Student Statement #1

Over the summer PSU began holding student conduct violation meetings. During these meeting students are asked if they would like to share any information, or make any comments about the accusation being levied against them. Below is one students response, printed with consent.

Statement: To the administrators of the so-called Portland State University,

I write to you over three months after students enacted a principled stance against our university’s complacency in the apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people. Two months after students took the physical representation of the chains we all wear as the servants of the empire that you produce in this very university, as you suppress student dissent in favor of capital and your own barbaric egos, chains students then placed back around the door handles to the renamed Leila Khaled Hall on our campus.
I write to you just a month after administrators from the university reached out to the students they had gotten beaten and violated, in order to re-traumatize us and punish us more than we already have been. You might have assumed that the passage of time would qualm the attention on the situation, or that maybe we might have come to our senses and fallen to our knees in submission, as the president of our university has to the genocidal entities that line her bloody pockets. But unlike Ann Cudd, unlike those who fear the consequences of speaking up and taking a brave stance for human rights, I am not a coward who will bow my head to the monsters of this world, monsters that hold positions of authority at our very own university.

I answer your accusations of “misconduct” with the following:

First, you accuse me of “collusion”. You claim I enticed others to engage in the conduct I did. I find this statement to be hilarious. How do you pose yourself to be an institution that claims to teach its students about liberation and resistance, and then you act surprised when those same students take action on these very lessons you teach? Either you provide us nothing but oppressive filth in your classrooms to teaches us to bow our heads and never stand up for what we believe in, or the institution itself is guilty of this very accusation. Which one is it? I have only ever encouraged others to stand up for what is right, is that now a violation of the university’s academic conduct?
You told students to engage in nonviolent dissent.
We listened.
You punished us anyway.
Clearly it was never about how students protest, but specifically what they are protesting for.

Second, you claim that I engaged in “disruptive behavior”. I laugh at this accusation as a student who had my life interrupted by militant police violence at the hands of this very institution. Students sitting peacefully on the ground is more disruptive than beating us to the point where bones are broken and any sense of safety on this campus is diminished? The only disruption caused has been by the hands of the university, which only disrupted and destroyed our campus over the last few weeks of spring terms, as classes were canceled and students were beaten and trespassed from campus. The only disruption caused has been by the hands of the university that has held my academic transcripts at ransom, as I have been forced to forfeit a full-ride scholarship as a DAAD scholar to pursue graduate school in Berlin, Germany. The only disruption has been caused at the hands of a university that claims to serve first-generation students like me, while you have actively worked to disrupt and destroy mine. I have been forced to lose a law school acceptance to the University of Oregon as well as a graduate school acceptance to the University of Chicago. I sat in front of a door for a couple of hours, and so you destroyed my life for the remainder of it.

Even after all this, the university still continues to prevent me from healing as you continue to hold me captive to a flawed system of misconduct investigations, by the same department on campus that has sent students similar threatening letters for simply attending a peaceful rally on campus. By the same entity whose administrators laughed and smiled as I yelled out in pain from the force used against me in my arrest. By the same department who ignored my request to view the evidence submitted against me in this misconduct review for DAYS, and then reached out when it was too late to schedule anything before this hearing. That seems like pretty blatant retaliation and a violation of my rights to me. You just settled one lawsuit with me and walked right into another.

Third, you accuse me of engaging in “endangerment”. This is an accusation posed against students who were engaged in a peaceful poetry circle when the administrators of this university, Taylor Burke, to be specific, approached us to state that she “looked forward” for us to be detained by the police, police who then proceeded to violate and degrade us before physically assaulting one of us so bad that a student needed to have reconstruction surgery on their ACL and Meniscus, while admin stood around us smiling as we yelled out in pain. Is endangerment words? Or is endangerment the physical wounds we still continue to bear? Is endangerment the poetry we were peacefully reading as police arrived? Or is endangerment militarizing your campus and subjecting the student body to sexual, physical, and emotional violence that we have still not recuperated from, being as the university has acted as the greatest inhibitor of our healing.

Fourth, you accuse me of “failure to comply”. However, the university has had over 8 years to comply with the explicit demands of students who oppose our university supporting genocide and apartheid. You have not complied once. You have ignored resolutions passed within student government, motions made within the faculty senate, as well as public pressure that has been applied to the university by demonstrations that gather hundreds on our campus to continue to protest the very demands that students have championed for years. Who is truly guilty of failure to comply? Why do you hold students to a standard you do not even hold yourself to as administrators?

