One year of genocide. One year of resistance.

Under the guise of “safety” our university administration continues to repress free speech, threaten police violence on students, invest in war-profiteers, and fear-monger amongst faculty and staff about our “dangerous” students. And despite this, as we have seen on campus and worldwide, the people stand with Gaza and we will not stop until Palestine is free.

As this academic year begins we will continue to bring you first-person narratives, information, and resources, that challenge the narrative force fed to us by administration.

In the mornings leading up to the library encampment, I struggled to get out of bed. Grief racked my body. To rage against the death machine of racial capitalism felt hopeless and futile. But PSU students, my comrades, my friends, proved my despair to be misplaced. Never have I entered a space like the library, the air thick with revolutionary optimism. Never have I felt such incredible solidarity as I did during the protest that day as we linked our arms screaming Free Palestine until they made our throats bleed.

It is my belief that this solidarity saved my life on May 2nd. While taking part in the protest that day, I was violently assaulted by PPB. During this interaction I was pepper sprayed in the eyes at point-blank range, slapped across the face, called a bitch by one of the officers, and repeatedly hit in the side with a baton, the force of which broke three of my ribs. As three officers attempted to forcibly remove me from the line of protesters and take me into custody, I was de-arrested by a comrade and pulled back behind the front line. I am confident that my comrade’s bravery and quick thinking, as well as my ability to escape, are the only reasons I did not sustain further injury at the hands of the Portland Police Bureau and Portland State University.

Calling PPB and Oregon State Patrol to arrest and brutalize students as well as invade the sanctitude of the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, which was by far the most peaceful, healing space I have ever had the privilege of taking part in, is absolutely vile behavior. Nonetheless it is unsurprising, coming from a president and an administrative office who have made it abundantly clear that they do not care for the emotional, spiritual, or physical wellbeing of their students.

Ann Cudd and her administration are more than competent to protect us from the death they produce. Only when we stand in their way are their true motives revealed: they want us in sustained, suspended compliance with death. When we refuse to comply, they send militarized force to silence us. The end goal is that when we inevitably die, they will be able to apologize for their “negligence”, their “missteps”, without bearing the weight of accountability. Whether our death is physical or social or both – from lack of housing, or healthcare, or employability – ontologically or literal, physical death, the goal is to amputate our ability to engage in any kind of meaningful revolutionary action. Then, and only then, will someone say the word “investigate” with a sickening amount of gravitas, all the while continuing to do absolutely nothing.

Make no mistake, the colonial school is colonial; they seek to help us solve the biggest problems of society without ever wanting us to disrupt the structures that truly cause them. But what they fail to recognize, time and time again, is that education is revolutionary, and that the revolution will come for them if they are not careful.

I truly do not have the words to express how incredibly traumatizing it was to watch a militant police force storm into our inner sanctum and rip it to pieces. This was a space where students were able to have their needs met in abundance, where our community blossomed, and where many of us experienced the overwhelming beauty of solidarity for the first time. The grief I feel over the death of that space sits in my bones like a weight I will never be able to shake. Portland State University administration did that. And I will never forgive them.

To Ann Cudd and the PSU administration: you have blood on your hands. My blood, the blood of countless other students and community members, and the blood of the Palestinian people. History will not remember you kindly.

To everyone involved in the pro-Palestine movement on campus, and in the city of Portland at large: I love you. Thank you. Please remember that “outgrowing” radicalism is not the natural way of things, it is a conscious choice adults make when they are scared enough or duped into supporting the death machine. Do not let yourself become deradicalized by fear. We take care of us.

After 13 years as a due-paying member of PSU’s AAUP, I have opted to leave my union in September. As a Palestinian-American, I have not felt safe on my campus this past year as I watch the persistence of Israel’s ongoing genocide see no end.

I’ve watched as the AAUP national chapter has been steadfast and proactive in anticipating campus situations around the country—reading the often-synchronized forces at play from the highest levels of government, mainstream media, university administrations, and donors falling in line lock-and-step to maintain narratives that expressing support for Palestinian human rights or basic opposition to Israel’s state-sponsored genocide of Palestinians falls into an “off-limits” or grey area of free speech. 

As I watched faculty members around the country lose jobs (post-tenure) and job offers or be targeted by doxing campaigns based on expressing support for Palestinian human rights, I looked to the national chapter as a beacon of hope for setting a tone of safety and assurance that my free speech is protected through their published statements and the reminders of our critical voices during such vulnerable moments on campus. 

