On April 25, University of Massachusetts Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes convened a rare all-faculty meeting asking us to ratify a statement opposing federal cuts to university funding. His administration has been slow to publicly respond to President Donald Trump’s administration’s assaults on university students and academic freedom. Many people thus welcomed the Chancellor’s willingness to sign onto this statement. Faculty and librarians overwhelmingly endorsed it, while also endorsing a stronger resolution urging the Reyes administration to enter a “mutual defense compact” with other universities.
But this gathering also recalls another emergency all-faculty meeting, on May 20, 2024. That meeting was convened after Reyes summoned hundreds of police to violently assault and arrest faculty, students and staff at a peaceful encampment on the South Lawn. The campers were protesting the University’s financial complicity in what Amnesty International has since labeled the “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza. In response to this shocking violation of our constitutional rights, faculty and librarians voted “no confidence” in the Chancellor.
Such an extraordinary move would normally result in the resignation or dismissal of the disgraced leader. Instead, the UMass Trustees commended Reyes for a job well done. This was a sign that traditional rules didn’t apply. Since then, we have continued to labor under an administration that clearly cannot speak on our behalf.
The parallel with authoritarianism at the federal level is striking. There, a violent autocratic president has unleashed a war on free speech and academic freedom, in violation of numerous laws. Meanwhile he continues his predecessor’s support for the “live-streamed genocide.” The two attacks are tightly connected: free speech must be suppressed so that the United States-Israeli genocide can continue unchecked.
On the anniversary of the assault that rocked our campus, we reflect on the ways this Chancellor — and the administrators and Trustees who support him — helped lay the groundwork for what the federal government is doing now. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) disappears students off the streets, as right-wing terror groups threaten to attack protesters with bullets and baseball bats and as politicians cancel our grants and seek to control our teaching, we cannot overlook the ways that the UMass administration has abetted these attacks on higher education.
Marianne Hirsch, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, recently noted how administrators at U.S. universities have helped pave the way for the federal government’s repression. She condemned campus administrators for employing repression of their own prior to Trump’s reelection. She also noted how they have collaborated in Trump’s ideological war by “accepting and then promoting the big lie that antisemitism is driving protests against the brutal genocidal war in Gaza.”
That “big lie” has helped enable the surreal nightmare we’re now living, in which a federal administration composed of Nazi-saluters and their apologists is weaponizing charges of antisemitism to crush dissent. The dragnet of repression has now expanded beyond the critics of the U.S.-Israeli genocide. It increasingly includes dissenters of all kinds, a pattern reminiscent of authoritarian regimes throughout history. The UMass administration shares responsibility for paving Trump and Elon Musk’s warpath.
Since the 2024 presidential election, however, the optics of violently arresting students have changed. Now, as state-sanctioned paramilitary forces and vigilante mobs threaten and assault protesters while chanting “Death to Arabs,” our Chancellor wrings his hands about the Trump administration’s war on higher education.
The UMass administration’s milquetoast statements are better than nothing. But the irony is inescapable. Those statements are now coming from the same people who spent the last year punishing and repressing the very dissidents now being targeted by Trump.
In making these deliberately vague statements, moreover, UMass administrators have refused to name and materially condemn racist threats to our campus recently made by a far-right extremist organization, Betar. These threats include publicizing student and faculty names and photos, promising to visit these individuals with “live rounds” and tagging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to demand deportations. Such threats have made members of our community direct targets for harassment, detainment and vigilante violence; they also seek to open up our campus to the possibility of kidnapping and abduction that Betar openly boasts it has inflicted upon Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk and others. We immediately called on the UMass administration to condemn this racist intimidation and direct threat of violence. Instead, they issued a vague email that failed to clarify which students are under attack, why and by whom.
One of the missions of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is to promote awareness of the ways our labor and working conditions are tied to the horror in Gaza. One connection is UMass’s well-documented financial complicity in the genocide through research contracts, industry partnerships, UMass Foundation investments and other mechanisms. Ending those financial connections has been the central demand of the student-led movement on this campus. This demand is broadly popular, as evidenced by a recent Request for Review of Foundation investments in corporations that commit war crimes, submitted to the Foundation’s Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee and signed by around 300 faculty, staff and students from all four UMass campuses. Similarly, we cite last year’s Student Government Association (SGA) vote, which passed a divestment resolution by an overwhelming majority.
There are other, perhaps less obvious ways our working conditions are tied to the genocide in Palestine. Our colleagues in the Professional Staff Union (PSU) have documented the privatization of staff jobs on campus. Privatization is an example of how UMass is operating more and more like a for-profit firm whose mission is protecting its financial investments (including investments in immoral and illegal corporate activities such as genocide) rather than serving the public good.
Related to this is the problem of “administrative bloat,” visible across much of U.S. higher education, in which university leaders hire scores of associate deans, vice chancellors and the like while cutting faculty and staff lines, defunding departments, increasing class sizes and raising tuition. As “shared governance” becomes ever more fictional, the bloated administration seizes more and more power.
This facilitates all manner of authoritarian activities, such as the Chancellor’s decision to spend over $100,000 of taxpayer money violating our free speech rights. Students’ and workers’ criticism of those decisions is purely symbolic, since the unelected trustees are free to ignore our votes of no confidence. In short, we have been defunded and defanged, at the very moment that resisting authoritarian rule has never been more urgent.
On the one-year anniversary of the violent repression on our campus, we center our outrage and grief on the original cause of our protest: the savagery of the U.S. and Israeli governments that continue to murder, torture, rape, starve and displace the Palestinian people while vilifying and gaslighting opponents of those crimes.
Given our locations in the UMass system, we cannot ignore our institution’s complicity. And even as we support administrators when they speak out (if occasionally and timidly) against federal repression and defunding, we stress the need for a radical transformation of our university’s decision-making structure.
We must build a democratic university, defined as the sharing of governance powers among the students, workers and communities that are affected by university decisions. A democratic university would not only be able to divest from genocide, it would also be able to put up a much stronger fight against government attacks on education. In fact, if UMass and other universities want to survive in the long term, democratization may be essential.
