EXCLUSIVE — Some faculty members at the University of Virginia are privately and publicly splintering with the school's president after he asked state police in riot gear to clear pro-Palestinian protesters from an unlawful encampment, deepening the divide between progressive professors and university leaders that has opened up at UVA and many other elite schools.
In a chain of emails obtained by the Washington Examiner, members of the Anthropology Department at UVA were discussing ways to express their condemnation Tuesday afternoon against President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom as the two school leaders held a virtual "town hall" to discuss the university's response to protesters.
Over the weekend, Virginia State Police in riot gear were deployed to remove protesters forcibly from an encampment on university grounds, where officers made several arrests and used pepper spray. After backlash from faculty and students, Ryan and others decided to hold the town hall to create a dialogue about the decision-making process behind the crackdown.
Anthropology Department faculty members were weighing a public condemnation of university administration, the emails show, with professors saying a joint statement should accuse school leaders of actively stoking violence in order to justify a heavy-handed response.
According to the messages to faculty and others associated with the school's Anthropology Department, the faculty members involved did not appear to have made a decision as to whether to send the statement from the whole department or to have specific faculty sign one. Some emeritus faculty noted that nontenured faculty could be at risk of "retaliation."
Professor Kath Weston suggested the statement should accuse the administration of "elite panic," an anthropological term that she said "describes what happens when the people formally in charge end up manufacturing the very violence and 'disorder' they claim to be working to prevent as they adopt increasingly authoritarian and potentially deadly command-and-control tactics to quell a fear and panic about the situation that is to be found nowhere but in themselves."
The discussions come just days after dozens of History Department faculty wrote an open letter condemning the actions, calling the crackdown a "repression of a peaceful protest of our students by armed state police in riot gear." Anthropology professors appeared to be seeking to model their message after the History Department letter.
Action from the anthropology professors remains unclear, as they appeared to be still discussing how to proceed, but criticism of the town hall itself snowballed quickly into talks of more sweeping action.
"Our outrage is surely more correctly aimed squarely at the fact that our 'administration' called in State troopers in the first place," professor Eve Danziger said, asking her colleagues for ideas on how to use anthropology to make an appeal in the same way the History Department invoked Thomas Jefferson. "The Town Hall is an ephemeral matter. We should instead put our efforts toward coordinating a more general response to the events of Saturday."
One of the anthropology concepts offered was Weston's "elite panic," which George Mentore, associate professor and director of graduate admissions, said in the email chain was "exactly my take on their orchestrated collective response."
"I was most shocked and insulted by the high jacking of MLK and Gandhi on peaceful protests to then argue that the students brought on the violence because they resisted arrest," Mentore said. In a separate email, Mentore suggested that Ryan's willingness to use "violent force" came out of "self-interest ... possibly by way of retribution from [Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA)]."
The move was the same "preemptive use of violence we hear all the time from those who speak in the name of justice," Mentore said.
Mark Sicoli, associate professor and director of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics, slammed the school's decision to address the issue in a town hall.
“The anthropology department does not recognize the 'town hall' being staged by President Ryan and Provost Baucom as a legitimate forum in which to discuss the arrests of our colleagues and our students and the terrorization of many faculty, staff, students, and community members who witnessed the take-over of campus by militarized state police with long-guns, chemical agents and aggressive tactics on May 4th against a small encampment of students protesting genocide," he said. "Calling this event a 'town hall' uses the language of democratic participation as cover for a carefully curated media event that maintains a safe distance of upper administration from the hard questions and difficult conversations needed right now."
Sicoli also asked for Anthropology Department members to reach out to colleagues in other departments to join the boycott. In the UVA Anthropology Department email thread, Sicoli and others pointed out that the town hall allowed participation from registered attendees, saying the school administration was "pre-selecting and screening questions" to avoid accountability.
In the town hall, which was led by Ryan, Baucom, UVA Police Chief Tim Longo, Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wagner Davis, and Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer Kenyon Bonner, Ryan described the weekend events as a "terrible and terribly sad and upsetting day. It was traumatic, I know, for everyone involved and it was far from the resolution I or any of my colleagues had hoped for."
While faculty members in the History and Anthropology departments described the protests as peaceful, Longo, the university's police chief, told a different story in which students were breaking rules, unwilling to engage in dialogue with administrators, and resisting police and administrators by any means necessary.
"It was made clear to me through their voice, or at least the voice of one who appeared to be acting on behalf of the group, and these are their words: They had a duty to fight for their cause, they had a duty to win, and they had nothing to lose," Longo said. "Their actions and words caused me to conclude that voluntary compliance with my request wasn't an option they'd be willing to consider."
Longo and the other university leaders on the call did mention that the protesters were compliant with requests for the first few days before changing their tune.
Bonner said the students rejected pleas from the university to open a dialogue and noted that the students ended up working through faculty intermediaries to deliver messages. After deliberation, the protesters rejected all offers to enter discussions and instead curated a list of demands.
The administration also pointed to some outside agitators taking part in the encampment and the leaders of the protests calling in others from the outside to join them.
Davis, UVA's chief operating officer, read out arrest statistics; police made 27 total arrests, 12 of which were of students and eight of which involved people unaffiliated with UVA. One of the eight unaffiliated people was charged with assault. In addition, four UVA employees were arrested, and three others who were either former employees or former students were taken into custody.
Despite the anger from history and anthropology professors, other faculty have come out in support of the administration.
Lee Coppock, an economics professor at UVA, posted to X that while "reasonable people may differ," he is "grateful" for Ryan's leadership.
"Jim [Ryan] cares deeply about free expression and so it must have been hard to have the protesters removed from Grounds on Saturday," he wrote. "The protesters were peaceful and within University rules for several days. When they failed to continue to do so, they were given several chances and then the rules were enforced."
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The Washington Examiner reached out to Weston, Mentore, Sicoli, and Danziger for comment. Shortly thereafter, Danziger replied in the email thread that she refused to respond because "Wikipedia tells me the Washington Examiner is a U.S. conservative news outlet." Danziger did not respond directly to the request for comment.
UVA spokesman Brian Coy pointed the Washington Examiner to Ryan's remarks during the town hall in a request for comment about the Anthropology Department's plans.
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