May 13th, 2024
To President Williams, Provost Ghadessi, Leadership Cabinet, and the RISD Board of Trustees,
We, as RISD faculty and staff, write this open letter to condemn your actions in response to our students’ protest at Fathi Ghaben Place (formerly 20 Washington Place). We attest that in recent emails to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and families you mischaracterize the events of May 9, 2024 with falsehoods and incongruous claims that contradict video documentation and firsthand accounts. RISD faculty and staff were present for the unsettling escalation and violence against our students while many other RISD community members watched via live-stream. What we witnessed is at best the aftermath of inept decision making and communication by RISD leadership, at worst a calculated tactic to obscure the intentional use of force against our students.
Our Statement by Faculty and Staff Against the Ongoing Genocide Against Palestinians continues to garner signatories and many of us have been meeting with senior academic and administrative leadership since its release in December 2023. From this perspective, we are compelled and obligated to share what preceded the RISD student protest. It is crucially pertinent to call out that there have been over six months of parallel and sustained efforts by students, staff, and faculty to seek a good faith dialogue with administration on our collective ethical imperatives as an institution in a time of extreme crisis. Good faith efforts were met with a pattern of silence, absence, deflection, equivocation, unpreparedness, and outright denial of our efforts.
It is reprehensible that nonviolent protest by students has been repeatedly mischaracterized as impulsive overreaction. It is dishonest to paint these actions as forestalling reasonable progress when it is the administration's half-year refusal to engage sincerely with our community’s urgent concerns that has stymied progress and demolished trust. In truth, the response by students has been deliberate and proportionate to their experience of school leadership effectively turning a blind eye to the trauma of witnessing the most documented genocide in history. At the direction of the Board of Trustees, RISD continues to benefit from war crimes, nullifying our deepest institutional values for the sake of financial interest.
It is deplorable that you have vilified RSJP student organizers, misrepresented their actions and demands, and threatened them with expulsion—an administrative tactic largely similar to messaging and strategies we see nationwide at other campuses. We celebrate our students and their brave condemnation of our collective complicity in the genocide against Palestinians. We reject your attempts to divert scrutiny from your own failures of leadership. We have no confidence in the Board of Trustees.
We have collected an evidenced timeline of events and community accounts in direct response to the claim in an email that President Williams sent on the evening of May 9th titled Recent Events on Campus. Addressed and sent to “RISD Families and Alums” it stated that students have been attempting to “reframe and re-narrate the events according to their agenda.” This is a blatant projection as President Williams, cabinet, and the board have rushed to spin the events of May 9th in defense of their missteps.
The poorly planned actions of RISD’s academic and administrative leaders, Public Safety, and Facilities staff on May 9th were the primary driving force in escalating the situation. The panic amongst students began when President Williams sent student protestors a printed and emailed letter, commanding them to create a means of egress and ingress by noon with less than 20 minutes to do so. The letter falsely stated that the administration would not “use this moment to otherwise enter the space.” Despite that assurance, and despite students’ immediate response and removal of most of the chair barricade, a large group of Fire Marshals, RISD Maintenance and Facilities workers, and RISD Public Safety officers forcefully entered the space moments later and sealed off the building with the students inside, further fueling panic among students both within and outside of the building. Students tried to access the building from the front door. Video footage published by RSJP shows a RISD Facilities member violently pushing one student away. Increasingly concerned for their peers inside, all students gathered at the side entrance where they stood on the threshold of the open door guarded by several members of RISD Facilities, Maintenance, and Public Safety.
As groups of students, faculty, and staff assembled to witness and support students trapped inside, faculty present as observers attempted to deescalate the situation by asking RISD Facilities to allow them to enter and check that the students inside were ok. Permission was denied. Present faculty implored that the Provost or President come to reassure the outside students directly. Despite assurances that our request would be communicated, neither the Provost nor President came to address the crowd. There is evidence that students were subjected to rough physical handling more than once. Students left the second floor and the building under the protection of their peers. After the students had already left, President Williams sent a follow up email demanding that students vacate the building by 2:30pm which included threats of expulsion if they did not comply.
