YUFA News

YUFA Executive Asks Members to Consider Signing Statement of Concern re Police on Campus

In response to a query from many YUFA members and in conformity with our concern regarding the Administration's response to the January 20 anti-Bush demonstration, YUFA Executive asks members to consider signing the following statement of concern.

For further background information, members can consult the eyewitness account of a YUFA member and amateur videos that have been circulating via an activist website.

To 'sign' the petition or make any corrections, write a brief e-mail note to Ananya Mukherjee-Reed or to Jody Berland. To assist in verifying 'signatures,' be sure to indicate your home Faculty / Department.

Statement of Concerned York Faculty

On Jan.20, a student demonstration was broken up on the Keele campus of York University by Toronto Metro police and York University security personnel. The evacuation of students was violent, with police officers chasing, holding down and hitting students in the group. Five students were arrested and have been charged. One student was hospitalized briefly after the arrest.

We have learned that the senior university administration prohibited gatherings in Vari Hall in February 2004. New rules define any student gathering in this space illegal, threatening to leave any student who seeks to participate in public assembly there with a criminal record. It did so without announcement and without consulting the university community.

Vari Hall is the only indoor gathering place for public events at York University. It is brilliantly designed to accommodate gatherings and assemblies, and it has improved the quality of university life since its creation. The richness of community life that may be seen there day and evening, weekday and weekend, testifies to the community's awareness of the importance of this place. The main floor rotunda is often used for job fairs, rehearsals and other events. Some faculty who were teaching in Vari Hall during the January 20 demonstration have stated that they assessed the "noise" as “perfectly tolerable,” and went on with their classes. Others were disturbed when the students began shouting and chanting as the police began to clear the space.

Whatever reasons the university administration offers for deeming peaceful student demonstrations to be "disruptive," their calling the police, permitting the police to abuse, interrogate and arrest students, and then describing the students as "violent" to the press to justify their own decisions, are not in any way justifiable actions.

As York faculty we condemn the curtailment of free speech at York and the use of police to prevent students from expressing their views in a peaceful non-violent manner. The administration must reverse its recent prohibition of non-violent student assemblies in Vari Hall and all charges against students must be dropped. A reasonable restriction is that those who use this space not harm anyone or physically damage the site. It is also reasonable to request that excessive sound amplification be avoided during classes. However, students should be able to assemble and to present and discuss ideas publicly on the university campus without requiring a permit or advance notice.

These events signal a troubling change in the spirit and ethics of governance of our university community. Public access to communication has been widely curtailed not just in Vari Hall but across various channels. In their wake it is urgent that we hold open discussions about values, ethics, governance and accountability in the university community. We can no longer condone the making of decisions that determine the quality of exchange and community at York covertly and without accountability to the York community. Faculty cannot stand by and watch our students being harassed, beaten and arrested for the public expression of concern about political events (in this case, the Bush inauguration). The democratic exchange of ideas is sometimes messy, noisy and inconvenient. But the suppression of such exchange is chilling and much more costly.

Signed,

Free Speech