Speaking Out of Place: Landmark Unfair Labor Practices Complaint Against UCs

Editor's note: A recent episode of a favorite podcast, Speaking Out of Place, brought together three guests who helped listeners cut through all the lies, easy misapprehensions, and lazy histories surrounding University of California politics, policy and practice concerning nonviolent campus protest of UC's role in the persecution of Gaza. In this episode, three UC professors explain the Unfair Labor Practice filed by faculty against the UC with a precision, expertise, and political analysis we admire. Thanks to host David Palumbo-Liu, whose day job is teaching at Stanford University. He explains the show's theme and introduces his guests in this transcript of the show. Read loud!

D. Palumbo-Liu: Today on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark complaint against the UC system. This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses, along with the system-wide Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP, charge against their employer, the University of California. A nearly 600-page complaint was presented to the California Public Employment Relations Board. What's especially noteworthy about this complaint is that it claims UC's repression of faculty and student protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza cuts to the heart of the educational process and denies faculty, staff, and students the ability to carry on their work of learning and teaching about critical issues in the world today. Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that the faculty groups say that the university system's restrictions on activism for Palestine amount to violations of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act, or HERA, which protects employees from retaliation around advocating for changes in the workplace. This raises the issue of just how far universities can go, and the methods they can employ, to maintain their complicity with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Why don't we begin with you just all introducing yourselves very briefly?

A. McClanahan: I'm Annie McClanahan. I'm an associate professor in the English department at UC, Irvine, and I'm chair of the board of the Irvine Faculty Association.

W. Matsumura: Hi, I'm Wendy Matsumura. I am an associate professor in the history department at UC, San Diego, and I am also the chair of the board of the San Diego Faculty Association.

A. Markowitz: My name is Anna Markowitz. I'm an associate professor in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and I'm a member of the UCLA Faculty Association Executive Committee.

D. Palumbo-Liu: So glad to have you all. So, let's get right into it. Tell us about this complaint that you filed with the California Public Employment Relations Board. Perhaps begin with which bodies are bringing this complaint and why this unique use of this kind of complaint. What do protests against Israel's war in Gaza have to do with faculty working conditions?

W. Matsumura: There are multiple faculty associations representing tenure-track faculty members in each of the UC campuses that came together and decided that we wanted to participate in UCLA's initial filing of an unfair labor practice charge. And we each decided to do so because we believed that there were serious unlawful practices that were done by our campus administrations that we could also include in order to both strengthen the UCLA charge as well as to make a point that we are all as faculty associations really concerned about the way that our university administrations have violated our rights to engage in protected activity.

D. Palumbo-Liu: Anna, please.

A. Markowitz: I can add a little more. So, an unfair labor practice fundamentally is a charge alleging that there were violations of labor law and specifically workers' rights to organize and demand change at their workplace. It really struck us that the students and faculty attempting to engage in this conversation with the administration did a very, savvy, and clever thing of thinking about what our role is here and what we can do. And students who really thought about what is the university's power here and how could we change a terrible situation through our own work in our own lives. And they asked themselves how the place that they are in is complicit. And I think that's really remarkable just on its own. And, for us, they were really asking UC to look at itself and to make changes based on what UC's able to do. And that means that they weren't thinking about their workplace and about the way that their own labor contributes to a war that they themselves do not support. And so the basis of the act was then stepping back and saying, we're trying to talk to you, our workplace, about this and about the role our labor has in this genocide, and you're not letting us do that. You're telling us that this is not our job, our business, this isn't what we can do. And then not only were you not allowing us to do this but you were taking actively repressive steps and that became this fundamental underlying logic for filing using HERA and for thinking of it as a labor action and so the faculty associations have been the arm under which we've been able to do that. We are not unionized, but we have the right to act collectively. And we did and we have these rights, and we thought let's use them. And we can talk about the variety of things they did, but they changed the nature of our teaching. They changed what we could talk about on campus. They physically harmed faculty and all these things broadly are a huge problem under here.

D. Palumbo-Liu: I'm so glad you framed it in that way, because again, thinking of my own time at Berkeley, it does follow in a tradition of people like Charles Schwartz, who was a physicist who protested about how the physics department was doing to facilitate the war effort, or Harry Edwards in terms the exploitation of black athletes and sports. So there's this long tradition and of course, you go to the Berkeley campus and you have the Mario Salvio cafe. And so it's all enshrined in this, but what you're getting at is that the Palestine exception is coming forward with such ferocity. Maybe, Annie, you could talk a little bit about Irvine.

