Professors in the US Academy defend the right to learn
By Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Ph.D.
As for centering and grounding myself, I am most proud that his family invited me to speak at the state funeral for Dr. Motsoko Pheko in South Africa in early May. I spoke from a chapter I wrote on anticolonial spirituality in my forthcoming contracted book with Oxford: I Meant For You To Be Free. Dr. Pheko was a jurist, university co-founder, book publisher, gardener, dad, a former political prisoner, and author of 45 books. He advanced the idea that apartheid was just one form of coloniality among many others. While my comments at the state funeral were not on his anticolonial international legal research (that resulted in the United Nations sanctioning apartheid South Africa), speaking about his writings on recovering African traditional religions as part of the decolonizing experience was timely and received well. It was only about a week after returning, on a day when I received some pretty serious health news, that I ran directly back to campus from my doctor’s appointment after watching a brief recording of helicopter announcements that students would be “tased, batoned, and gassed.”
It was not the first time I ran into the fray believing that my job as a UC professor involved interrupting my research and reflection work to stand in the gap for students, staff, and other faculty. While the other moments have involved physical injury and requests to take on tasks way way way above my pay grade, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that stepping up as one of the most senior Senate Faculty on hand to try to reach the Chancellor to beg him to stand down the riot police would have resulted in my brutal arrest and beating and detention. I spoke to no fewer than six people (including a person attending the rally who identified themselves as having shared shabbat with the Chancellor the Friday before), begging and pleading with them to please call the Chancellor and let him know that there were far more police than community members and students in attendance at the May 15, 2024 rally.
I wrote colleagues at the National Humanities Center via text and at every other agency I knew in hopes that the Chancellor, who lives within five minutes walking distance from me, might be influenced by someone of a higher rank than me to stand down the over 300+ police officers from 22 policing agencies who had arraigned in full riot gear on the Biological Sciences Plaza at UC Irvine. Police officers from Huntington Beach were told that the shooting was happening on campus. Sandwiches for the police had been pre-ordered and were available for them. Sharpshooters were visible atop buildings. I was terrified that there was going to be a bloodbath on campus because whoever called in the police–made a catastrophic error.
Instead, my attempts at de-escalation and my queries to the highest-ranking Student Affairs administrators were met with bedlam, disorderliness, and confusion. I was told that no one in Student Affairs, even when police were being called in. I was told by the person who claimed to have shared shabbat with the Chancellor that he “would never call that yahoo.” I witnessed elderly community members (far into their 80s and 90s walk toward the police) and followed them. I approached the riot police and explained naively, “We do not do this here. I am a state employee. You are state employees. The students are our employers.”
I was taken down to the ground by countless officers, thrown face down, and my head slammed into the concrete. My glasses were damaged. I was stomped on. I had to shout, “I am disabled.” I sustained numerous lacerations to my head, neck, arms, shoulders, and thighs and severe damage to my person. I was detained, dragged, given a citation but never offered Miranda Rights, water, or a phone call. I was publicly searched after some four hours in a jail cell on a bus in the sheriff’s building. I was publicly searched and had my privates exposed in front of many male officers. I was not allowed to close my pants or cover my privates. The female officer who searched my body did so, so roughly to damage the underwire in my brassiere. I was yelled at, demeaned, laughed at, and scorned. I was called and referred to by so many horrible name that I had to tell the officers on the bus, “We are humans.”
I behaved like a senior professor at the University of California and attempted to de-escalate, and my boss had me arrested as if my standing and reputation did not matter.
As mentioned above, this is NOT the first time that I have either willingly or been coerced into stepping in to fix problems way way way above my pay grade and asked to do things that no one should be asked and certainly not somebody who is a precarious URM faculty member in one of the reddest counties in the state and region. I went to my Dean to ask that Ella Turenne, a Ph.D. student who worked on our UC-HBCU grant, be memorialized with a tree on campus and was told no. I was made to teach graduate seminars not in my area of expertise mid-quarter to avoid graduate students suing other professors. I was called by senior faculty in the system to mentor students they were trying to get to leave the graduate program. I was trying to figure out who to ask, how to say no, or how to get any advice from anyone. It occurs to me that I have done a great majority of such service because the campus has refused to provide me with adequate professional development and faculty affairs infrastructure that would make it possible for me to simply do the one job that I am actually paid for–conduct research and teach and contribute to the governance of the university as my service. Instead, I have been called upon to do many other people’s jobs. No wonder, I ran from my own doctor’s appointment to the scene of the rally. I had internalized the rule that my only reason for being here was to be a fixer and a cleaner and the person to pick up messes not of my own making.
