This story has been updated with information provided by Interim  Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Mike Malone regarding the University’s response to the 2023 housing demonstration. 

On Wednesday, May 1, over 300 people gathered on Metawampe Lawn at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for the first ever “UMass People’s Assembly.” The meeting was hosted by a coalition of unions and organizations from both the UMass campus and the larger area.

Among the groups organizing the assembly were UMass Dissenters, UMass Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Professional Staff Union (PSU), Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP), Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) and the Palestine Solidarity Caucus.

The assembly opened with speeches from each organization. Speakers demanded UMass to divest from Israel and to cut ties with military defense companies like Raytheon, one of the 2021 top six employers for UMass students post-graduation. The goal of the speeches, organizers explained, was to uplift student voices and worker unions involved with UMass.

“Everything that we are dealing with at this university is unjust, it is not dignity, and we deserve better,” Terrell James, the interim co-chair of GEO and an anthropology PhD student at UMass, said.

The people’s assembly followed the day after students organized an encampment on Student Union South Lawn, which lasted from Monday morning to early Tuesday morning until administration cited land-use violations and brought in police officers.

Update: According to an emailed statement from Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Mike Malone to faculty, “Last year’s housing encampment and previous Whitmore occupations are largely irrelevant since Chancellor Reyes is not required to enforce policies in a manner identical to the 30 chancellors who preceded him.”

Malone ensured that Reyes is committed to a viewpoint-neutral view of the application of  campus policies.

Louai Abu-Osba, a Palestinian American and Hampshire College alumni, spoke about his experience fighting for Palestinian liberation throughout his life. Salama, a town in Palestine where his family is from, he explained, was destroyed by Israeli occupation in 1948.

When giving a speech at his Hampshire College graduation in 2003, Abu-Osba urged the college to divest from Israel. His speech was met with a lot of resistance from the audience and the president of Hampshire at the time.

“Advocating for [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] in 2003 and referring to Israeli policy as apartheid were not common ideas in the mainstream progressive discourse. It was a very lonely time to be advocating for Palestinian human rights and ending U.S. aid to Israel’s oppression,” he said.

Abu-Osba encouraged students to keep using their voices. He explained that even though people “cannot outspend the military and industrial complex,” they can “out-connect them.”

“Your connection to those physically next to you, to students at other campuses, to the Palestinians undergoing genocide as we speak, is terrifying to the centers of power and profit,” he said.

One of the organizers mentioned the federal investigation against UMass for targeted disciplinary actions of specifically Arab and Palestinian students and other allies in response to the student sit-in at the Whitmore Administration Building.

As reported in The Intercept, 18 students have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.” The University has yet to address these claims.

Members of the assembly spoke out about the University’s actions and how they feel targeted in their fight for Palestine. According to them, the encampment conducted last year to protest the lack of affordable housing in Amherst was responded to in a very different way, and students were not forced to remove tents, unlike Tuesday morning.

“We are here at a University, a place where free speech must always be defended. The free speech movement grew out of the civil rights movement and the movement to end the U.S. war in Vietnam,” Hoang Phan, an associate professor of English at UMass and member of FJP, said.

He added, “Right now, this is a free speech movement as well. Wherever you’re positioned, this is also about your rights to free speech, to exercise your free speech rights.”

The coalition organized a question-and-answer session with one of the 57 UMass students who was arrested on Oct. 25 during the Whitmore protest. The speaker gave advice for those who wanted to engage in nonviolent direct action.

“If you’re willing to put your body on the line for something you believe in, you should … it’s important that you keep whatever you’re fighting for in sight. For us, that was centered in Gaza, and how our University is funding a genocide that we don’t want to be a part of,” they said.

The assembly ended with a ‘Know your Rights’ training around 3 p.m., led by Rachel Weber, the lawyer representing the 57 students arrested.

Organizers announced they will still be present every day for the rest of the week from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on South Lawn without tents. Speakers at the assembly encouraged faculty and students to spend time there, whether teaching classes or just by supporting.

Kavya Sarathy can be reached at [email protected]. Eve Neumann can be reached at [email protected].