UMass Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes, the chief of campus police, and other university leaders sat in for a special faculty senate session, one focused on how a campus protest ended with mass arrests and the attention of national media.
Mahar Auditorium was packed with campus members, including students and staff filling the seats and lining the walls as the chancellor started speaking.
“The encampment violated the policy based on the following criteria - the space was not reserved by the demonstrators,” he said during his opening remarks. “In fact, it had been reserved by another group. The structures were not authorized.”
Reyes continued to reiterate that while he supports the rights of students and faculty to advocate, the tents and fencing that went up by the student union building on May 7 violated the university’s land use policy.
The encampment was similar to demonstrations that have been taking place across the country as the war in Gaza continues. Organizers also called on the university to divest from certain companies and revisit charges faced by students arrested at a protest last October.
Reyes also pointed out how in April, a similar encampment had disbanded without arrests and that he had been hoping to repeat the process last week.
However, with police called and discussions between organizers and the chancellor yielding nothing, officers moved to break down the camp that night, with footage of the crackdown and arrests spreading on social media.
Gaining national attention, university leadership soon announced they would meet with the faculty senate.
That included the chancellor and officials like campus Chief of Police Tyrone Parham hearing directly from campus community members.
Among them was Professor Laura Briggs, who questioned the focus on encampments not being allowed, especially given the university’s history.
“… but as we know, the land use policy says nothing about tents. An encampment was allowed in 2023, overnight. An encampment was allowed in [2011] for several weeks, in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street,” Briggs said during a question and answer portion of the meeting. “I, myself, was part of an encampment at UMass in the mid-1980s in support of divesting from apartheid in South Africa, something that was hardly supported at the time, but it's now celebrated on the president's webpage.”
Calls for an apology by the chancellor also surfaced.
In addition to asking why arrests continued even after the tents had gone down and what was accomplished by doing so, Professor Lori Goldner homed in on an apparent lack of a formal apology from Reyes.
"If the answer is nothing, as would seem to be implied by your insistence that we need to do something different going forward, nothing or worse, why won't you apologize?” Goldner asked.
“I can answer the first part of the question,” Parham said. “That is, those charges for the additional people, after the encampment for a failure to disperse and trespass.”
“As I said before, we had a - I described the environment that we had, and where it could have led, and I just thought it was best for the campus to do what we did,” Reyes said.
Questions in the same vein continued before the meeting formally adjourned.
It was then that students launched into chants, continuing to demonstrate outside of the auditorium as leadership made its way out.
