Open email to Lori Reesor, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at UW-Madison

Sent September 29, 2024.

Hello.

I'm academic staff, and also a generally concerned community member. While I'm sure I don't know the full story here, I think charging students for speech related to Palestinian and other human rights issues is chilling and quite obviously a case of biased viewpoint discrimination.

Although I couldn't spend all my time at the encampment on Library Mall back in May, I was down there as much as I could to try to help understand the students and get their message across. Disclosure and divestment are both extremely reasonable demands, in the historical context. I talked to people from all walks of life and had some very enlightening conversations. I never felt unsafe, and still feel saddened that others did feel threatened by simple slogans calling for peace and shared humanity.

I saw peaceful, civil protests of what is quite clearly a human rights disaster—even if you are someone who shies from using the word genocide to describe what's happening in Gaza. I saw the aftereffects of police violence, when our chancellor called UWPD and others to brutalize the students and staff and faculty who took a stand. Quite honestly, the police could learn valuable lessons from the student stewards, who de-escalated complex situations with counter-protestors and others in amazing, careful ways. The only hate speech I saw the entire time was one foolish anti-Semitic counter-protester who yelled about Palestinians deserving death. What I saw from the protests students pushing to try to steer this institution in a more moral direction, in a direction that sees the humanity of all humans.

Our university trumpets its activism in the past; just a block away from Library Mall is a bronze megaphone and newspaper celebrating Vel Phillips and her civil rights actions. Just as we celebrate those who marched for civil rights, and those who marched for divestment from South African apartheid, we will someday soon be celebrating these students who took a stand on US complicity in the horror-show that is Gaza. Making this all about the tents misses the forest for the trees: the point of setting up the encampment was to point out the irony of Israel constantly forcing Palestinians to move from one safe zone to the next, while bombing them. Tearing those tents down kind of made their point for them, and it doesn't put UW-Madison in a glowing light, exactly.

On social media, SJP and other orgs are claiming that your investigations of two students, Dahlia Saba and Vignesh Ramachandran, are based solely on their public criticism of the university. If your evidence of bad action by students is simply an op-ed critiquing UW administration, do you see how bad it looks that UW administration is cracking down on those students instead of openly discussing the issues, and upholding our lauded "sifting and winnowing" ideals? How bad it looks that you are also charging people who weren't even on the campus at all during the encampment? I firmly believe that those who set up tents had our institution's best interests at heart, and they worked (and continue to work) on a better idea of who is human and deserves self-determination. (The answer is everyone.) I don't see how protesting war, and trying to force institutions of learning to divest from literal bomb-making, is such an evil thing that must be squashed. The squashing itself feels like part of our country's careful, ongoing two-step with fascism.

Please don't let our university fall on the wrong side of history here. I echo the community call to terminate these charges.

Dan Fitch
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