Campus policing today

Dana Cloud: I want to start by thinking about how campus policing in the wake of the Palestine solidarity encampments and protests has changed. What do you think about the prospects of the ceasefire? Would you be willing to talk for a minute about the ceasefire and what this means for protest or for Palestine solidarity work?

Karma Chávez: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, right? The conversation, it feels to me, at least here, has shifted closer to the center. I mean, it’s still very right, but a little bit closer to the center. To the extent that a lot of people really agree that a ceasefire was a good thing.

DC: And that’s at least something.

KC: That’s something. I mean, it should be fucking obvious, but it’s not, but it’s something. What is interesting is that the repression on campus last spring did not kill the movements at all, but did slow them down and send them into sort of a different phase of the work.

Some of that is because at least in the case of the University of Texas (UT), one of our main leaders in the Palestine Solidarity Committee got suspended for three semesters. He’s in the middle of a lawsuit, but that has quite a chilling effect, not to mention the other 130 arrests.

Tying those two things together, the movement is kind of quiet right now on campuses. A lot of people, hearing that the ceasefire was coming, people were thinking that their work here was done.

Ceasefire is the bare minimum. Now we’re really trying to work with the students to figure out what is the next best thing to do here, particularly given that we’re in Texas.

I don’t think the students are ever going to stop being public, but they’re in a different phase. We’ll see if the ceasefire sticks.

DC: Between the ceasefire and the policing, I’m concerned that when the ceasefire ends and whatever Israeli aggression might come does so, the movement will be quiescent.

KC: As someone who pays close attention to movements, as far as student movements go, this was different. I felt this was pushing in ways we haven’t seen in a long time.

It was nationally coordinated and really impressive in the ways they were on point with messaging. They were asking for some reformist stuff, but some not reformist stuff. They had a clear sense of what the role of the university was and what their role was as students.

Students were taking such good care of each other by attending to power and privilege and all of its intersections and making the spaces safe for people in all these different kinds of ways.

DC: I think it was the most monumental campus protest movement since the 1960s. In the 1960s, those movements started with a challenge to universities’ restrictions on organizing, speaking, and protesting. Today we see the revival of the administrative prerogative to delimit, restrict, and punish. Add to that the suspensions, the arrests, and the explicit crackdown on faculty and administrators who have been outspoken about Palestine, which is not new.

That’s the context for what I wanted to talk about: the Readiness Response Team at the University of Texas. It came out of the spring at UT employed former police officers who are now in the Dean of Students’ office. Can you talk a little bit about that and, backing up, what it was like at UT on the campus during the protests?

KC: There was never an encampment at UT. But students were engaging in a lot of other kinds of space-taking. The students didn’t feel like they had the infrastructure to keep people safe in an encampment.

I was out of town on April 24th, the first day of the arrests. But the students were planning to have a march. They had encouraged their classmates to walk out and then they were going to have events all day on the South Lawn.

They were notified the night before by the university that their asking students to leave class was a violation of policy and they weren’t going to be allowed to have their event. But of course they ignored that and began with their march anyway.

Within ten minutes of beginning the march, they were kettled on all sides. One student, who ended up being suspended for three semesters, argued that the students should shut it down. We have to disperse. We are in bad shape right now. They threw him to the ground and arrested him almost immediately, despite the fact that he was trying to comply. That day 79 students got arrested for a whole host of things.

We had a big faculty event on the 25th as a response to that. We planned it basically in the middle of the night and got up the next day to denounce what the university had done. The students who were out of jail by that point were there with us.

The students really didn’t know what they wanted to do because they saw what happened when they were just planning to have an event. They were in touch with a lot of folks in the community, and they were also in touch with us as FSJP (Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine). On the 29th, movement leaders, community folks, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) on campus, tried to make an encampment because they felt like the best strategy was to escalate. They had put tarps down, they had started to put tents up, and within five minutes, they were shut down. We had actually done a vigil for scholastifcide right in front of the tower at one o’clock.

