“If all of you decide I’m not the right leader, that’s your choice,” said University of Virginia President Jim Ryan. “That’s how I feel.”
Though no university officials have publicly called for Ryan to resign, Ryan’s tone and demeanor were marked by a resignation of their own at the university’s Faculty Senate meeting last week.
Ryan, alongside Provost Ian Baucom, university Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis and UVa Police Chief Tim Longo, spent an hour answering questions during the May 10 meeting of the Faculty Senate, a governing body of roughly 90 faculty representatives from across the university’s 12 schools charged with advising UVa’s leaders on “matters affecting the welfare of the University.”
That meeting came nearly a week after those leaders called in Virginia State Police to break up an encampment on university Grounds where a small band of protesters had been voicing their opposition to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza since the end of classes on April 30.
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Although the encampment had been dwindling in size and had remained peaceful, the university raised concerns that the protesters had erected recreational tents on Grounds without a permit and “individuals unaffiliated with the University,” including four mysterious “men in black” who officials have declined to identify, had joined their ranks.
There were 27 arrests made on May 4, the majority of them students, faculty and alumni. Only eight had no known affiliation with the school, and the majority of those were local residents, including a freelance journalist who was covering the protest. Since May 4, several of the charges have been dropped, including an assault charge against a freelance photographer who was captured on video attempting to help an older woman with a cane when police grabbed her and took her into custody.
Police on May 4 also pepper-sprayed members of the public and the media who had gathered to witness the scene, eventually pushing the crowd off the public university’s campus and into the street.
Ryan and his administration have faced significant pushback for unnecessarily escalating the situation, making their decisions from an undisclosed “command post” and not at the scene of the violence. Critics have argued that the encampment, already low on numbers, likely would have disbanded on its own, as seen at Cornell University earlier this week. They’ve noted clear inaccuracies in the university’s official account of events, including outright lies that medical personnel treated everyone at the scene who had been pepper-sprayed. They have criticized the administration’s perceived canned responses at a “virtual town hall” on May 7, after which many said they left with more questions than answers.
At the Faculty Senate meeting last Friday, representatives made clear they want answers, passing a motion calling for an independent and external review of the events surrounding May 4.
The motion also included language demanding a change in UVa policy that would “identify under what circumstances the University will engage state police” as well as transparency and accountability from the school’s administration regarding policies protecting free speech and safety on Grounds.
The motion was actually a watered-down version of another motion presented to the Faculty Senate Executive Council that included a full-throated condemnation of the university’s response on May 4.
Michael Kennedy, a professor of special education who serves as chairman of the Faculty Senate, called an emergency meeting of the Senate’s Executive Council last Thursday. The Executive Council is a select group composed of 20 faculty senators who set the agenda prior to full Senate meetings.
It was at that Thursday meeting where senators were first presented with the “Motion Condemning the Violence of May 4, 2024,” drafted by the Senate’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee under the leadership of Chairman Eric Ramirez-Weaver, an art professor at the school.
In addition to calling for a review, the original motion’s text denounces the “vastly asymmetric displays of force” used by the state police who were “deployed” by the university’s senior administration “to remove a small, unarmed group of peaceful protestors that largely consisted of members of the University community,” thereby risking the most “the most unimaginable catastrophe.”
The original motion was also critical of the manner in which university officials “inundated” the community with mobile emergency alerts “that provided no useful information” throughout the day on May 4. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee said the alerts prioritized police operations over the community’s safety, “thereby eroding trust in its emergency communication system.”
This version of the motion never made it to the full Senate, as a majority of the Executive Council voted against it.
“It handily failed,” Ramirez-Weaver told The Daily Progress. “Excising the first clause from our initial motion, I believe ExCo failed our university community.”
Despite the majority of his colleagues’ refusal to publicly denounce the university’s use of force against its own students and faculty, Ramirez-Weaver said he still believes such a statement is necessary given UVa’s role as a public university with a long legacy defending the right to free speech.
“It is vital to underscore that denouncing the violence of May 4, speaking to its harm and establishing a sincere platform for its review are all fundamental as we move ahead,” said Ramirez-Weaver. “This is how as concerned faculty we model civil protest, call attention to the damage done and make it clear that work of peaceful reconciliation which must take place in the coming academic year is a shared responsibility and only effective when both blame and learning are shared by all.”
