The following was submitted anonymously as a Letter to the Editor. The opinions expressed in this letter do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
To Our Campus Community:
We are a coalition of faculty members concerned about recent statements and actions taken by the Cal Poly administration. These include campus-wide emails sent by Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong and Vice President of Student Affairs Keith Humphrey, the prosecution of students protesting at a recent career fair, and the decision to postpone this year’s Social Justice Teach-In.
Our concerns begin at the top. On October 12, 2023, President Armstrong wrote to the campus community that, “As president of Cal Poly, I am often asked to respond to national and world events like the loss of life in the Middle East due to the horrific attack on Israel and resultant war in Gaza. Our practice at Cal Poly is not to comment on current national and world events that do not directly impact a critical mass of our students and employees. Rather we focus our efforts on providing care and support to those in our community who are most affected.” In this first email, President Armstrong demonstrated a shocking indifference to many members of his campus community, in equal balance. In his follow-up email the next day, however, he said he wanted to “sincerely apologize for the hurt that I know it caused many of you – especially those in our Jewish and other communities.” President Armstrong explicitly identified one specific campus group as worthy of his empathy and negated the very existence of our Palestinian community by not naming them.
He went on to say that “some events are so morally compelling that we are moved by our common humanity to speak about them. The attack on Israel by Hamas is one of those events.” He said nothing about Israel’s disproportionate retaliation against Palestinian civilians in Gaza that followed, which by October 13 had killed 1,800 people, including family members of some of our students and faculty. Clearly, to President Armstrong, the slaughter of nearly 30,000 civilians over the four months since October 7, 70% of whom are women and children, is not so “morally compelling” to move the administration to speak about them.
When our campus community members have spoken out against the assault on Gaza, they have been met with armed police and publicly and falsely labeled as antisemitic. On January 23, Cal Poly students and members of the SLO community demonstrated in favor of a ceasefire and against the presence of defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Atomics—companies that supply weapons used in the current war in Gaza—at the campus career fair. In his email to all students the following day, Cal Poly Vice President for Student Affairs Keith Humphrey said the following:
“We’re living through precarious times, and it’s natural to feel as though things are out of control and spilling over onto our campus. For some members of our community, the antisemitism surrounding yesterday’s protest adds additional heartache and distress. As I reflect on this, what makes these developments difficult is the tension and opposition it creates in our community between peers and colleagues who we work and study with every day.”
Humphrey’s accusation, for which he provided no evidence or clarification, perpetuates the dangerous and prejudicial myth that it is antisemitic to speak out for Palestinian rights or to take action to stop what the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible ongoing genocide. Equating pro-ceasefire calls with antisemitism also promotes the dangerous narrative that supporting Israel’s current war on Gaza is somehow intrinsic to Jewish identity itself. Such a claim runs counter to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and denies the legitimacy of Israeli organizations such as B’tselem and Breaking the Silence, as well as diaspora movements such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, whose thousands of pro-ceasefire supporters include rabbis, scholars, and members of the SLO Jewish community. Vice President Humphrey’s irresponsible language fosters a hostile campus climate and serves to further alienate and silence the SWANA community at Cal Poly. It is his own words that have contributed to “tension and opposition … in our community between peers and colleagues.”
Humphrey also said that the career fair protests caused heartache and distress “for some members of our community.” But, like Armstrong, he expressed no empathy for the very real and devastating heartache and distress that many of our Palestinian students and faculty have been experiencing for over four months, watching their relatives, country, and culture be destroyed in front of the world (in what Humphrey flippantly referred to as current “global tensions”). Nor has he acknowledged the violent anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate crimes that have occurred throughout the United States in recent months. The slate of sessions on Palestine at the Social Justice Teach-In intended to urgently amplify these issues that our administration has ignored. Yet the administration has chosen to reschedule the teach-in to May, promising a “new schedule.”
As a coalition of faculty committed to social justice, we seek a genuine commitment to equity and inclusion, including support for our Palestinian community and a rejection of essentialist claims about Jewish identity. We are disturbed by the rhetoric and actions of our administration, both for its immediate impact on campus climate and in light of the prosecution of student protesters at the career fair and the decision to postpone the Social Justice Teach-In without consultation with faculty organizers. We as a campus must unite against antisemitism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and all other identity-based discrimination.
Signed,
Cal Poly Social Justice Coalition Faculty
We, a coalition of faculty united for social justice, remain anonymous due to concerns for our safety and job security within the current campus climate, concerns that have been intensified by VP Keith Humphrey’s email