Six months ago, Chancellor Javier Reyes called in state riot police to our campus. Those police brutally assaulted and arrested over 130 students, faculty, staff and community members who were peacefully protesting the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s ties to corporations profiting off the genocide in Palestine. The UMass community’s collective response to the chancellor’s horrific betrayal of our community’s trust was clear and principled. Over the next two weeks, major UMass student, faculty and staff organizations, including a general meeting of the faculty, passed votes of no confidence in Reyes.

Despite this rebuke, Reyes remains in power; a power he has shown himself unworthy to hold. Now we are entering a second presidency of Donald Trump – which promises to destroy our system of higher education as we know it – under a campus administration we cannot trust to stand up to this threat.

In hopes of preparing our community for the hard fight ahead, we have compiled a timeline of repression and violence on this campus in the past year. The timeline documents this administration’s relentless targeting and persecution of students, faculty and staff for exercising their free speech rights and their right to assembly.

We also created this timeline to provide important background information for an open letter we are circulating, which demands that the UMass administration cease its persecution and sanctioning of the students arrested last October and May. The letter can be read and signed here. We call on our community to band together in the face of these assaults on our students, our mutual freedoms and our right to shared governance. We are facing a very difficult and dangerous historical moment, and students, faculty and staff must unite and confront it together.

Signed by UMass Faculty for Justice in Palestine