We adamantly refute assertions made by the senior leadership about student rhetoric and behavior. Again, the sudden demand to comply in an impossibly short period of time, the lack of clear communication otherwise, violence towards students, and the absence of leadership were the triggers for the escalation on May 9.
In two emails sent out on May 9, referenced above, President Williams states that student protesters must go through a “restorative justice” process or “be held accountable under the current conduct codes.” This is a disturbing appropriation and misuse of the work of the Smithsonian Center for Restorative History. When a claim of Restorative Justice is attached to the threat of expulsion, its legitimacy as a reparative process evaporates and is rendered nothing more than moral cover.
A true Restorative Justice process demands four main questions: 1. Who has been harmed? 2. What are their needs? 3. What are our obligations to meet those needs? 4. What are the root causes of the harm, past and present?
In the context of the ongoing genocide and the administration’s refusal to name it as such, it is offensive to shift the questions of harms and needs away from the Palestinian people. Restorative Justice processes do not, and cannot, happen in a vacuum. They must be rooted in a genuine ethic of care and a strong commitment to open communication and accountability, which senior leadership has not yet shown.
As faculty and staff who care profoundly for the RISD students with whom we interface daily, we demand that disciplinary action not be initiated against any students engaged in nonviolent protest. We stand against expulsion and all authoritarian threats used to menace students into compliance and remind the administration that unilateral expulsion is against RISD policy.
The email from the President threatening expulsion references the RISD Code of Student Conduct, but it does not outline student rights under the Code of Conduct. The RISD Code of Student Conduct states that all students have a right to “reasonable and fair processes in resolving alleged violations of this Code of Student Conduct.” It further outlines that, before a student is expelled, a formal complaint must be submitted, assigned a Conduct Administrator, reviewed, and investigated. Then, the Office of Student Conduct decides whether to take action or not. If the Office of Student Conduct decides to take action, they then proceed with one of the following courses of action:
The Conduct Board will deliberate and make a recommendation to the Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards. The Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards will then make a final deliberation, which students have the right to appeal.
It is worth noting that the Code of Student Conduct states that, “During Conduct Board Meetings “Both the Complainant and the Respondent are entitled to have an advisor of their choosing attend the hearing to guide and accompany them throughout the process. The advisor may be a friend, mentor, family member, attorney, or any other supporter a party chooses to advise them.” Failing to reference such a protection in the mention of “restorative justice” from the school insinuates that students will be present in such a setting without advising of any kind. This is in conflict with the goals of restorative justice.
While it may seem pedantic to review the process for expulsion, it is imperative to underscore the importance of adhering to our procedural standards. The President’s direct threat of expulsion exposes an alarming dismissal of these standards, suggesting a reliance on intimidation rather than proper administrative process. Upholding procedural diligence is essential to ensure transparency, fairness, and psychological safety in all our actions.
As the semester comes to a close, we continue to see RISD administration applying the same institutional playbook tactics being used across the nation: intimidation and demonization of students, deceptive messaging, suppression of public statements, and delay tactics meant to wait out protests and dodge meaningful engagement with students, staff, and faculty about their demands.
While it can seem as though the economic structures that fund institutions are difficult to change, we are witnessing protests across the world succeed in empowering and inspiring institutions to pursue a path toward disclosure and divestment.
The question before RISD is, what matters more? Standing against genocide or profiting from it? We believe the latter exposes RISD to much graver existential threat than any loss of donors and funding. The choice is yours.
To the RSJP organizers and all of our students: We celebrate you. Your inspiring actions uphold a long and vindicated legacy of anti-war student protest. It is with great pride that we affirm the knowledge and skills you have collaboratively built within and throughout your coalitional organizing. You should be celebrated, not intimidated and threatened with disciplinary action.
We are inspired by the generative and educational space of communal care you have carved out as you bear the oppressive weight of RISD's complicity in Palestinian genocide. To miscategorize this space as one that would "impede the right of another to study, learn, and pursue education" is categorically false and insults us all. We denounce this shameful deception by the administration.
Students, we honor your courage and your integrity. We invite everyone to experience the beautiful community of liberatory joy you have created at Fathi Ghaben Place. We join you and voices around the world. Free Palestine.
Sincerely,
faculty and staff of risd solidarity
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