To this moment, I have not received a call, a note, a query, or anything from anyone in senior administration. Instead, I was warned that I had to stay away from my campus for seven days. Instead, I have been thrown out of University Town Center eateries by managers who are unafraid to say publicly “You are loud, get out” to the only Black adult in the establishment. But after being viral during my arrest, I guess I have to expect that this could happen to me any place I go in Irvine going forward.
Why hasn’t the Chancellor or EVC or Head of Research called to ask if I am ok? Why hasn’t anyone in the UC Office of the President inquired how I am dealing with my injuries?
I was trained at UC Santa Barbara where Chancellor Henry Yang could be found just about any night in the 24-hour book room offering himself as a tutor to students like me who did not have computers. Students without housing or a place to work late into the night were not met with scorn and derision, he literally applauded our hustle and desire to improve our lives. He would go from table to table to table and offer a quote from Rousseau for students reading philosophy and actual back-of-the-envelope calculations to students working on computer science and chemistry problems. He actually seemed like he was a teacher with a vocation who cared about us. I am a faculty member, and I miss that kind of leadership and its courageous willingness to put himself in the shoes of the other members of the community. Even when I protested to unionize myself as a graduate student employee, Chancellor Yang came out of the administration building to shake my hand. He treated me like a person, which will always be the standard that I live up to as a researcher and a scholar at the public research university.
I am recovering the best that I can and trying to figure out what the career, spiritual, moral, and ethical lesson is when I am this close to becoming a Full Professor and my boss used his leadership and authority to have me beaten, arrested, exposed publicly to state sexual assault, humiliated, kept in jail, and barred from campus. With drones, sharpshooters, and Zoot alerts that caused more people to come to the rally and helicopters, from my vantage point, none of the de-escalation protocols worked. No one was in charge on May 15th. To this day I have not been told who the incident commander of the day was. I have no information and yet I have been warned that my job could easily be taken within the next three years and that I could be charged criminally in the next year. I have had to take out exorbitant loans to cover the expenses associated with this day.
I found myself after the seven-day barring from campus ended begging the VC of Academic Personnel for a document that I could carry around that I could show to the police in case they detained me again. I found myself begging my department chair and dean to remove my email address because I was receiving death and rape threats to my email and to my house address. I internalized that like a slave of yesteryear, I should carry some freedom paper on my person to prove that I am worthy and legal to be here.
I am working on grounding myself.
But mostly, I am trying to recover from the humiliation of May 15th. It lives on in my body and in my spirit. It lives on in my nightmares and night terrors. It lives on. I had to beg to be able to return to my still MOP mortgaged residence. I had to beg neighbors to inquire with the chief of police so I could get my phone back so I could take my kids to the doctor because I maintain a shared household Google calendar not a paper calendar. I had to notify my neighbors to be vigilant because many many people had threatened to bomb our street by name.
I was told I should be grateful that I have my liberty. I was told that I would be and should be detained with the “stinky crackheads and rapists” officers from unknown police agencies so many times that I had to explain that “those people are members of my family.” I was detained in a cell next to a woman having a full psychiatric break who screamed for assistance and never came for 15 hours. I was detained with staff and students in a jail cell where there was no privacy, where used sanitary napkins were discarded in plain sight, and where there was no tissue or refuse container.
I pray that someone cares enough to let me know that at least calling 300+ police to campus was a violation of policy or a mistake.
It is easy to reach me–at least for the people who want to offer geographically specific death and rape threats.
I greet the Chancellor when I see him walking around the neighborhood. I always have. I wish he would extend that grace to me and express something like concern and care. It is the least I can expect of the leader of a university campus.
I can expect professionalism. I can expect discernment among leadership. I can expect common courtesy. Electoral politics, county politics, and geopolitics do not undermine the work I am here to do. I can expect that my students will not be arrested and kicked out of their housing for weeks and weeks and weeks. I took an oath to educate the people of the state of California. While it is against my religion to take such oaths to a government, I took that oath very seriously. I only wish that everyone who took that oath also understood its words.
I think I need to contact your office for support. Something happened to me, and I did not know what to do.
