After nearly six months of delays, the University of Arizona Faculty Senate has unveiled a draft statement condemning antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Chair Leila Hudson had promised the statement last April after an on-campus Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, was graffitied, but she then postponed it in May. She said she could not “in good conscience” submit one after a pro-Palestinian encampment was broken up on campus that week.
Hudson, who is Palestinian, presented her draft statement in Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting, on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that killed 1,200 people in Israel.
“In this moment of turmoil in the world and on college campuses around the country, we have a particular and heightened obligation to be vigilant and proactive about recognizing, discouraging, reframing, deescalating and — when appropriate — reporting to the Threat Assessment Team all Middle Eastern conflict related to aggressions — specifically but not exclusively antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian harassment,” the draft reads.
The Faculty Senate has yet to vote on the statement but is expected to begin discussing and editing it at next month’s meeting.
The statement also mentions that the “exercise of protected first amendment rights” will “at times make community members uncomfortable.”
Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson
It continues: “While students and others should never be required to endure unwelcome or non-consensual conversations or demonstrations and should never be punished for withdrawing from situations that create discomfort, they cannot be systematically protected from intellectual or even emotional discomfort by this public state institution without encroaching on our shared core values.”
Before she presented the first draft of the resolution, Hudson made remarks about the anniversary of Oct. 7.
“It’s been one year since the Hamas rampages and massacres and those discussed in the Israeli press by the Israeli military on October 7, 2023,” she said. “It’s been one year of multiple daily massacres by Israel that have made Palestinian life in Gaza unlivable, now extended to the West Bank and Lebanon.”
Hudson continued that it had been one year of “challenges to our constitutional freedoms to speak our conscience and discuss and debate freely.”
Her initial postponement of the statement last spring drew criticism from the UA’s joint council on Jewish life and antisemitism, whose members wrote in a statement at the time that they were “appalled” by the deferral.
“Every day is a day to call out antisemitism,” the Jewish council wrote at the time.
Hudson declined to submit a statement to the Faculty Senate for review after the May 1 encampment at the UA.
Officers with the UA Police Department, the Tucson Police Department, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Arizona Department of Public Safety and SWAT descended on the encampment near the UA main gate on the early morning of May 1. Protesters in the camp, which included pop-up tarps, stayed on campus past the 10:30 p.m. curfew for non-academic activity as they demonstrated against Israel’s actions in its war with Hamas in Gaza.
Then-UA President Robert C. Robbins, after an hours-long standoff that he said created a volatile and dangerous situation, told authorities to “immediately enforce campus use policies and all corresponding laws.” Officers fired rubber bullets and pepper balls at protesters.