Fifth, you have stated I engaged in a “misuse of university property”. Name a single one of your items we touched, other than the door handles you removed in hopes that students would stop gather before them. Your police have touched far more places on our bodies than we have even walked on this college campus. Your police, who ripped off a student's religious headscarf and refused to return it back to me regardless of how much i cried being forced to strip down in front of male sheriffs officers.

Sixth, you claim I engaged in “obstruction”, while your officers themselves have openly targeted students and prevented us from safely accessing campus. We have been followed to our homes, intimidated, beaten to the point of needing surgery, and threatened by monsters such as Marcos Jimenez. Your employees and students who needed access to the Leila Khaled Hall were politely redirected to the multitude of other exits and entrances to the buildings. No one who needed to be inside was denied the opportunity to do so, whereas you continue to deny us the opportunity to safely access the campus that we pay to attend.

Seventh, you accuse us of violating the law. However resistance has always been criminalized by the supposed law. Revolutionaries have been condemned in the courts that someday honor them as heroes once they have been absolved by history and the masses. There are quotes from King on the walls of the (in)justice center downtown, although King himself was assassinated by our very own fascist police state and deemed a criminal while he was still alive. Nelson Mandela is deemed a hero by a country that has him on a terrorist watchlist for his resistance and activism with the African National Congress up until 2008. Our very existences are criminalized by the law. But the law is arbitrary, as you have proven. Beating students is okay, sexually assaulting us is okay, but standing against administrators is an injustice that you state is against the law? Students who chained similarly themselves in front of buildings that were also renamed on the campuses at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon were not met with police violence and arrest. Why is it only a crime when students on this campus do so?

Just like the Zionist entity you serve, every accusation from your mouth is a blatant confession.

Hold yourselves accountable to the same standards you attempt to impose on us.

I will not apologize for utilizing my campus to the fullest potential of an academic institution where learning must occur, regardless of what those who oppose the beauty of the resiliency of the student spirit do to hinder it, the same academic institution you turned into a battleground for police and university-sanctioned violence that has scarred many of us for life.

I will not apologize for utilizing the wisdom and education of my elders who have instilled in me the morals of speaking up. I will not apologize to you, who have attempted to brainwash us into submission and complacency for the worst horrors that this world has to offer. I will not apologize for following in the footsteps of students at PSU decades ago who similarly enacted change to prevent the tree in front of our library from being torn down by similarly chaining themselves to it. I will not apologize to you for being on the right side of history.

I will not apologize for my morals. I will not apologize for my dissent. I will not apologize for my right to free speech.

History will remember us as the students who rose up, and it will remember you as the barbarians who attempted to punish truth, dissent, and justice. You will never crush the spirit of the students who teach you far more than anything they learn from you.

How else will you punish me? In May, I was awarded the DAAD scholarship which is a full ride scholarship offered by the German ministry of education to highly competitive international students. In August, I lost my acceptance to my graduate school program in Berlin, alongside my scholarship, because the university placed an unjust deans hold on my account and prevented me from submitting my transcripts to either my graduate school or my scholarship program. Shame on this pathetic school for doing this to me. Days before us, students at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University also chained themselves on their campus to protest their university admins’ disgusting relationship with genocidal entities. Those students remained chained for DAYS, and somehow, their universities did not brutalize them with the police and violent arrests, nor were they subject to unjust academic misconduct investigations and punishments. So why are we different? Why was our nonviolent peaceful civil disobedience met with such violent aggression just hours after we arrived on campus?

I know that in the eyes of the university I am not an alum just yet, as you have freezed my credits from my final term and prevented me from accessing either my transcripts of my degree, but I consider myself an Ex PSU Student. I entered this university as the recipient of multiple scholarships, DSP, Presidents Equal Access, Don Wyler, and other grants and awards I would continue to accumulate along the way, such as Build EXITO and McNair. I came to this university with promises that it would serve first gen low income students like me. I took great pride in all the resources available to students like me for years. I was so immensely proud to attend this school, and Ann Cudd’s disgusting administration took all of that away from me. Frankly, i am fucking disgusted in this school. I am repulsed to have ever attended, and it brings me great shame I wasted four years of my life at a school that committed such unspeakable violence against me. I am still not over the events that resulted while I was in jail, the violence I faced, and the life long trauma that will continue to follow me. Before this, I never had as much as a speeding ticket, but PSU’s decision to be the only university on the west coast to arrest their students for simply gathering in front of the admin building peacefully has turned my life upside down. From this, I have lost my housing, my employment, and some days I thought I would even lose my will to live. That’s what you’ve done to me. And now you wanna deliberate on how I should be punished further? When I am asked years down the line, I know how to answer the question of where I stood. Now the question is, what about you, Claire?

*Claire is the former conduct officer tasked with overseeing conduct reviews. She has since left PSU.