Boycott

After more than two months of student and community action, the controversy over the bylaw adopted by Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, or LSJP, and nine other law student organizations has escalated.

Silence might embolden well-funded groups that are attempting to harm the increasing numbers of students, faculty members and the broader community of higher education in our state who are taking a stand against injustice. The UC system needs to maintain the public mission of the university by speaking out about this.

UC Berkeley faculty members have quite rightly taken the UC administration to task for a recent statement, signed by all the system’s chancellors, that condemns Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS. The statement was issued in the name of protecting academic freedom when, in our own view, the only freedom under threat is the bedrock right of faculty and students to engage in political speech.

In response to "Free Speech Week," several faculty members preemptively cancelled classes. After the event's sudden cancellation, many of these classes were made optional.

Approximately fifteen protesters erected two large, illustrated wood barriers at Sather Gate Wednesday afternoon as a public statement portraying Israeli-Palestinian relations and supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

Michael Brown’s death is not an isolated incident of institutionalized racism run amok; it exists in a continuum of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow and the almost ageless stereotype of the violent black man. It exists in an ascendant culture of totalitarian police who were armed by an ever-growing military industrial complex by a country that strives to be always profiting at war. To the people of Ferguson, it exists in a timeline of tension wherein a mostly black town is occupied by an almost all-white police force. To the people of Berkeley, it exists as oppression that cannot be borne if any of us is to feel safe or free.

While the ASUC president has the constitutional power to veto bills passed by the senate, past presidents responded differently to the divestment votes — one vetoing, the other not. The potential for a veto in any future divestment votes, then, could vary greatly, depending on who is elected the next ASUC president.