A. McClanahan: So one thing I just want to highlight about what Wendy and Anna just said is that this is the ULP filing really is very historic. The UC faculty associations have only once before filed a sort of system-wide labor grievance using the ULP process that was in the early nineties. That one was about paying compensation. So this is also the first system-wide labor grievance on the part of faculty that tackles issues of speech and particularly our rights to speech as workers to engage in protest, and also to discuss with our employer issues that pertain to conditions related to our work. The UC's reaction to this protest really did have very significant effects on actions fundamental to faculty's jobs in all of the FAs represented in the ULP. And so it's important that we're basically demanding that UC respect the law under HERA as Anna was just saying, like giving us back rights were due, including by walking back some of the new restrictions that they've placed in terms of speech on campus. Just to give an example from UC Irvine's filing, we have a member of our faculty association at UC Irvine who received a disciplinary letter in their file about things that they said in class claiming discrimination when they were speaking simply about the genocide in Palestine. And so when you have that kind of really draconian repression of faculty's ability to speak about issues of concern to their fields, to their subject area, and to their classes, when you have people feeling like they can't talk about those issues in their classrooms, that is a violation of basic workplace protections, particularly for faculty, because talking about complicated, difficult issues in our classrooms is, in fact, our job. And that's just one connection that you might see between this tactic of using the unfair labor practice, which is a very sort of standard, union-type tactic, to talk about something that is a political issue that extends beyond what would appear to be narrow workplace concerns.

W. Matsumura: I think at San Diego, as well as on other campuses, it is the case that the aggressiveness of this has really been directed at people who have less secure employment: postdocs, graduate students lecturers. We know more cases of those, but in terms of tenure track faculty, it is true that the university seems to be using much more aggressively it's own sort of route to engage in investigations, meaning that these unilateral announcements that an investigation has been opened against them comes from like the associate vice chancellor, rather than coming through more mediated channels that are usually the case with faculty investigations. And so one example that we saw had to do with a faculty member who initiated a discussion about a departmental response to the genocide in Palestine and had gotten into some back and forth with other colleagues. In that case, their department chair decided that it was a good idea to then report them. And the university opened an investigation against this faculty member for things that usually --- for other sort of like non-Palestine things --- would have probably been dismissed, as no, we can't punish this. The point is that those were then aggressively taken on by the university, which hired an outside investigator to do all of these interviews, go through emails, all of this stuff…and, after five months, conclude what could have been concluded at the outset, which was that there was no basis for allegations of discrimination. And so there's all of these resources that are being devoted to wasting and ruining people's lives and causing a lot of emotional distress, enabling them to not do their work, sort of having repercussions on other faculty members who then have to take on work.

There's just like all of this damaging stuff that is happening because the university has decided that any kind of dispute related to somebody who is expressing a pro-Palestine position is something worthy of investigation. So, that's what we're seeing. And we think that is a major waste of resources and a violation of, our rights to academic freedom.

D. Palumbo-Liu: I would just add it has such a chilling effect laterally, not just in terms of other faculty, but staff, lecturers, students. It just becomes a whole prohibited domain, which is toxic to any kind of educational enterprise.

A. Markowitz: I think Wendy just made such an important point also about how the folks that are getting most hit are those that have the least protection.  Our Senate does still retain some power. When UCLA initiated some disciplinary hearings for our various faculty who they knew of only because of arrest, despite the fact that they deny it's the only thing linking these folks. For our ladder faculty, we were able to advocate with the Senate. And [in] the Senate, even folks that don't feel strongly about Palestine recognize this is not okay. And for many faculty, this has been galvanizing because they're seeing repression on an issue that they could see quickly linked to their own work. But it is our faculty that are not protected by the Senate, and our staff and our librarians, that are going through these administrative-only disciplinary processes. And I think this is really important to call out. The reason we have the Senate and the reason the shared governance is supposed to be something that protects this work and that makes the UC great and a bastion of free speech and creative ideas. And instead we're seeing this push where the administration is making these decisions and eroding this. And so for many faculty, they're noticing and paying attention. But I think part of the goal of the ULP was to give this information to more faculty, to have more faculty put their heads up and think, how is this going to affect us in the downturn? Because the restrictions that the UC is putting in place --- at UCLA, we have this new office of campus security that just emerged and we have no sense of who it's accountable to or why --- that's going to make campus bad for all of us. And so the ULP is taking some action to prevent that and to help, put out a call to other faculty as well.

