The University of Arizona’s faculty chair says she’s informally distributing emergency whistles to faculty, students, staff and community members she encounters, to increase safety on campus and alert people in the vicinity of any kind of trouble.
“I think we all know enough to be horrified in the current situation, no matter what our perspective or political orientation may be,” Faculty Chair Leila Hudson told the Faculty Senate on Monday.
She said the idea to distribute whistles originated at the time of a mass shooting Dec. 13 at Brown University, where a gunman opened fire inside a campus building and killed two students and wounded nine others. Since the shooting, Brown has faced questions about its security policies, including its surveillance footage.
She also mentioned the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE activity taking place across the country, including in Tucson.
Hudson said she met with Steve Patterson, UA’s chief safety officer, and the Office of Public Safety’s Real-Time Coordination Center to talk about the ongoing process of securing the UA campus against all kinds of incidents, including natural and criminal events.
Hudson
“Today, I’ve offered many of you emergency whistles. You can take one and clip it to your keychain,” she told faculty senators and administrators at Monday’s meeting. “It’s good if you hike and fall down, or if you walk alone at night, or if you ever need any kind of help or backup or warning to the community. It’s a good-old-fashioned analog signal, loud and clear, still uncorrupted and unspoofed as of yet, that alerts the helpers and warns the community of any kind of trouble.”
About her meeting with Patterson, she said, ”We talked about the difficulties on a large campus like ours, where you don’t have street addresses, most people don’t know the names of the buildings they don’t regularly frequent. We also talked about what happens if we were to have a digital kind of collapse, if the grid collapsed, if our normal means of communicating with each other were invalidated.
“So that, plus current events in the news made me think of whistles as something that one should be equipped with ... in case you need backup, in case you need to identify a location, in case you want to warn the community about something, and we’ve seen them used that way across the country in the ongoing ICE raids,” Hudson said.
Hudson walked around with a plastic bag full of whistles at the end of the Faculty Senate meeting and distributed them to whoever wanted them. She said she’s been carrying around a couple of dozen and giving them out informally during classes and when she’s on campus and interacting with people. It’s a “friendly little reminder that we live in a community and people want to help each other, should they ever require help," she said.
Hudson, an associate professor of modern Middle East culture and political economy, began her speech to the Faculty Senate on Monday, at its first meeting of the new semester, with political statements.
She said she was speaking “as the Epstein cover-ups continue, as our mainstream media distract us, as our two-party system fails to protect the checks and balances of our vintage republic, paramilitary thugs threaten our neighborhoods, our people, our constitutional nonpartisan values and rights.”
She referred to the massive ICE enforcement effort in Minneapolis, including the controversy over a U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo saying ICE agents may enter homes using administrative warrants rather than judicial warrants. Critics have charged this is unconstitutional as it allows forced entry without a judge’s signature.
“This time last year, I sent ‘know-your-rights’ cards out to our whole faculty list," Hudson said, "and now a year later, I think people in our community know better their constitutional rights, the protections of your private spaces, your home and private work areas. Most people know the difference between a valid warrant signed by a judge looking for a specific person and the kind of administrative warrants that are being brandished these days."
A year ago, Hudson had sent out an email with a cut-and-save card telling faculty their constitutional rights and advising them to carry it with them in case they are stopped by law enforcement officers asking them to prove their citizenship status.