So, on behalf of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, Ramirez-Weaver submitted the following text as an amendment to the motion at the full Senate meeting on Friday:
“We, the members of the Faculty Senate, denounce the events of May 4, 2024, when the University of Virginia senior administration deployed armed Virginia State Police in full body armor to remove a small, unarmed group of peaceful protestors that largely consisted of members of the University community on our Grounds, thereby risking the most unimaginable catastrophe, and this police force, using pepper spray and vastly asymmetric displays of force, aggressively arrested 27 individuals including students and current/former employees.”
This too failed.
“UVa has, I believe, rightly branded itself as an institution which aspires to be great and good,” said Ramirez-Weaver. “At times, we must advocate for the forgotten, defending human rights wherever they are affronted and paving a path toward peaceful resolution, even when it requires the adoption of unpopular positions.”
“Our students and colleagues at significant personal risk in fact enacted that democratic work on May 4, 2024, and their university responded with suppression and alienation,” he added.
Ramirez-Weaver was not the only faculty member disappointed.
Though she considers the external review a “good move,” Spanish professor Anne Garland Mahler said she and a number of her colleagues share a “general sense of disappointment that they [the Faculty Senate] weren’t willing to take a stronger stand.”
Mahler told The Daily Progress that many of those in attendance Friday “got up and left in disgust” after the Faculty Senate failed to pass the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee’s amendment.
Those faculty senators that remained were able to ask university administrators questions. And those administrators repeated that they stood by their decision to call in the state police and that they would make the same decision again if presented with the same circumstances.
Ryan said calling in troopers on his own students was “in the best interest of UVa.”
He also said that he did not make that decision because he was worried he could lose his job.
“I don’t know anyone in their right mind who would want to be a president of a university right now, so fear of losing my job is the last thing that motivated my decisions,” said Ryan. “I would never do anything just to keep my job. I’m not interested in keeping my job for the sake of keeping my job.”
But for many at the meeting, that still leaves the question open: Why was it necessary to escalate the matter and call in state police, instead of relying on local authorities or even allowing the protest to disperse of its own accord?
“The biggest concern that I have, that I know a lot of people have, is just that the administration has repeatedly said that they would do the same thing again,” Mahler said. “There’s these kinds of cyclical crises that seem to be a result of the pattern of their communication with police. By which I mean, is that they’re only talking to police about nonaffiliated individuals.”
The university still has not explained exactly which “unaffiliated individuals” presented a threat to the community at the encampment, describing them only as four men in black.
“At least four persons who responded were known to law enforcement, and at least four persons who responded had been engaged in organized work in the past around historical events that have occurred here that resulted in violence,” Longo said during the administration’s “virtual town hall,” without identifying which “historical events” or what “violence” he meant.
Mahler said she and others are concerned that historical violence Longo has referred to is the events of Aug. 11, 2017, when a mob of hundreds of torch-wielding White supremacists marched across UVa Grounds chanting “Jews will not replace us” before confronting a small group of peaceful counterpotesters and attacking them. The scene was only declared an unlawful assembly and cleared by police after violence had broken out, and the university defended its decision to allow the White supremacists to carry open flames on Grounds as a form of free expression.
“What we saw in August 2017 and what we saw in May 2024, that information has been very biased, and reliance on that biased information has continuously put our community at risk,” said Mahler. “Such as who the university finds threatening or not. They were not afraid of the horde of White supremacists with actual criminal records coming to campus. But last Saturday, they were afraid of umbrellas and people who weren’t identified.”
Given that a majority of those arrested on May 4 were affiliated with the university in some capacity and not openly associated with any White supremacist groups, multiple faculty and students organizations have issued statements calling for UVa to grant amnesty and for the University Judiciary Council to cease all investigations against those charged with trespassing.
One such organization is the United Campus Workers union, which is circulating a petition calling on the school’s faculty to withhold grades until UVa:
■ Rescinds all no-trespass orders issued to those arrested on May 4.
■ Stops any internal disciplinary proceedings that have been launched following the arrests.
■ And returns all property confiscated by UVa at the site of the protest.
As for what the Faculty Senate has demanded of the university, the motion holds no binding power, it merely expresses the views of its members, some of whom are not elected, instead appointed by sitting senators.
University spokesman Brian Coy told The Daily Progress, “University leaders agree that a review should be conducted and are evaluating next steps. We will have more information to share there soon.”
Ryan left last Friday’s meeting when the allotted hour was up, leaving many with questions unanswered. He said there would be other opportunities for him to respond to questions, but did not elaborate on when or where that would be.
“I think what we’re seeing between the webinar and Faculty Senate meeting is a continued pattern of a lack of transparency and willingness to be accountable,” Mahler said. “People in the audience thought they should all stay. We’re their colleagues, we have every right to ask questions too.”