D. Palumbo-Liu: Just a couple of examples. I had a colleague at the University of Florida ask me to vet her syllabus: “How does this appear to you?” I said I'm not in Florida. And she said that's why I'm asking you. But also after October 7th, I decided to have a new course on Palestine in the spring. And the letter from my departmental chair began with, “Of course, it's your right to do this, but two things. Maybe by that time, the whole situation will have changed and, b, we're really concerned about your safety. and the safety of your students.” So how is this affecting your mental processes when you think about going to a student event or designing a course or any number of things? Because Wendy mentioned the amount of time this takes but think of the amount of psychic energy it takes to anticipate, which is not what our brains should be doing at this point in history. But maybe we could talk about how it affects your labor practices in all sorts of hard and soft ways.

A. McClanahan: I just attended --- last weekend, there was a really wonderful event --- a workshop organized by the UC-wide faculty and staff for justice in Palestine workshop about precisely the question of how to create syllabus language course descriptions, as well as pedagogical practices, precisely to avoid the kinds of cases that we're seeing. Because at least at UCI, and I assume on the other UC campuses as well, what we're seeing, particularly since the spring, is a very coordinated campaign, much of it coordinated by off-campus groups, helping students or student organizations to navigate the complaint process in order to have the maximum negative impact on faculty and to put faculty, as much as possible, on the defensive, like almost from the beginning. So trying to weaponize these practices that the UC has in place around faculty political speech practices which in the main amount in their sort of historic articulation only to saying faculty can't go around saying you have to vote for so and so, and if you vote for them, you'll get extra credit, right? That's the extent of the restrictions on faculty political speech as they're written in the law. But a lot of these student groups are trying to weaponize those rules. I think in many cases it's not actually about a change in the way that the faculty conduct process is being interpreted or run. But if faculty are afraid that there has been a change in the conduct process, that will have the same effect as if there actually was one, right? And so this workshop was really about how can you talk about assessment with your students to clarify that you're not judging them on the basis of the content of their political beliefs? How can you manage difficult conversations in class pedagogically in ways that will not make students who might disagree with each other feel shut down? How can you incorporate language on your syllabus that makes clear that topics around the Genocide may come up, that you are indeed an expert or that the course material is relevant to topics pertaining to these kind of urgent contemporary political questions? And the fact that we're having to go through all of this extra pedagogical labor simply in order to say this might come up in discussions where it's relevant, not only force an additional amount of labor and a great deal of anxiety for faculty. It also makes it appear as if only people with a particular set of field expertise can talk about this, which is of course exactly what the university is not supposed to be. It's supposed to be a place where people who are engaged and curious can have conversations regardless of their degree of scholarly expertise. So it makes faculty feel anxious. It adds another layer of work. It makes it seem as if only some people can talk about it. And it also means that we can't respond and particularly --- I'm just thinking about your chair's point, right? --- we need to be able to be responsive to changes in the situation. That's the case for faculty who want to talk about it too, right? If we feel like I can't talk about anything that wasn't on the syllabus that I wrote six months ago, then we perforce are unable to talk about any issues of contemporary concern whether that's,  fascism or police violence or impacts of climate change, right?  Can an instructor in ecology and evolutionary biology not shift and dedicate a class to the consequences and causes of Hurricane Helene because they didn't include that on their syllabus, right? Is that a world that we want to live in? And so I think it's this combination of extra labor, a sense of kind of self-repression, right? Where we're like anticipating an advance. things that might be dangerous for us to say and not, and then not saying them. Again, the entire point of faculty academic freedoms was to prevent that situation. And then, in addition to all that, just the anxiety of feeling like you're being surveilled all the time, in part by your administration, but in some of these cases by students in your classes who are taking up a very familiar right-wing playbook. I saw it first at Berkeley in the early 2000s around the Iraq war, all of the attempts to repress academic freedom in that period. So this is an old playbook, but it's being used with new force. And I think it's having a much larger impact in this moment than it did in the early 2000s.

D. Palumbo-Liu: Could you talk a little bit more about the new force? I think this is a really important point. Who are the actors that are involved in these kinds of acts of repression now? It's a much wider cast of players. Everything from your lieutenant governor to members of Congress to local city council people in Southern California, especially to outside groups.

