Statement Concerning the Arrests of 24 Students and Faculty Members on May 1, 2024
May 10, 2024
The Advisory Board of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook is composed of scholars from across the broad scope of the humanities disciplines: Africana Studies; Art; English; Hispanic Languages and Literatures; History; Music; Sociology; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
The HISB Advisory Board denounces the arrests of twenty-four members of the Stony Brook community – twenty-two students and two faculty members – on the night of May 1-2, for what appear to be, from all the available evidence, acts of peaceful protest.
We are proud of our Stony Brook students for having the courage of their convictions, and we are proud of those faculty who stood up to bear witness for them and to protect them. By standing with our students, our colleagues Josh Dubnau and Abena Asare have demonstrated solidarity, concern, and care for the health of the entire Stony Brook community. We recognize and commend their actions.
We regret the Administration’s refusal to address a campus protest without relying on police intervention. And we are not satisfied with the current explanations for the police intervention on offer from the Administration.
We therefore call for a formal and impartial investigation into the agencies and actors involved in the arrests as well as the decisions that led to them.
We call for the immediate release of property confiscated by the police or by ERM from the protestors and the faculty; and we condemn, as a further violation of protestors’ civil and political rights, any attempts by the police or by ERM to mine data from confiscated digital devices.
We call for the Administration to reverse the academic suspension of the twenty-two arrested students. We do not think these suspensions are fair or appropriate. Students should not be made to go through an appeals process in order to finish the semester.
We call for the expunging of any police or academic records of the arrests of protestors (including those protestors arrested in the Administration Building in March), and for the dropping of all charges made against them. The university must do everything it can to ensure that its decision to involve the police does not result in long term harm to the students involved; to fail to do this is to betray the university’s mission to make better futures for its students. Every student and faculty member swept up in these arrests must be granted complete and unconditional amnesty.
We make this statement to reconfirm our commitment to the flourishing of our students, the openness of our campus, the freedom of speech, and the right to peaceful protest.
Many of us on the HISB Advisory Board believe that these protests will prove to be historic because they are part of a widespread student movement demanding an end to mass murder. As vilified as they currently are, so will they be vindicated, much like previous campus protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. Many of us believe that history will remember these protestors as champions of the highest humanistic values. Many of us recognize them now.
– Submitted May 10, 2024 to the President of the Stony Brook University Senate