On May 13, Notre Dame President the Rev. John I. Jenkins released a statement titled “A Message from Father Jenkins on Campus Protests,” the first engagement from Notre Dame’s administration concerning our protests in solidarity with Palestine. Occupation Free Notre Dame strongly denounces the statement’s intentional misrepresentation of the events of May 2, and the administration’s continued failure to address what we see as the University of Notre Dame’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide.
Students, faculty and staff of Notre Dame gathered on May 2 under the banner of three concrete and actionable demands for the university: 1) to disclose and divest from companies manufacturing and supplying arms to Israel, 2) to join the international boycott of Israeli academic institutions whose research underpins the tools that enable the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and 3) to end Notre Dame’s so-called “15-minute rule,” which prohibits unapproved campus protests longer than 15 minutes on threat of suspension or expulsion. Although these changes cannot be immediate, the protestors’ principal aim was to prompt the university to engage seriously with the calls for action, and to open official communication with the student movement on these questions. Instead, students were met with a bad-faith conversation with two administrators and 17 violent arrests.
In his statement, Jenkins begins by commending students for their “sincerely held and laudable convictions.” However, rather than responding meaningfully to the movement’s demands, he instead redirects his statement to a discussion of the procedural “complexities” of the situation. He praises the response of the administration and the Notre Dame Police Department and assures the reader that the university will maintain the charges and proceed with the disciplinary process. Jenkins paints a picture in which the administration is the victim and that their actions are validated in the complexity of the situation. This narrative could not be further from the truth.
Given this whitewashed rendering of these events, we aim here to refute a number of his claims. First, we reject the claim that our May 2 gathering was “disruptive.” We quietly gathered on the lawn, near the Eck Visitors Center throughout the afternoon. The NDPD indicated they would let us stay until 10 p.m., at which point we would face arrest for being “disruptive” during reading week. Later in the night, when asked what “disruption” entailed, NDPD responded that, because our gathering was not university-sanctioned, anything we did was a disruption — including, evidently, standing and talking in the rain. (As ample footage from the evening will attest, chanting did not begin until after police began approaching to make arrests.) The university made it clear that we were only a disruption because of the cause for which we were advocating.
Second, we reject Jenkins’ narrative that the university’s response was marked by “patience, discretion, and professionalism.” Dean Scott Appleby and Provost John McGreevy, the two individuals who constituted Jenkins’ description of “several members of Notre Dame’s administration,” engaged in only about 15 minutes of dismissive conversation with students. Students were met with condescension, sneers, defensiveness and racist remarks. Indeed, when asked why severing ties with Tel Aviv University was unreasonable, rather than respond, the provost instead looked at a Chinese student negotiator and asked if Notre Dame should be expected to boycott Chinese institutions as well. Though we made clear that we would disperse the crowd if they agreed to a formal meeting, they refused to commit to even this smallest of asks.
Furthermore, NDPD has acted with aggressive force in both of our protests and has consistently targeted students of color. At our first protest on April 25, one NDPD officer grabbed a student by the wrist, tauntingly repeating, “I know it hurts,” while another officer elbowed a student in the face. During the arrests on May 2, NDPD pinned some students to the ground to cuff them and forcibly carried others away on tarps. Another officer targeted a woman of color, not even a part of the demonstration, merely for filming the arrests, walking past two white students to grab her. She was the only observer arrested for filming.
The university wants to erase its violent actions, burying them in procedural complexity. But we will not be silenced: What we see as complicity in genocide requires continued demands for accountability and action. Occupation Free Notre Dame rejects Jenkins’ narrative. We call on the university to request that the prosecutor’s office dismiss the charges. We also encourage the Office of Community Standards to drop all disciplinary action against student protestors. We hope that the University of Notre Dame administration will apply Jenkins’ call for “dialogue in pursuit of a sustainable, peaceful settlement” of conflict in Palestine/Israel to our own campus. We are ready to engage in thoughtful negotiations concerning our desire for the university to end its complicity in genocide — the administration just needs to come to the table.
Doctoral student Francesca Freeman wrote this Viewpoint on behalf of Occupation Free Notre Dame.
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