A. McClanahan: Even the UC-wide academic Senate, which has not been known for taking super strong political positions on this has noted with a great deal of concern that for the 1st time, members of the board of regents want to intervene in faculty and student conduct proceedings. In all likelihood, you have a number of, presidents, chancellors as well as the, as President Drake, who either were or are being forced out of their positions because they've been perceived by the regions and by the California legislature to be inadequately harsh with respect to student and faculty protests. So the extent to which basic principles of firewalls and shared governance are being completely thrown out the window in this moment is really extraordinary. And I think historically extraordinary. And if people think that it's going to stop with the Palestine stuff and the Board of Regents is only going to intervene in these ways, the legislature is only going to intervene in these ways with respect to Palestine and to the genocide in Gaza, they're wrong. Because as soon as you open that door then it becomes possible to intervene on questions around ethnic studies, right? Questions around like other political issues that may emerge. So it really is a dangerous moment and it's why it's so important for faculty to work together through processes like the ULP.

W. Matsamura: Yeah,  in terms of what Annie said about the Board of Regents a lot of the stuff that we're seeing right now, both in the spring, but also transpire over the summer and being implemented right now, actually, has a longer short term history, which begins on October 9th, when the chair of the board of regents at the time, Richard Leib, as well as UC President Michael Drake, made their statements in support of Israel, followed by my chancellor, who forwarded that and then made his own statements on October 10th. And then thinking about the aggressive move that the Board of Regents made after that, as faculty began to express their own sort of positions around how to situate October 7th in the context of settler colonialism and the Nakba, what we saw is that one of the other members of the Regents, someone named Jay Sures --- who is, like, a talent agency executive or something --- was able to get an op-ed published in the LA Times where he spoke as a UC Regent to issue an attack against a group called the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, which had, made its own statement about the UC's response to October 7th. And what he did there was he used his position to defame faculty who were on that council by implying that they were antisemitic supporters of terrorism. And a lot of Regental policy we know follows that sentiment and that moment including the introduction of a new policy to restrict faculty departments’ ability to use their websites, and new guidelines around teaching and all of these time, place, manner restrictions which we know come out of a very politically activated group of Regents who were really upset that faculty dare critique anything related to any sort of action by Israel and characterized all of our critiques as being antisemitic. Some of this transpired in Board of Regents’ meetings where it was, “Oh, I thought that this policy is not about academic freedom, but it's about, like all those people talking about Palestine.” And so it's on record, but somehow that hasn't really been thought of as a problem for the faculty at large, which is alarming because, as Annie said, this is going to really impact all of us.

A. Markowitz: I really appreciate both of these points, but I think it is worth dwelling on the fact that this is a lot of outside the university forces and outside the public sphere of the university forces that are driving a lot of this. At UCLA, we saw a violent mob of folks outside the university come and attack our students, and the university has not yet done anything to really push for any sorts of consequences for those folks. Many of them have been identified, and one charge to date has been filed and then that charge was dropped. Whereas the charges against our students at the city level have not actually been dropped. Right now they've declined to prosecute but they have not dropped the charges. So there's still the possibility that they could open those at any time. And so what we saw is that when an outside force came to attack our students what the university chose to do ultimately was to turn on its faculty, students, and staff rather than to protect our students and say this is a public place and this is what is allowed to happen here. And that is egregiously against the First Amendment. This is the public institution. It's the government saying, no, you may not have this particular speech. And I think that needs to be dwelled on in a particular way. And then for us to think about what that means, broadly speaking, for the UCs as a place of public education. The UC is increasingly paid for by private dollars, both through private funding and donations as well as through tuition dollars, and it's changing what we can do at the institution if people are starting to make decisions thinking about those dollar signs on the line. The state share of our funding has dropped by more than 60 percent since the early 90s, so we are really looking at becoming less and less of a public institution, and what we're seeing is the consequences of that right now.

A. McClanahan: I think that's so important and I just want to add something to what Anna was saying, which is about thinking about the relationship between the campus and its outside context. And one of the things that's really interesting to me and reading the ULP is observing both how much this is system-wide, how much kind of coherence and what appears to be a kind of concerted attempt on the part of the administration to repress faculty system-wide and yet also very subject to local specificity based on either the region in which the campus is cited or the sort of decisions made by their campus leadership. So here at UCI, we the faculty, including the faculty Senate, asked the administration not only to drop the charges against arrested students and faculty but also to petition the Orange County DA's office to drop the charges. If anybody is familiar with the history of the Orange County DA's office that's particularly important because it is a DA's office with a very known history of corruption, of racism including the current DA himself, Elliot [Todd] Spitzer --- like, Google him, you will find just a treasure trove of insane information about the history of that office. And so for us, it was vitally important that the campus do whatever it could to try to persuade that office not to press charges. They did not. And as a result, the DA's office is pressing charges against all forty arrestees, including instances of what's clearly like charge stacking, of adding multiple charges to a single arrest, which on the basis of the cases we're looking at is entirely racially motivated. You can see who it is that is victimized by the charge stacking and it's all arrestees of color. The brutalization that the arrested students, faculty, and staff were subject to in the Orange County jail was just unspeakable. And UCI has been willing to do absolutely nothing to prevent any of this. They're going to allow these potentially felony charges to be pressed against UCI student and faculty protesters.

