[UPDATE: 5:30 pm CST, 23 Nov: A new draft is available here.]
The following is a draft of a resolution I will introduce to my Faculty Senate early next month. Please attach comments below, or email them to me here. Please feel free to adopt this draft and send it to your own Faculty Senate. [comment in brackets represent additions to the original; strike through comments are suggested deletions from the original].
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Whereas the theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience is one of the great moral achievements of the past 200 years,
Whereas its theory was developed by some of our greatest thinkers, from Thoreau to Tolstoy to Gandhi to King,
Whereas its practice was used by hundreds of thousands of brave but otherwise ordinary people during our history,
Whereas in particular the use of nonviolent civil disobedience was an essential part of the movements for women’s suffrage and for African-American civil rights which have that changed the structure of American society forever,
Whereas our charge as educators includes the nurturing of proper means of expression of the consciences of our students,
Whereas the best current research[1] indicates a drastic shift in police tactics for dealing with nonviolent civil disobedience from the “negotiated management” paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s to the “strategic incapacitation” paradigm currently in use,
Whereas the inclusion of “negotiation” in the very title of the “negotiated management” paradigm refers to practices congruent with the values of universities,
Whereas the “negotiated management” paradigm[1] [was widely and successfully used in the 1980s and 1999s] and offers both police and nonviolent civil disobedience participants the opportunity to negotiate the conditions of arrests, which include willing surrender and walking on their own, or willing surrender and going limp [and is thereby congruent with university values of reasoned discourse],
Whereas the “negotiated management” paradigm served both demonstrators and police very well in the divestment campaigns prevalent in American universities in the 1980s,
Whereas the “strategic incapacitation” paradigm [currently in use] eschews the practice of negotiation, and is thereby incompatible with the values of universities,
Whereas the “strategic incapacitation” paradigm licenses the use of batons, pepper spray, sound cannons, rubber bullets, and other “less lethal” weapons in the first instance, without negotiation,
Whereas some of these weapons have been recently used in shocking and unjustified displays of force [violence] by university police at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and [by municipal police at] McGill,
Therefore, let it be resolved that the Faculty Senate of (… University)
Calls upon the (Chancellor / President) of the University
To forbid the use of “strategic incapacitation” tactics on University grounds [when dealing with nonviolent civil disobedience],
To mandate the immediate adoption of, and training in, the “negotiated management” paradigm by University police [when dealing with nonviolent civil disobedience],
And to commit the University to policies that protect the rights of students, faculty, and staff to engage in the historically significant and morally justified practice of nonviolent civil disobedience on University grounds.
[1] Patrick F Gillham, Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Sociology Compass 5 ⁄ 7 (2011): 636–652, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00394.x (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00394.x/full).
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