CAMARILLO, California. The last two remaining People’s University for Gaza Solidarity Encampments in Southern California – the California State University, Channel Islands encampment, and the University of California, Santa Barbara encampment – were swept today.
These encampments were some of the longest standing in California. Of the two, UCSB – whose encampment had begun May 1, the same day as the late CSULA encampment – fell first, with the UC Police Department joining forces with the Santa Barbara Police Department and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office to violently sweep the encampment. Six students, including two journalists from UCSB’s KCSB news station, were arrested during the sweep.
Livestreamed footage revealed the police who swept the encampment were making constant threats of violence against present students. Promising to use all assault methods necessary, police later enumerated that they would use baton beatings, tear gas, and rubber bullets against anyone who touched a tent they were trying to remove or who took a step forward toward the police line.
The UCSB sweep came just hours after campus administration demanded that the encampment deliver a minimal list of demands, an agreement to decamp, and a safety contingency plan. Despite widespread support for the students, and the encampment having remained entirely nonviolent, they were met with overwhelming police brutality. To attempt to hide the actions of the police, ultra-bright and strobe lights were aimed at anyone who was filming the police actions – including members of the press not participating in the encampment.
UCSB was the last remaining encampment in the UC system after university police violence shut down encampments at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and other campuses, with others needing to shut down for logistical reasons such as UC Merced. Violence by the UC system against encampments has been fierce, and has been constantly backed by the UC Board of Regents – an appointed oversight agency sat on by Governor Gavin Newsom – and the office of UC President Michael Drake, who has personally defended the actions of campus administrators.
Later, at 3 P.M., the CSUCI University Police Department swept the encampment at CSU Channel Islands. This encampment, which had been running since May 13, was one of the largest surviving encampments until the CSULA sweep, at which point it became the only CSU encampment standing.
While CSUCI President Yao had been negotiating with students, to some extent – with agreements regarding disclosure and other items from the encampment’s demands – he reversed course and reinstituted policies prohibiting overnight camping, attempting to set up justification for the potentially illegal and unconstitutional sweep of the encampment.
Email transcripts provided to Titan YDSA show how President Yao worked to build an argument for impasse, refusing to actually engage in a meaningful way with student demands. He continually stated that the divestment demand was met, when the only agreement he had made was to fast-track the next investment evaluation process to Fall 2024 – which does not provide any meaningful movement toward divestment.
With the sweeps of UCSB and CSUCI, there are now no more encampments in Southern California.
These sweeps come after a series of high-profile raids by both the CSU system and the UC system, as well as many others internationally. After Cal Poly Humboldt’s occupation fell and Sonoma State President Mike Lee was removed from his position, actions against CSU encampments in particular stepped up. Following a sit-in at the Student Services Building, CSULA President Berenecea Eanes orchestrated a joint raid between the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the University Police Department. This took down what was the longest-standing encampment in California at the time.
California law requires all public and private institutions, including UCs and CSUs, to provide students with all rights that would generally be afforded to them under the U.S. Constitution, in addition to all rights provided by the California Constitution. While federal precedent and state law does allow for the establishment of “time, place, and manner” policies that regulate speech in public places (such as university campuses), these restrictions must be reasonable, content-neutral, and afford those engaged in expressive activity an opportunity to reach the same audience in the same magnitude as the prohibited form of expression.
What occurred today at UCSB and CSUCI was not reasonable, was not content-neutral, and did not give any alternatives to the students. It is not a settled matter of law whether encampments may be prohibited under time, place, and manner policies, and thus the burden would fall on institutions to show a real threat to public safety or other substantive disruption to university operations caused by the encampment. Minor disruptions or political inconvenience do not meet this standard – protests are inherently disruptive, and are generally protected expressive activity.
These raids, and all that proceeded them, are classic examples of the Palestine exception to free expression and academic freedom in modern society and our academic institutions. CSULA is an institution in an area with a long history of police repression of political speech, being in East Los Angeles which in the 1960s was rocked by the Latinx student movement (also known as the “blowouts”) which led to the formation of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan.
While always having a high culture of surveillance, CSULA has generally not sent police in on students due to the reaction that would spur within the community. With the divestment movement and encampment, that changed substantially. Undercover police officers were there from the first hour, and have remained throughout. During the SSB takeover, hundreds of cops staged outside CSULA, ready to beat down on students. Nearly a hundred police were in the direct circle around the encampment – facing off against seven unarmed students.
Further, what other comparable means do encampment members have to protest? What means can a university provide to students that allows them to place the same level of political pressure on administration, and reach students, as an encampment? Even if such a fairytale method of “non-disruptive protest” existed, they have not been provided by university administrations. The brutality has been overwhelming and unreserved.
Public safety concerns that have been cited in these sweeps are laughable at best. As these administrations create real public safety concerns by failing to provide their students with housing, food, and medical care, encampments have been a source of livelihood for desperate students. Safe housing, adequate food, and street medics have provided far better resources to low-income students than these universities ever have – all running off community donations instead of the multi-billion-dollar budgets of these institutions. Encampment committees take into account fire safety concerns, deploy effective medical solutions, keep the encampment clean, and protect campers from the elements; the work they do far exceeds any university “public safety” or environmental department.
Indeed, the emails from UCSB and CSUCI administration have exposed the true intentions of administrators: hiding political blemishes from newly incoming students and their parents. Both campuses referred to the need to “prepare for next semester” as a reason encampments had to come down. If these camps could last during normal university operations last spring, why would they need to shut down? Simple: incoming student and parent events.
Every time parents and family members of students are slated to come to campus, a mass wave of sweeps has occurred. The first wave of these has occurred before university commencements: many of the largest camps fell for the final time, or near final time, right before that university’s commencement was scheduled to begin. The next round is orientations: early orientations for quarter-system campuses and late orientations for semester-system campuses are beginning right now, and as a result we are seeing mass waves of repression.
Families seeing encampments on campus causes, depending on the individuals who see the encampment, either a political crisis for the university or a political crisis for the Zionist institutions upheld by these universities. The two most common reactions to someone seeing an encampment for the first time are either outrage, causing parents to disenroll their students or cut donations (creating substantial financial losses for the university), or inquisition, causing them to learn more about the fight for Palestinian liberation and joining in.
To a university administration part of the greater capitalist institution, neither of these reactions are tenable. Once a university has killed off all student services and laid off faculty and staff en masse, as administrative pay never drops during budget reductions, it has nothing more to drop – it risks bankrupting the institution, forcing authorities to replace the university administration itself; self-interest demands this not occur. Likewise, as public opinion shifts due to inquisition into fights for liberation, the capitalist enterprise faces even more strain, risking a fall and the rise of socialism; the collective interest of capitalism demands this not occur.
As such, the university administration must stop these reactions from being able to occur in the first place: by shutting down the encampments before they can be witnessed by the masses. Anger of the families of students arrested and brutalized is politically nothing compared to what occurs as the masses become agitated and educated.
Fighting back against these shutdowns by recamping – both by setting up new encampments at other institutions, and by restarting encampments that have been shut down – will be critical to continue the movement for an end to institutional complicity in the genocide of Palestine over this summer and into the fall. These are setbacks, yes – but the student intifada lives on. Gaza is depending on everyone to keep fighting.