UMass Activists to Detail A New Wave of anti-Palestinian Repression and Attacks on Academic Freedom

On Thursday, December 4th, 4:30pm, rain or shine, outside of the Whitmore Building on UMass Amherst campus, a coalition of Palestine activists at UMass Amherst will hold a press conference to share details of new disciplinary discrimination and academic suppression.

Press interested in attending, please contact geo.palestine.solidarity [at] gmail [dot] com or ​​​​wmpeoplestribunal [at] gmail [dot] com

Student activists at UMass Amherst have been leading a campaign to urge the university's administration to cut ties with RTX, the weapons manufacturer formerly known as Raytheon. RTX has profited from the genocide in Palestine from day one; it recently signed a contract to supply Israel with $1.25 billion worth of missiles. RTX has additionally produced weapons which have been used to kill civilians in Yemen and beyond, created surveillance infrastructure for US Customs and Border Patrol, routinely violated labor practices including silencing whistleblowers, defrauded the US government, and devastated our environment with its pollution. Despite these crimes, UMass Amherst continues to pursue confidential research projects with RTX, allow RTX to recruit students at career fairs, and has three executives from RTX and its subsidiary Pratt & Whitney on the Riccio College of Engineering Industrial Advisory Board. 

At the end of October a large cross-constituency group of activists held a "People's Tribunal," holding UMass (along with Smith College, Hampshire College, and L3Harris in Northampton) to account for its illegal and immoral activities and presenting extensive documentation of UMass's ties to corporations complicit in war crimes. The Tribunal was held amongst a growing consensus that the people of the Connecticut River Valley do not wish to be complicit in Israel's genocide in Gaza: Northampton passed a resolution to divest from Israel, Montague officially became an "Apartheid-Free" town, and Amherst elected a progressive Palestine solidarity activist to its city council. 

UMass Amherst, under the new leadership of Chancellor Javier Reyes, has been harshly repressive towards the antiwar & Palestine solidarity movement on campus, most notably in mass arrests of peaceful student protesters on October 25, 2023 and May 7th, 2024. This combined with the administration's toothless responses to Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism on campus led the Council of American-Islamic Relations to designate UMass as a hostile campus and the Office of Civil Rights to begin a federal investigation into anti-Palestinian bias on campus. As public scrutiny raises against these actions, UMass is now shifting tactics from visible, violent police attacks on crowds to quiet, bureaucratic attacks on individuals.

Admin has begun to dole out extreme punishments to a handful of pro-Palestine student organizers—disciplinary actions which would effectively end their enrollment at UMass. One of these punishments came after students protested RTX's presence at a UMass Isenberg Career Fair. Participants complied with the UMass Demonstration Response and Safety Team's directions to leave when told they faced disciplinary action; nonetheless, one of the organizers received five conduct charges for the event and was suspended through May 31, 2026. Further details, including about the other disciplined students, will be available at the press conference on 12/4.

Additionally, UMass is making cuts to Arabic and Middle Eastern studies courses—including the only UMass courses offering conversational Arabic and courses on the history of Palestine/Israel and the Iranian Revolution. UMass has justified these cuts under the pretense of financial constraints while still spending extensively on police crackdowns and pay raises for top level administrators: chancellor and provost salaries have nearly doubled since 2010, far outpacing inflation and worker salaries.  As the cost of tuition continues to increase, the surplus budget is diverted away from academic opportunities and towards surveillance and militarization.

Thankfully, after a concerted petition campaign by student activists, one of the cut courses—History 131, Middle East 1500 to Present—has been reinstated for the spring semester.

All this against the backdrop of a planned vote of no confidence by staff in the Professional Staff Union (PSU)—a vote which, if passed, will be the fourth successful vote against Reyes since his violent police crackdown, joining previous votes from the Student Government Association, Faculty Senate, and Graduate Employee Organization. In addition to Reyes's authoritarian actions, PSU's vote is motivated by his anti-labor practices, which have kept UMass employees without a contract or living wages for the last 18 months. This contract fight follows on the heels of PSU's attempt to prevent UMass management from privatizing their Advancement department in 2023—a move deemed illegal by the state auditor. While activists ask for more transparency about UMass's ties with weapons manufacturers, the privatization of Advancement allows UMass to collect money from organizations with even more secrecy. 

On Thursday December 4th at 4:30pm in front of the Whitmore Administrative Building on UMass Amherst campus, student, staff, and faculty Palestine solidarity organizers, including affected students, will share statements on this repression and take questions from the press.