A. Markowitz: Just to circle back, because your initial question, David, was around, like, how is this affecting our work? And I do want to just call it: the students know. This is a bunch of university students who read the internet, and they all know. And anxiety is huge on campus for all of our students. And, at UCLA, we have a ton of surveillance happening on campus, and students are super nervous about that, especially students of color who understand that they're at greater risk for COVID-19. For just doing normal student things than they ever were before because there's someone around who they decided suspicious is going to be taking action. We have students suddenly asking, Oh, I don't feel comfortable coming to campus. Can I Zoom in? Can I do this? And instructors are navigating in new ways, thinking about like, how do I ensure a quality education and something good and connective and generative for you for your future life when you're afraid to step foot on campus, not because of what the students are doing, but because of the way the institution has responded to what in many ways is just fundamental student speech, which has happened again and again on UC campuses. And in fact, that we celebrate and praise ourselves for in, in many cases to your point earlier. And I think the institution should be held responsible for the fact that they're inculcating this fear and not just for students generally with the securitization, but even with not engaging with the students that were protesting and not sending out missives that sort of clarified for Jewish students what was happening on campus. We've also created a culture of fear for those students that I find to be tremendously wrong and really problematic. And I hold the university responsible for the way that they're treating the students that we're here to serve and do right by.

D. Palumbo-Liu: Yeah, just to pick up that one thread and loop it into something else. But, very early on during the UC strike, I did a podcast, and a bunch of campuses were represented. I also talked to people at the London School of Economic because the UK was also at this huge labor strike academic university colleges. And one thing that was consistent was that students said, listen, these graduate student lecturers and faculty are the only people who know my name. No administrator knows. I'm just an unknown entity. And I was just thinking about both that case and this case. Linked together with issues of labor is the absolute contempt administration has for faculty and students: You are just an irritant. And one of the things that points out how willing they are to endanger both is the fact that they let the Proud Boys on campus. These are the most anti-Semitic, violent people that we have. And they let them on the UCLA campus and said in a very belated way, they did whatever they did. And, here at Stanford, we have Turning Point USA. The professors watch, and all these things that in any other context you would think would be immediately dealt with by administrators who would want to stay true to the faith of the students and the public has in them…that they would have a free and open field for inquiry. But the absolute cravenness of the administration is something that never fails to astound. And yet I think --- Anna, you pointed out --- students know this, and this is why they're so vocal. They understand they're being cheated. By people that are absolutely unresponsive and serving entirely different sort of master class. Could we talk a little bit about this broad spectrum of accusations from denying students safety to being antisemitic? The “antisemitic” is the hardware; the safety thing is the atmospheric. Which again --- I think earlier in our conversation we were talking about --- people inspecting syllabi, and at one point I thought, they could find anything that they want. It doesn't matter what you wrote. If you have the will to misinterpret and you're backed up by power, that gives it credence. So could we talk about how your complaint is addressing these accounts that legitimize these acts of repression, saying they're protecting students and that you are enacting a kind of antisemitic violence against students? How do you respond to this?

