UCSD Faculty Attempt to Deliver Two Petitions to Chancellor Khosla

On May 16 at 1:00 p.m. approximately 15 UCSD faculty members met outside of Seventh College’s The Bistro dining hall in order to deliver two petitions condemning the police response to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on May 6 to Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, where they believed his office to be at 3333 North Torrey Pines Court.

The first letter titled “Faculty Testimony on UCSD Gaza Encampment” was signed by 86 professors and associate professors who had visited the encampment, and 160 professors and associate professors who had not visited the encampment but supported the statement. In addition to their testimony, they also delivered the San Diego Faculty Association’s Statement on Student Protests that was signed by 286 UCSD faculty members.

The stated purpose of the Faculty Testimony petition is “to explain what we saw, and to also communicate our understanding of what the encampment was about.” It observes that, according to the 86 faculty members who visited the encampment, the encampment’s members remained peaceful, were majority students, and that associated protestors outside the encampment did not block Library Walk from non-protest related traffic. They further criticize the insinuations that the encampment represented antisemitism and made for an unsafe environment for Jewish members of UCSD.

The faculty members stated, “We reject any dismissal of the peaceful encampment as antisemitic, or that it created a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty. We recognize antisemitism as a real form of discrimination that harms our communities, but we reject the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and its actions is inherently antisemitic.”

This statement comes after the Antisemitism Awareness Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 1, and has been received by the U.S. Senate. The Act has been widely criticized, including being condemned by the ACLU, as an attack on free speech, which could pressure universities to restrict previously protected criticism of Israel as discrimination.

The faculty members delivering the letter included Associate Professor of Literature, Creative Writing Lily Hoàng, who was arrested in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on May 6, and Professor of Communications Gary Fields, who has worked as a photojournalist in Palestine, and spoke at the Council of American-Islamic Relations press conference on Islamophobia on campus held in front of Geisel Library on May 14.

Upon arriving at 3333 North Torrey Pines Court, they discovered the doors were locked. Faculty members knocked on the doors and congregated outside, waiting for almost half an hour. Occasionally, someone could be seen through the glass doors of the building looking at the group before disappearing behind closed doors. At 1:55 p.m., a woman emerged from the building leaving work. Associate Professor of Literature Ameeth Vijay held the door open, requesting that before she leave, the woman ask someone inside the building to talk to the group of professors. The woman stood in the doorway, so long as Professor Vijay held the door, which could only be opened with a staff key card, open. After several minutes of conversation, Professor Vijay let the door go, and the woman left the building.

After ten minutes of waiting, in which professors continued to knock several more times to no response, they decided to slide their letter through the door in an envelope addressed “TO THE CHANCELLOR.” Professor of Psychology Adam Aron gave a short speech in front of the doors saying, “Here I am as a representative of 500 faculty at UC San Diego who have added their names to petitions demanding amnesty for their students. We’ve come as a group of faculty here, we’ve walked all the way off campus, half a mile from UCSD on North Torrey Pines Drive. Apparently the Chancellor and his staff are sequestered in this building. We cannot access it. There’s no button to ring; no one comes down. No one from his website responds to our emails or our phone calls, and this is symbolic of a leadership that is completely out of touch with the people it represents and is trying to steer. So here we go Chancellor, suck on this.” After giving this speech, Aron slid the petitions through the door.

Once this occurred, the professors left the facility. Approximately 40 minutes after the professors left, two Allied Universal Security officers arrived on the scene. After circling the building on foot, they walked through the front doors and took the envelope. When asked why they were moving the envelope, The Triton was told the security reaction was due to a burglary which had occurred at a nearby building on Monday, May 13, and that the security guards were on high alert because of it. When asked what they planned to do with the letter, the security guard said he did not know.

Tate McFadden is the Arts and Culture Editor and Opinion Editor for The Triton.