Faculty and staff and the University of New Mexico sent UNM President Garnett Stokes a letter Thursday rebuking the school administration’s response to student protests.
The letter has over 200 signatures, with about 40 withheld names. It calls for the university administration to support free speech and urges the university to include encampments in its definition.
Jennifer Tucker,an associate professor of community and regional planning at UNM, helped to write and collect signatures on the letter. She said it represents faculty and staff who agree and disagree with students’ calls for divestment.
“This issue of repression on campus goes much broader than just the question of the war on Gaza and the need to intervene, so we decided to focus it on a support of students rights of free speech, activism and political action,” she said.
The letter calls encampments, “sites of learning and action oriented toward more just futures, embodying the core values of public universities.”
Tucker says faculty worked with student organizations to write the letter.
“We're really explicit that we encourage debate that refuses racism, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, Muslim discourses,” she said. “But we also want to be really clear that charges of antisemitism are being weaponized to quell debate, and it's not antisemitic to raise critique.”
UNM responded to the letter in a statement on Friday from Provost James Holloway and President Stokes, saying, "We know that we can have effective protests, even protests that confront us. This has been demonstrated several times over the course of the semester and even this week...As stewards of UNM, we do not accept that the right to protest includes the right to vandalize, damage property, or illegally occupy community spaces – this violates not only our policies and the law, but also violates our shared responsibility to create and maintain supportive spaces and resources for all of our Lobos."
This story has been updated to reflect UNM's response.
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