A. McClanahan: One thing I think is important is that the UC a number of years ago actually put forward a statement on non-discrimination, to which the entire system is subject. And when they were initially putting together that statement, there was a lot of pressure from outside groups to include language that accepted the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As a result of the sort of pressure. They put together a working group. They convened a working group full of faculty with broad expertise, both on Middle Eastern studies, in Jewish studies, and on the Holocaust, and on the tradition of antisemitism, as well as scholars of the law and free speech. And that group concluded --- as has virtually every other group with a concern about free speech and faculty freedom that has explored this issue --- that this equation was not acceptable and that it could not and should not go into the UC's policy. And so that policy exists. And so every time an administrator or someone in campus leadership tries to make this equation, faculty have to say, you have a policy on this and it does not accept this substitution of one of these positions for the other. So I think that's one thing that's really important is to, again, look at the policies that we actually have and ask whether what is being said about them is accurate because it often is not accurate. So that's one thing. And then the other thing I think is just coming back to the Palestine exception, right? I think it's really important to say on the one hand, the techniques that are currently being used to repress faculty and students' speech and political action and political protest will be used for other political movements, other protests, and other sort of areas of concern. However, they have not historically been used in the same way. There is something very specific about Palestine in this moment. And so the irony, for instance, of going to Berkeley or going to UCLA's campus and seeing advertisements and marketing of the campus around its participation in the tradition of protest movements --- whether that's anti-Vietnam War movement, whether that's the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, whether it's the UCs choice to divest from companies contributing to climate change, which they did about 15 years ago and likes to really brag about --- the fact that all of those movements and that history can become something that the campus brags about even ss the campuses are choosing to call in police to repress and to beat and to arrest their own faculty and students for engaging in political protest? I think we have to keep pointing out that hypocrisy.

A. Markowitz: To that, I think personally, it's very important to continue to be vigilant about antisemitism, to call it out when it happens, and to stand against it. I was working at the University of Virginia in 2017 during the Unite the Right rally on August 12th. And I saw some of the most egregious antisemitism. I received anti-Semitic robocalls after that happened. And I did not see a huge apparatus come back to try to support my Jewish colleagues then. And I see it now and I think, what's going on? And so it's real. It bubbles up. And if we're not careful, you can fall into dangerous traps. And so I absolutely think it's something to think about. I also think we as faculty are the exact kind of people that can do a lot of work to fight antisemitism and to have this conversation in a real and nuanced way. And what we're seeing here is not let's have a conversation, let's figure this out, let's fight this menacing force. What we're seeing is the halting of conversation. That's never going to solve a problem or make it better. It's going to increase fear for students who can't understand what's going on but are hearing these words, and [which] decrease[s] their safety. So for me the whole premise is false. Halting this conversation increases student fear. And I think, we are the exact place where we should be discussing why it's dangerous to equate antisemitism with being against Zionism or specifically the version of Zionism that is the settler project in Israel right now. It's politically expedient right now to do this, but why aren't we having a conversation about what's dangerous about that equation and how that sets up problems in the future? I don't think ever stopping that is, is the way to move forward.

W. Matsamura: I guess the only thing I would say is that I know what you said reminded me of all of these initiatives that came forward from the president's office around money being devoted to give to campuses so they can have conversations around antisemitism, and then maybe they added on Islamophobia or something, right? What's happening, I think, is that as the classroom becomes a more surveilled space where having these conversations entails quite a bit of risk, for me, having to put on my syllabus hey, it's not okay for you to record this class without my permission, right? That goes against a lot of the kind of trust that I'm trying to build in my classroom. It’s damaging for me to have to do that or to have conversations. The conversations are okay but to have that as a policy? It's something that is really against what I'm trying to do, but it becomes this thing that I have to put in because I'm hearing that university counsel is treating our syllabi as contracts when they're engaged in these investigations. And so on the one hand you have the weakening of my ability to have real honest conversations, difficult conversations with my students. On the other hand, this apparatus is being created that is going into places, offices like the EDI office or something that isn't really an academic space where you can have workshops, where you can have trainings and things like that around antisemitism or Islamophobia that, are being the vetting process for who is getting to run those workshops or what is going on? Do people actually have the ability to run those in a way that can accommodate all of these difficult conversations as Anna was saying is up for question. And so for me, it's just very disturbing that our space is being ceded to that kind of work. We're not being supported in our work and there's money that's being funneled to these organizations that are deemed acceptable by --- who knows who? --- the University.

D. Palumbo-Liu: That's such an important point because we get the same endless memos from our deans, and they revise them every two weeks. The other language put on so that we're compliant basically comes from the legal office, but nobody believes it. The students don't believe it. We’re in such an atmosphere of cynicism that the letter means nothing anymore. And this gets back to the point that what they're suppressing --- in the shape of the encampments and the people's universities --- that's the place where education is going on. It's outside the heavily mandated formulaic, institutionalized spaces that have been completely sanitized and repressive, and it takes place with students organically coming together with inexact, inexpert but incredibly explorative kinds of ventures into educating themselves. Because they trust each other, and that's fundamental to any educational process. If you don't trust it, you're automatically filtering out 90 percent of what you're told. So how have the students reacted to this complaint? Those who know and in general, how have faculty on your campuses been working with students as I think a super important resource for information for moral support and a very important component to maintaining some sort of trust in some part of the institution?

