Atlanta’s Emory University began the new school year last week with the president Gregory Fenves unilaterally announcing a new policy prohibiting tents on campus, “building occupations and/or takeovers” and protests after midnight – in violation of the school’s shared governance policy, according to faculty members in positions of leadership who spoke to the Guardian.
Fenves announced the new policy last Tuesday, calling it an effort to “improve how we keep our community safe”. But the university senate’s current president and president-elect met with Fenves the following afternoon, urging him to delay implementing the new rules until a process had taken place that included the full senate holding a meeting and issuing recommendations, the Guardian has learned.
Failing to do so is a “complete violation” of university policy, which says such decisions must include input from the university senate – representing faculty, students and staff, said George B Shepherd, law professor and the body’s current president. He called what Fenves did “making rules by fiat”. Still, Emory’s president insisted on staying the course, saying the school year had already begun and that “it was an emergency”, Shepherd said.
“If he understood shared governance, he wouldn’t be doing this,” said Noëlle McAfee, chairperson of the school’s philosophy department and university senate president-elect, who also attended the meeting. “He doesn’t care about the legitimacy of his leadership.”
As for the policy itself, McAfee said: “To what problem are these [rules] a solution to?”
An Emory spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the new policy, including what was meant by an “emergency”, and instead pointed to the policy statement issued before the university senate leaders requested a delay.
Clifton Crais, history professor and president-elect of the college faculty senate – a separate body – called the Fenves administration “thuggish” for proceeding as it did, “despite everything that happened last year”.
Crais was referring to how the private university distinguished itself on 25 April, after Fenves called Atlanta police and Georgia state patrol onto campus within three hours of protestors setting up camp opposing the school’s investments in Israel as well as a police training center outside the city colloquially known as “Cop City”. At an estimated $11bn, the school’s endowment is among the largest in the nation. Fenves’s move appeared to be the fastest decision to call police on campus to quash protests at the time, and police then used Tasers against protestors and others, another first.
At the close of the first week of school, Crais described the mood on Emory’s campus as, “not a good scene”. Some faculty were applying for jobs elsewhere, he said. Others who were arrested at or near last spring’s protests recently found out the school was unwilling to recommend to prosecuting authorities that they drop misdemeanor charges against students and faculty arrested – meaning months and possibly years of trials lay ahead.
McAfee made this request to Fenves at last week’s meeting. “He said nothing” in response, the philosophy professor said. Crais also sent an email to Fenves on 25 August asking the university president to “do the right thing and call for all charges to be dropped” and received no response.
McAfee was one of the 28 arrested on 25 April, after she had come to the school’s quad that morning to see what was going on. She later told a local TV news reporter that she “saw a young protester thrown to the ground by officers, who were ‘pummeling them, just pummeling and pummeling’. The mother in me said ‘Stop. Stop.’ And I made sure to stand 4ft away from them, standing still, non-confrontational, I said, ‘Stop’ [...].”
Police arrested the philosophy department chair and charged her with disorderly conduct. A video of her arrest went viral, and she now awaits a trial. In an editorial published early summer in Scientific American, she wrote that Emory “violently and brutally dismantle[d] a peaceful protest, all in a matter of minutes”, instead of helping “educate their students to become engaged members of society—with the side benefit of furthering the democratic process itself”.
She said students arrested that day have since faced consequences such as being denied when seeking to rent an apartment or being unsure whether they can leave the country to visit family. One student suffered nerve damage after being arrested.
After last week’s meeting, she said: “My president had us arrested, and has not even asked us how we are. He has not reached out to anybody.”
Emory declined to comment when asked by the Guardian about the request to drop charges.
As for Muslim students on campus, Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair) – the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization – recently called Emory (and George Washington University and UCLA) a “thoroughly hostile and dangerous environment for anti-genocide students, faculty, and staff, especially Muslim and Palestinian community members”. Azka Mahmood, executive director at Cair-Georgia, issued a statement on video, “advising Muslim students to avoid Emory University”.
Hamza Dudgeon, a doctoral student in Emory’s Islamic civilizations studies program, said “Muslim students are really scared” as the new school year begins. Asked whether he agreed with Mahmood, Dudgeon said, “after seeing the way [Emory] retaliated against students and faculty for exercising basic academic freedoms … honestly, yes”.
The graduate student just began his last semester of classes, and then plans to write his dissertation.
“After that,” he said, “I’m trying to get out as fast as possible. I’m scared for new, incoming Muslim students. What if they say something that gets them in trouble? Especially talking about a genocide going on.”
• This article was amended on 9 September 2024 to clarify the terms of Emory’s response to the Guardian.
