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Petition: UVA and Charlottesville community demand UVA administration drop UJC charges against student protesters arrested on May 4th

Contact: 

Laura Goldblatt (lgoldblatt@gmail.com)

609-915-6132

Walt Heinecke (Waltheinecke@hotmail.com)
(434) 825-1896

September 8, 2024

Charlottesville, VA 

UVA students have launched a petition that has garnered over 500 signatures and counting demanding that the UVA administration drop University Judiciary Committee (UJC) charges against the five remaining protesters still facing such charges following local and state police’s violent break up of the UVA and community pro-Palestinian encampment on May 4th, 2024. 

The petition notes that in addition to retraumatizing students attacked by police in riot gear, some wielding semi- and automatic weapons, the charges are unjust and arbitrary. Given that local authorities, including the Albemarle County Prosecutor Jim Hingeley, has determined that there is not enough evidence to proceed with criminal charges and all no trespass orders have been dropped, the administration seeks to use the UJC charges to further antagonize students who have otherwise been fully exonerated through due process. 

The students protesting at the encampment and on May 4th sought to realize UVA’s mission of being both “good and great” by demanding this ethos apply to the University’s operations and that they divest from Israeli companies and those profiting from the genocide in Gaza. In making an example of these students, administrators aim to deny UVA faculty, staff, students, and Charlottesville community members of their first amendment rights and protections and instill a culture of fear around free speech and the right to protests at UVA.

The UJC charges also cause material harm to those students who cannot obtain diplomas and secure employment, effectively locking them out of the job market despite their successful completion of their degrees. Current students facing charges remain in limbo. As they start the academic year, they are unsure of what will happen in their cases and whether they will be able to finish the semester with their peers.

A local civil rights attorney representing one of the students facing UJC charges recently stated “It’s over the top. ‘Let’s prosecute them. Let’s put them in judicial proceedings. Let’s take away their right to get a diploma.’ What else do you want to do to them?”...All for a small, entirely peaceful demonstration for which the university can give no adequate, truthful answer to why it happened, how it happened and who, in fact, ordered it happening.” (Daily Progress, August 25, 2024)

In a recent Statement the American Association of University Professors (“AAUP Condenms Wave of Administrative Policies Intended to Crackdown on Peaceful Campus Protests”) stated: “College and university students are both citizens and members of the academic community. As Citizens, students should enjoy the same freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and right of petition that other citizens enjoy and, as members of the academic community, they are subject to the obligations that accrue to them by virtue of this membership. Faculty members and administration officials should ensure that institutional powers are not employed to inhibit such intellectual and personal development of students as is often promoted by their exercise of the rights of citizenship both on and off campus....Administrators who claim that “expressive activity” policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.”

In dropping the UJC charges, UVA administrators could join with peer institutions like the University of Chicago, which have dropped all charges against student protesters. Such actions would serve as the first step towards transparency and healing, actions that they refused to take over the summer in the immediate wake of their egregious decisions on May 4.