Dear President Salovey, Dean Lewis, and Vice President Goff-Crews,

We write as faculty and staff of Yale University to strongly condemn the administration’s treatment of peaceful protestors, especially the arrest of students and community members at Beinecke Plaza on April 22, 2024, and the threats of disciplinary action.  The April 22 communication from President Salovey justified the arrests as an exercise of “campus safety,” citing the “harmful acts” and “threatening language” of “aggressors” from within “the Yale community” as well as “outsiders.” This justification relies on a highly distorted and inflammatory characterization of the diverse coalition of Yale and New Haven community members who have been expressing solidarity with Gaza and calling for Yale to divest in weapons manufacturing. Especially in light of the fraught relationship between Yale and Black and Brown communities living in surrounding areas—a relationship which, as the university’s administration has acknowledged in its recent Yale and Slavery Research Project, requires ongoing repair work—we would have expected more care and sensitivity in addressing the presence of supportive and peaceful community members on campus. The president’s speculations feed dangerously racialized tropes of “outside agitators” and chaotic mobs. We are heartened by Dean Lewis’s retraction of false claims about potentially violent protestors and sincerely hope that President Salovey will follow suit as soon as possible.

How can it be that Yale Corporation’s investments in weapons that have destroyed every university in Gaza do not meet the threshold of a “grave social injury,” but Yale students’ prayers, performances, art, and books are a violation of “campus safety”? How could Yale fail to support our students who use every resource they have, including their own bodies, to reject the Yale Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibilty’s approval of investment in weapons manufacturing in the midst of a genocide?  On the same day that students’ arrests made headlines, journalists reported the discovery of a mass grave of bodies killed execution-style at the site that was once Nasser Hospital in Gaza; this violence is what our students are calling to our attention and fighting to end. Given that the students in the Occupy Beinecke mobilization and the subsequent Occupy Yale gathering on Cross Campus have been advocating “books not bombs,” we find it specious that the administration would accuse students of disrupting “teaching, learning, research, and scholarship.” Before and after the arrests, administrators invoked vague “university policies” and “disciplinary consequences,” criminalized the presence of non-Yale affiliated New Haven residents on campus, and relied on a false equation between advocacy for Palestinian lives and antisemitism. [In a letter written by over 20 Jewish faculty at Columbia and Barnard to President Shafik on 10 April 2024, the authors note, “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.”] In a climate of ill will, hostility, fear-mongering and over-policing, it is the administration’s overwhelmingly punitive response to students—not the protests themselves—that have impeded teaching and learning and that have made our campus feel unsafe.

Members of the faculty have witnessed the OccupyBeinecke and OccupyYale protests and spent time studying with, singing with, standing with, praying with, dancing with, and talking with students who have gathered in those spaces. As educators, we are in awe of the commitment, discipline, and peacefulness our students have shown despite being doxxed, intimidated, falsely accused, and now arrested. They were, in fact, admirably heeding the president’s call to “act with compassion and civility, especially when the values we stand for are being severely tested.” This warrants respect and tolerance rather than discipline and threats. 

We call on the university to halt its punitive approach to student and community organizing and to refrain from further disciplining their efforts to think, teach, learn, and lead. Our students have the right to peaceably assemble without intimidation, slander, or attacks, including administrators’ statements that lend unsubstantiated credence to allegations of violence and antisemitism. We also ask that administrators listen and respond to—rather than violently suppress—students’ demands for divestment and disclosure and continue to work toward an investment strategy rooted in honesty, integrity, and a commitment to sustainability and a more just relationship to New Haven.

We are concerned that further criminalization of pro-divestment organizing, both by Yale students and non-Yale affiliated residents of New Haven with whom they build coalitions, endangers robust intellectual and social life here at Yale and may have moral, social, and economic ramifications beyond this moment. Consider, for example, that the more than 100 arrests at Columbia University have led academics to cancel their engagements at Columbia. The same has begun to happen here: a scholar and Yale alum scheduled to speak at the MacMillan Center’s conference “Trajectories of Constituent Power” chose not to attend citing the administration’s decision to arrest students and community members who support them as “unconscionable” and “troubling.” Academic boycotts not only affect universities’ bottom line but also their very function as open sites of research and learning.

The recent national and international media attention on the protests at Yale and the responses from the administration means that the whole world is going to be watching to see what Yale does in the coming weeks and months. Yale is in a position to take a powerful stand on protecting the civil liberties, safety, well-being, and constitutional rights of all of those protesting, across and beyond the university. We would like to see our university live up to the ideals of liberation, compassion, and care demonstrated by its students, or at least to the terms of its own mission statement: “improving the world today and for future generations'' through “the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”

Columbia and Barnard faculty have shown their solidarity with students through a walkout. We are prepared to engage in similar acts of solidarity on behalf of our students, including staging walkouts and boycotting Yale’s graduation ceremonies, if the administration continues to meet students’ demands for disclosure and divestment with silence and punishment. We ask the administration to refrain from exacting punitive repercussions and commit to leniency for all students engaged in peaceful protests. Arrests, suspensions, expulsions, and other mechanisms of punishment are not only inappropriate, but counterproductive, as has been demonstrated at Columbia University and elsewhere. We reaffirm the letter that more than 100 Yale faculty addressed to students stating our intention to protect their rights in the face of attempts to silence, intimidate, and misrepresent them, and we ask you to join us in defending their rights to express their political dissent—even their dissent to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza.

We trust that we share a sincere commitment to the well-being of our students, and wish to contribute to their sense of belonging at Yale. We hope that you agree that we enhance their welfare not with more policing, but rather with a genuine responsiveness to their needs and most urgent expressions.

Respectfully,