The term ‘Orwellian’ is rapidly losing its gravitas with how often we make recourse to it in trying to explain global society’s piecemeal tumble into neofascism (same as the old fascism), but a recent batch of policy changes at the University of California, Los Angeles, rolling out this fall in retaliation for students and faculty’s pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests last spring, truly deserves the epithet.
Reeling in the wake of frequent anti-genocide protests, rallies, and marches last year, the occupation of Royce Quad by a pro-Palestine student encampment in April, and three major graduate student strikes since 2019 (this one, which was at UC Santa Cruz but threatened credibly to spread to UCLA, this one, and the most recent one), UCLA administration is scrambling to enact new campus-wide policies aimed at preventing student movements, activism, protests, and other forms of free expression and free association from taking place on campus, which is public land owned by the State of California.
The most desperate change takes the form of sweeping updates to the (also Orwellian-sounding) Time, Place, and Manner Policies, reported on today by the student paper, the Daily Bruin. Under the new regulations, campus administration redefines “publicly accessible spaces” (on a publicly-owned campus on public land with no gates or physical barriers to entry from the street) to include just two locations: a thin strip of walkway known as Bruinwalk, colloquially known by some as “the gauntlet” of leafletters, solicitors, canvassers, and undergraduate clubs seeking to boost their membership; and the area outside Murphy Hall, the main administrative building on campus. According to Daily Bruin, “Separate rules exist for events that receive administration approval 10 days in advance,” such as marches, rallies, and using a megaphone. Other heinous acts that students are no longer allowed to commit include ordering food delivery between midnight and 6a.m., walking outside during the same timeframe, and refusing to identify oneself to campus staff.
Next, a new, ironically stupid “Workplace Violence Prevention Plan” that is to be imposed on all campus employees this fall could have been in the works since before the pro-Palestine spring uprising, but the timing of its release is at best pure bureaucratic tone deafness and at worst another mechanism designed to clamp down on freedom of speech and association on campus. This is especially true because in the legal code to which it refers, ‘violence’ is defined broadly to include threats that result in ‘psychological trauma’. No matter what the boomers say, mental trauma is a genuine form of harm, so there is no issue there. The problem here, as with many of the University of California’s reactionary new policies, lies in the potential for – the likelihood of – selective enforcement. Furthermore, the concept of psychological harm was weaponized by Zionist counterprotesters last spring, led by their on-campus posterboy, who actively antagonized peaceful anti-genocide protesters and then was quoted in this Times of Israel article saying the encampment made him feel ‘not safe’.
In reality, the only ‘workplace violence’ that has taken place recently is the administration-sanctioned April 30 Zionist assault on the anti-genocide encampment and UCLA’s own $11 million spending spree on rubber bullets, smoke bombs, and private security to be used against students and staff in the aftermath.
All of this comes on the tail of University of California President Michael Drake’s earlier ban on public encampments across UC, announced last month.
So, let’s look at the tally of new rules at UCLA:
- No protesting or gathering except in two specific areas
- A permanent campuswide curfew of midnight to 6a.m.
- No food between midnight and 6a.m.
- Students are required to “identify themselves” to “campus officials”, to include hired private security firms like the ones used in conjunction with LAPD and California Highway Patrol last spring
- No encampments, politically motivated or otherwise
The elephant in the room is the dubious capabilities of administration to enforce all or any of these impositions on student and staff behavior and movement. For the undergraduates, the curfew alone is likely enough to cause an uproar. To quote a friend’s sardonic quip when they heard the news, “Ah, yes, college students are notoriously inactive during those hours.”
It goes without saying: Conflict at UCLA around the administration’s refusal to acknowledge the genocide in Palestine and divest from Israel is going to keep heating up in the next few months, and these authoritarian policy changes will only exacerbate the very unrest they are trying to suppress.
Genevieve Landers is the pseudonym of an antiwar writer and critic. She has previously worked in mainstream journalism and is now a graduate student in literature at UCLA. She is using the pseudonym for fear of retaliation by the university.