We stood there silently for an hour with the names of colleagues who’d been killed. After that, I went over to do a talk at the Texas State Employees’ Union. And as I was walking away from TSEU, I saw the row of cops on bikes. Those were state troopers that were on the bikes.

The PSC students were at this point thinking, we’ve kind of lost, we’re not in charge of this moment right now, and that’s okay. That’s how movements work. We’re going to regroup. We watched all afternoon and then we collected money to bail folks out. Fifty-seven were arrested on that day, April 29.

DC: When did this Event Readiness and Response Plan come into being and what was its role?

KC: We have been told by the AAUP (American Association of University Professors), when we’ve asked about this new office, that this actually started way before any of the protests happened last spring. But in the summer we saw the job ad for the director go up.

This happened over the summer when nobody’s on campus, essentially rewriting all of the student protest policies to make them happen. Much stricter. Then we saw this new events readiness office. The next thing we hear about it is that this [former Austin Police officer] is being paraded around campus to meet all the faculty and tell folks he’s just a friend of the students. He just wants to help them be safe.

DC: So this was just this past summer after the fact of the protests that this happened.

KC: In other words, it was in direct response to the protests.

DC: Tell me who was hired and what their relationship is to the existing infrastructure of UT’s campus policing.

KC: I’ll back up a minute on that question to say that one of the things that was happening last spring was that when any Palestinians or their allies were organizing, there was a police presence. There was also a massive Dean of Students’ office presence. I mean, there are always a couple of Dean of Students lackeys around, but I’m talking like sometimes six or eight of these staff members.

I know they’re being forced to do this gatekeeping. It really was becoming a problem in the ways that they were dictating to the students. We could tell that they were colluding with police.

That relationship was really getting fortified already in the spring. Then this guy, Joe LoBrutto is his name, a former cop–he shows up, he’s at events, and he’s trying to be Mr. Jovial with the students. But really, he’s always there to monitor. And they’ve got all these new rules posted. They’ve got all of these helpful little things for you to remember–what you should avoid and what you can do and what are the formats that you can engage in. You might think that you want to do this, but here’s something else you might try.

It’s just so patronizing, but it is all a veiled threat because of the more direct relationship that exists now.

DC: Is he employed by the Dean of Students?

KC: Yeah.

DC: And they were saying that it was already in the works, but it clearly emerged right out of these protests, like many other new campus policing and discipline efforts have emerged since during and since the spring as well. So that was my other question. Do you know about the national context about how campus policing has been transformed in the wake of the Palestine protests and encampments?  Do you have a sense of the bigger scene?

KC: I don’t really. I feel like I’ve been so overwhelmed by the local that I haven’t been able to zoom back and kind of connect it, other than anecdotally, with what’s happening elsewhere.

My sense is just from talking to folks. For donor types and admin types, it is the perfect antidote to the defund the police movement–a reason to reinvest in the police.

DC: Given Trump’s inauguration, what are the implications for this kind of development on campus discipline moving forward? How can we challenge these restrictive and more coercive strategies in terms of the control of campus dissent at this time when we’re going to need more campus dissent?

KC: A couple things here. One of the things that we saw is that of the 130 or so people who were arrested, roughly 80 of those were students. With the students we basically coordinated an effort. We worked with colleagues in the law. So we in FSJP and the AAUP worked with colleagues in the law school to create a support system essentially for students who are going to face these disciplinary proceedings.

And the folks in the law school who ended up kind of heading this up were like, we know this. We know the drill on this. We can totally help out with this and we can easily train folks. For all of the faculty who wanted to help, they gave us an hour of training on the nuts and bolts about this.

We opened a portal for student support where we can advise them. When the notices started coming in, pretty early on, the DA dropped all the legal charges, so the students weren’t facing any legal charges. In fact, the D.A. admonished UT for wasting city and county resources and state resources. But as students started to get their disciplinary notices, it wasn’t business as usual. In fact, they weren’t going to get a hearing or the usual due process.