A. Markowitz: I don't know how super aware they are of the faculty ULP. Sometimes you tell them, they're like, “Oh, cool.”

D. Palumbo-Liu: It's probably healthy.

A. Markowitz: I'm like, yeah, you do you, we'll do us. Okay. I dunno, it's been for you all, but it's the vibe here.

A. McClanahan: One thing that I would just mention at UCI is that almost exactly the same time period that we filed the ULP the group of students who were still undergoing the student conduct process and facing student conduct charges, also filed a lawsuit against UCI. The way that UCI had managed the student conduct process had already received a great deal of concern, including a number of letters from the ACLU and from the National Lawyers Guild, expressing that the way that the process was being conducted was nontransparent. Virtually every single student that entered the student conduct process received evidence, quote-unquote, evidence against them that was not specified. For instance, if you were a member of a student group and that student group was involved in the encampment, you may have received charges in the student conduct process, even if you were never there. So that's just one example. So the process was so bad. Also, UCI was the only UC campus that chose to suspend students from campus housing. So many of the students undergoing conduct charges were forced to immediately leave their campus housing, were homeless. We had dozens of students who were homeless for extended periods of time. And because of the way the student conduct process was managed here. And because as of the end of the summer, roughly, we still had students who had then been in limbo with that process for almost six months, students hadn't been able to graduate, couldn't receive their transcripts, couldn't receive their degrees, couldn't complete their coursework, couldn't return to their on-campus housing, couldn't return to their on-campus job, and had been in that situation for months and months. Because there had been no change in the student conduct process, and they were still in this kind of uncertain situation, they are suing. And so one of the things that we've been really talking and thinking a lot about on our campus is the relationship between the faculty ULP lawsuit and the student lawsuit. Because I think that they're so much about the same issues. They may be about different sort of versions of those issues, but they really are the same. And if you think about the way that, say, processes of surveillance impact and prohibit people from engaging in what would otherwise be protected activities, those are the kinds of things that impact faculty in their status as workers and students in their status as students equally and in many of the same ways. So I think a lot of what shows up in our filing also pertains to the students and dovetails a lot with what the students have been doing on our campus in terms of pushing back against this repression.

D. Palumbo-Liu: One of the reasons I thought of asking the question was because we did a program with faculty and students from the University of Michigan, and their faculty said it was one of the first that voted for a divestment, and it was basically dovetailing with student resolutions and protests about the fact the university prohibited students from even taking a vote. So the two forces worked very well together. I'd be happy to put you in touch with those folks if you're interested because they have a continuing project that keeps that alliance in place. It was really quite impressive.

A. Markowitz: I'll add that one of the charges that is in the UCLA portion of the ULP is that we had these overbroad restrictions on what we could talk to students about, particularly when the strike began where we were given information that, sort of, you can't talk to any students about this. And, aside from the fact that that's incorrect, it just represents a clear effort by the administration to not have students and faculty see the way that they're in this together, just exactly the way that Annie was just saying. And it was reminiscent for me of the 2022 strike where, you know, I think there are many of us who are like, look, if you don't respect the work of these students and the right of these students to self-determine on these sorts of labor issues then you're certainly not going to respect ours. And so we saw that here as well, with this new issue coming forward. And so in that way, I think continuing to press forward in the ways that this repression is intertwined and, we're not protected just because we're faculty feels really important too. And even if we were, that's not the world we want to live in.

A. McClanahan: If you look at some of the things in the charges, again openly surveilling faculty and others engaged in protected activity, taking no action to protect students and faculty, directing law enforcement to arrest peaceful protesters, permitting law enforcement officers to brutalize protesters, surveilling and intimidating faculty engaged in protected activity --- particularly faculty opposing discrimination and opposing a hostile work environment --- all of that is relevant to pretty much everybody on campus, as far as I can tell, whether they're a represented employee or a student.

A. Markowitz: From the perspective of PIRB, we're the fourth labor group to have filed a charge against the UC for their actions this past spring. And I think part of it is just, here's yet another group saying this is about our working condition that feels really important. I think the first one that PIRB will rule on will be the UAW’s and that's going to have implications for all of the other ones downstream because we'll see how PIRB is thinking about it.

D. Palumbo-Liu: Getting back to Wendy's point, I'm sure that whatever PIRB decides it's going to have more than simply a symbolic effect. Just a couple of other questions because I always like to give my guests this opportunity. Is there anything in the media coverage of your complaint that you feel is missing, and something that you would like to get out there that you think has been either not covered or undercovered by the press so far?

