CARL Director offers Public Comment at December U-M Regents Meeting

On December 7th, during the meeting of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, the University’s eight-member governing board, Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III offered public comment regarding campus racism and political repression of student activism by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and their supporters.

Dr. Davis was offered two minutes to speak. Below are a transcription and audio recording of his remarks in their entirety:

My name is Charles H.F. Davis III, faculty member  and director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab here at our Ann Arbor campus. I would like to thank the board for the opportunity to address this body on the matters of campus racism and institutional repression of student activism, my areas of scholarly expertise.

As is well known, during a peaceful demonstration on November 17th, students from a diverse coalition representing 60 allied organizations, were met overwhelmingly by police officers from nearly a dozen different departments. Student accounts reported by the Michigan Daily noted armed police used physical force to prevent entry to this building during hours of operation as well as engaged in physically displacing students that led to at least two injuries, religious indignities against Muslim students, and infringement on the dignitary safety of numerous others. These instances of brutality occurred following intensified harassment and suppression of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and during the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

As a scholar, faculty member, and concerned campus citizen, the aforementioned actions, and their enablement by the institution, are wholly reprehensible. They have no place on a college campus that espouses a strong commitment to student safety and are ideologically inconsistent with the President’s communicated interests in enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, embracing decolonization, and his promise to support an unarmed, non-police emergency response.

We are witnessing an extremely repressive climate [as further emblematized by the continued use of law enforcement to limit and bar of student attendance at today’s meeting] that discourages students from acting as “leaders and best” on society’s most intractable problems and especially as they manifest on the campus in which we  live, work, and learn.

I would like to encourage the board to exercise the moral and political courage necessary at this particular time of controversy and challenge. Lest we forget the precedents established by previous Regents, including the March 16, 1978 resolution in which this body rhetorically condemned South African apartheid as "oppressive...immoral and unconscionable.” 

The current moment presents another opportunity to take decisive action in reaffirming a clear ethic regarding settler apartheid through changing institutional investment practices and severing financial entanglements with apartheid regimes. 

This moment also offers the unique chance to demonstrate the courageous leadership expected from our University among AAUP and Big Ten institutions, leadership that takes seriously the role of  a “power source” that can directly energize, rather than stifle, campus political engagement and support institutional leaders in leveraging the expertise already present on campus to provide more nuanced understandings of polarizing issues with empirical precision and unshakeable moral clarity. 

Given the diverse community that includes Palestinians and their supporters, it is crucial the institution put material substance behind its rhetoric and align the university along the moral arc of justice during this pivotal moment in world history. 

Thank you.