On August 17^th, the AAUP put out a formal public statement to all union members that outlined increasingly scary policies, procedures, and limitations that are in the works to limit campus free speech. Such statements warn the academic community that these restrictive policies aimed at limiting free speech are being imposed without faculty or student inputs and largely erected to appease “politicians who are calling for university administrators to use a heavy hand against faculty and student protestors.” The closing thought to their statement summed it up well: 

“Administrators who claim that “expressive activity” policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.”

I really appreciated the thoughtfulness and intent of AAUP National’s statement, as well as their Aug 28^th statement on the right to engage in academic boycott. Thinking about the new boundaries and constraints being imposed to free speech policies on our campus, I felt there was an urgent need to hear from the leadership of PSU’s union chapter. Reflecting on my 13-year membership to PSU’s union chapter, leadership would often reassure our faculty that we were protected according AAUP’s public statements by sending affirming emails that convey that our union is taking the temperature of American campuses, is fully on board to support PSU’s faculty during such vulnerable periods, and that support exists on our campus for faculty who might be affected. 

I admired prior union leaders for taking this additional measure to ensure that nothing was lost in translation on our campus and that PSU was not an idiosyncratic case of exception. With the Fall term about to begin, I asked for the PSU AAUP leadership to publicly and proactively reaffirm / acknowledge the August statements on “AAUP Condemns Wave of Policies Intended to Crack Down on Peaceful Campus Protest” and the “The AAUP's New Stance on Academic Boycotts: What You Should Know”. I was informed by our union that they would not do this.  I asked for a similar request in the Fall of 2023 and received a similar response. So, I have ceased my membership to the union this year in protest of their stubbornness to listen and respond to their members during this heightened time of concern on our campus. It is the exception I have faced and strived to overcome for much of my life—The Palestine Exception to free speech, or “PEP”—progressive, except Palestine. I’ve watched this force pervade our political and legal systems, industries, and media structures, but I never imagined I’d find it in the chapter of my academic labor union.

In case you missed it—Statement to the Board of Trustees on Friday, September 27th

Good morning Trustees, Chair Berry, Vice Chair Chandler and President Cudd, and shout out to all the faculty, staff, students, and community members who have taken the time to attend this meeting online and in person today.

I’d like to start with a moment of silence for Jason Washington, a loving husband, father, and grandfather, who was shot and killed by CPSO in 2018 while he was trying to deescalate a fight on campus. Thank you for honoring the memory of Jason Washington with me today.

Trustees, I attended some of the committee meetings held yesterday in this room. During the morning meetings there were 2 CPSO officers in uniform, and armed, sitting on the first floor of this building, and 2 other officers, in uniform and armed, sitting in the offices directly behind you there. I spotted another CPSO officer undercover in the room, sitting in plainclothes with meeting observers, and wearing a wired earpiece. I could not tell if he was armed.

By my observation, the 2 officers sitting in the lobby were simply chatting with each other, and o the 2 uniformed officers on this floor, one spent most of the 2 hours sitting and looking at his phone. That is a total of 5 officers, which I believe is nearly half of the armed police force at PSU, spending at least 2 and a half hours simply sitting in one building. I am incredibly troubled both by the misuse of resources, and by the message it sends.

This repressive response to students who are simply asking that their university divest from even the slightest participation in organizations that are directly profiting from mass death and destruction is an egregious display of armed force and a material threat of violence. You are communicating that the students protesting an ongoing genocide, which has personally affected many members of our campus community, face the likelihood of violence at the hands of armed CPSO officers. I am personally aware of truly shocking instances of physical force and violence committed against out students by CPSO officers last spring.

Trustees, I imagine you invited at least 5 CPSO officers to yesterdays meetings with a goal of feeling safe on campus. I also hold a goal that members of our community experience safety on our campus, and I am her eto tell you that many members of this campus community do not feel safe on campus in the presence of CPSO, as a direct result of the behavior of officers, and the ongoing lack of accountability for CPSO at all levels.

Happy autumn, and as we all prepare for classes to begin next week, I bed you to remember that there are no more schools left in Gaza. Disarm and Divest*, PSU. It’s time.

*Disarm PSU a long standing student, staff, and community group organizing against the arming of campus police has become Disarm & Divest Coalition. You can find mroe information about them, their commitments, and their week of rage action on IG @disarmdivestcopsu