A. McClanahan: I want to invite Anna to say something about this simply because I think one thing that I have felt does not get enough attention is how much those of us on other campuses besides UCLA were shaped by what happened at UCLA. And if you look at why it was that faculty were --- when the UCI encampment was raided by the police on May 15th, when you look at why it was the faculty were there and felt that we were morally compelled to be standing literally at the front to try to protect students --- if you look at why it was that was the case, it was because of what all of us had heard. And I think that what happened at UCLA impacted both UCLA folks and everybody else. So I would be interested to maybe hear Anna speak to that.

W. Matsamura: Yeah, and that's directly in ours as well. UCSD, ours went up right after your raid.

A. Markowitz: When I think about what happened at UCLA, I'm always surprised at the details that are missing or the things that get mucked up. For example, people don't talk a lot about the Jumbotron that showed up on our campus on April 28th and then continued to play loud music through the night, scenes of violence. And this Jumbotron was never permitted. It was just on campus people that were teaching in the adjacent buildings filed several complaints. People filed Title IX complaints. And, during that entire period, UCLA sort of stands with, there's nothing we can do about it. I was, can we just pull the plug? Can a group of us just do something like, do we know any electrical engineers? And I think that it just shocks me that it was UCLA wants to talk about how all of this is about prioritizing student safety and it's that doesn't pass the sniff test. You don't leave that up, you don't have it playing loud music in the middle of the night when you know a bunch of students are there. You don't have it flashing these images all day if your fundamental concern is student safety. I think people don't talk enough about how our students were getting attacked every night, and they knew that, and we had all these security out who essentially watched the attacks. That was, their role was to watch them. They didn't do anything. I think The Washington Post article that details the hour-by-hour incidents the night of the 30th, is excellent, and I wish that had gotten more attention because I think, when I hear now what they're doing now, and they're claiming, oh, it's to keep students safe, oh, it's for this, it's what were you doing then, if this is your big focus? And you have a bunch of students saying that this is the opposite of making them feel safe. And we're not having a real conversation about that. As Annie used earlier, like it's this playbook. Yeah, we see them following a playbook that entrenches power and creates a security state, and makes people feel like they can't think or talk about hard things. It doesn't pass the sniff test. That's not what you do if you want to keep students safe. They've done nothing from the beginning. If they're going to put a bunch of security on campus, why didn't they set up a perimeter? I don't know if any of you have ever been in a place where a dispersal order is called, but they say this is the dispersal route, you have to leave, here's the route. The route was totally blocked and then UCLA put a bunch of private security there, so it looked like it was covered by cops. That was supposed to be the exit. Why don't we talk about that? And like the way that it was students were not set up to be able to make choices for their own safety. And in fact, we made it look scarier. And I want to hear more conversation about that because I want the university to be held to task for the way that their choices escalated situations and did create student lack of safety. On June 10th, we had a second spate of arrests. The students essentially had set up an action in a place that was away from where any finals would be happening. And they were going to read out the names of folks who had been murdered in Gaza and they stopped the event in its original location and the students essentially just moved to a new location and then moved to a new location every time they were stopped if they had not escalated that situation. If they had just let it play out it would not have been near anybody who is taking a final and the students stated their intention. They got up on a megaphone and said, this is what we're going to do now. It was the university that escalated it and instead, we got an email from Rick Braziele [Associate Vice Chancellor for Campus Safety] telling us that wasn't the situation and that the students did it and that they ran through these buildings and none of that would have happened without the way the institution moved and, how can we be honest about what we're doing and who we care about without really thinking and getting those facts out there? But that's not really about the ULP, but it is something I wish people talked more about.

D. Palumbo-Liu: No, it's super important, especially since it did have such an effect on the other campuses. Even up here at Stanford, we were all watching that and horrified by the violence and the use of chemicals and the university doing nothing. Anything else anybody wants to add? I will say that we also have a blog function on our website. So if you have any materials, either now or later, that you'd like us to advertise along with this episode, you can post at any time. And that whenever you feel like it, either you or your colleagues, please come back and keep us abreast of what's happening and most importantly, let us know how we can help you. But other than that, thank you for carving time out on a Sunday. Go out and enjoy whatever there is to enjoy and get some restorative time in, but thank you so much.

A. McClanahan: Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate you reaching out to us and doing this.

D. Palumbo-Liu: My pleasure. Bye bye.