Quick Take
Protesters at UC Santa Cruz need to take it down a notch, writes humanities professor Kirsten Silva Gruesz. She understands the need to disrupt business as usual to make a point, but believes the disruptions have missed their mark. “The rhetoric of many student protesters and some of their faculty allies comes disturbingly close to a moral absolutism that divides the world into good and evil sides,” she writes. That won’t lead to an understanding of our ethical responsibility for the suffering of others, she says, calling for a full investigation of the police intervention on May 30 and 31 rather than a rush to judgment.
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Police sirens heading toward the UC Santa Cruz campus were the last thing I wanted to hear on May 30. As a faculty member, I had already cast my vote in favor of a May 22 Academic Senate resolution urging campus administrators to refrain from using police to “break up, disperse, and arrest” student demonstrators from the pro-Palestinian encampment. But the situation changed on May 27, when the group escalated its protest by blocking vehicle access to the only two campus entrances, using barricades and their bodies.
The tradition of direct action aims to disrupt business as usual, to halt an operation that’s causing active harm. But in this case, the disruption went wide of its mark.
Those directly affected were not soldiers or lawmakers in Israel but students, teachers and workers — including some who don’t have the luxury of going remote. Claiming the terrain of the two campus entrances as their own (“Whose university? Our university!”), demonstrators seized the public commons, treading over the rights of thousands of others who wanted to continue their work of collaborative learning in a precious space where critical thinking, debate, intellectual and personal growth happen.
This denial of access, not the presence of the encampment, led to the police intervention on May 31. The group downplayed the barricade as an “inconvenience,” allowing pedestrians and bikers through, but only the exceptionally able-bodied can navigate those steep hills in a hurry.
They chanted “shut it down,” and they did.
I understand that the success of social movements involves sacrifice, and that incremental steps can lead to long-term gains. Recognizing our complicity in the suffering of others is the foundation of political ethics, and I agree that everyone who pays taxes to the U.S. government is implicated in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Untangling the levels and layers of our complicity, however, is hard work that requires we reject binary categories such as perpetrator vs. victim.
The heated rhetoric of many student protesters and some of their faculty allies comes disturbingly close to a moral absolutism that divides the world into good and evil sides. In contrast, the radical philosophical traditions that form the basis of feminist and anti-racist education aim to undo such simplistic binaries.
It’s distressing to hear chants like “Glory to the martyrs!”, which invoke the religiously motivated violence used to justify the Crusades or the massacres of Indigenous resistance fighters by New England Puritans in the 17th century. The personal targeting and harassment of individuals tarred as “guilty” is dehumanizing, now as then.
I don’t claim the scholarly expertise on activism that many of my colleagues possess. But I am not convinced the current list of intractable demands from the protesters represents a just and effective response to this scene of suffering. The proxy logic by which UCSC is being held to account for the entire University of California system is especially flawed: This campus hosts no weapons labs supplying arms to the Israeli government, which has been accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The endowment it controls is a pittance compared to those of UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Francisco.
Tuition funds, contrary to what some protesters believe, are not part of the complex investments pool. The blockade of campus affected members of our community in a manner out of proportion to their complicity, bringing questionable returns for a sacrifice the majority did not ask for.
The disruptions have continued into finals week and commencement, with protesters’ rhetoric dialing up to even further extremes: They claim to be “declaring warfare” on “the bloody machinery of this violent institution.” Rather than hurling insults and threats toward campus administrators, a more constructive action might be demanding accountability from our local congressional representative who recently condemned the ICC for its ruling against Israel.
There are conflicting accounts about when and why negotiations broke down, but there seems to be no dispute about one fact: The demonstrators were given multiple opportunities to avoid arrest during and after the 16-hour standoff.
Police repeatedly instructed those who formed a human chain to stop blocking the road. A number of them heeded the call and left; others did not. Students and their supporters in the local community have lodged complaints about brutality and violence. Photos and videos are not empirical evidence in themselves: They require context to interpret what’s not visible in the frame, just as eyewitness accounts do.
The community deserves a thorough, careful investigation of what transpired over those two days. The awful destruction of Palestinian universities does not translate into a rationale for shutting down important conversations at this one.
It is time to de-escalate, heal, and remake the campus as a space we share.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, a professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz, is an award-winning scholar of the colonial Americas and of Latinx studies.