The students were asked to write an essay in response to a series of questions. Now, these questions, many of them, could implicate them legally. The DA could reintroduce those charges at any point within a couple of years.The questions were phrased in ways like, do you agree that disrupting campus during school hours is a problem?

We tried to challenge the process at AUP, saying that this is not fair. This is not what the process is. This is not what the handbook says. And the University was like, well, here’s the fine print where basically we can do whatever the fuck we want, and that’s what we’re doing.

I was trying to help these students figure out how they were going to respond. Some of them were 18, new to campus. They’re just kind of learning and they got swooped into this thing.

I tell a lot of students, you don’t have bad politics if you just want to get this over with and go on to the next thing. So some students did that. Some wanted to use it really as a time to really resist, and some were kind of in the middle.

When they started handing out sanctions, it was different for everybody. It ranged from, on the extreme end, suspending a junior for three semesters. There were students who were just put on probation, some for a semester, some for the remainder of their time. I mean, it was all over the place, kind of ranging in severity, even though legally they’d all been charged with the exact same things. It was clearly a divide-and-conquer objective for the university, also meant to throw faculty advocates off.

There also wasn’t a direct correlation between what students had said in their essay and what they got. It was really quite arbitrary. I think that this is the apparatus that we’re dealing with now.

I don’t suspect universities are going to want to see the same big performances they did last spring. I think they’re going to drive it into this deeply administrative process for dealing with students, and we’ve been seeing it all fall.

Students protesting in front of the President’s house have been told to leave. And then a couple of weeks later, they get disciplinary announcements as well. What were the

DC: What were the protests at the President’s?

KC: It was just like small groups of students calling attention to the problems. One of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s big demands last spring was for [UT President] Jay Hartzell to resign. Of course he’s resigned now.

DC: Why do you think he resigned?

KC: I think in part it had to do with the fact that he’s basically mishandled every possible thing he could, but also that the job sucked. I mean, anybody at UT who’s president is in a shitty position with the trustees. What we’re seeing here is that everything has gone a little bit quiet. Joe LoBrutto is trying to micromanage every event that he can and become an officer friendly kind of thing.

The Dean of Students office is slamming hard on disciplinary proceedings. And the Palestine Solidarity Committee has been on administrative interim suspension since April 25th. They can’t do any events on campus.

But they went ahead and did an event in October. I had secured the room for them. I got the notice as well from the Dean of Students that reminded them that they’re suspended and that they cannot do events, and so I wrote back and I said, well, if I’m a faculty member who is getting this notification from your office, I’m entitled to more information about their suspensions. And here we are six months later, and they never even responded to an email to say, no, you can’t get that information.

DC: Are you expecting protests this year, for example about immigration?

KC: There is going to be some agitation, but it won’t come from the faculty. There’s no appetite for this from the faculty. A lot of the students that I’m in conversation with are doing a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff. And they’re not agitating as directly, with the exception of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). They have really taken up the slack. All of these white boys in SDS are taking leadership from women of color and Palestinian-led organizations, and they’re putting themselves front and center as the agitational arm of student protest.

But I think it’s a regroup period otherwise. None of the resources that once existed on campus for undocumented students exists now. They got thrown out with the SB 17 law. So those students are still doing that on their own. There’s a small group of us faculty that are trying to be a support system and connect them with community organizations. There will be stuff. But it won’t be as visible. It won’t be that kind of agitation we were seeing last spring.

DC: So that’s some advice that you could give to activists, about building that kind of support network.

KC: Yeah, I think it was Mariame Kaba who had said something right after the election to the effect that our big task right now is to get to work on building everything that we’re going to need for this world now, but especially at the end of four years. We don’t know what that’s going to look like, but what we do know is that right now, we can build the communities we want to live in in this environment.

That’s always kind of my way of operating, but it is especially the case right now. You can’t get Trump impeached. You can’t prevent him from releasing a hundred executive orders today. But you can do these things that might really make things better. What you can do is bring people together. You can do is help people to be in community and to provide people political education that they’re going to need–along with a meal.