AMHERST — Several UMass professors joined more than 50 demonstrators in front of the Whitmore Administration Building on Thursday, demanding an end to university-imposed probation placed against students and faculty that were arrested for occupying the building in October to protest against the ongoing war in Gaza.

The students who participated in last fall’s sit-in protest originally faced criminal trespassing charges when they were first arrested, but those charges were downgraded to civil infractions by an Eastern Hampshire District Court judge in February. Demonstrators onBut the demonstrators on Thursday said the legal decision has yet to sway campus administration from dropping probationary sanctions against the students, and submitted a petition signed by more than one thousand students, faculty and other community members, demanding an end to such sanctions.

“Probation might not sound like that big of a deal, but I’ll tell you what probation has done,” said Rachel Weber, an instructor in social thought at UMass who also as an attorney has represented the arrested students in court. “It prevented students from going to study abroad despite months and months of prep for that and paying tens of thousands of dollars. It has shown up on people’s grad school student applications. It has interfered with people’s ability to get housing. And for the staff that were arrested, they’ve had to deal with suspensions without pay.”

Toussaint Losier, an associate professor at the school’s W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, told the crowd that as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he too was arrested for protesting better access to medical care, and that it was only because of faculty, students and staff applying pressure to the school that he did not face disciplinary actions.

“What I take from that is that the university will give those who are disrupting the status quo a difficult time, as hard a time as they can,” he said. “If people are quiet, if people are not taking action about the processes and the manipulation of the student code of conduct that’s taking place...things are going to continue as they are.”

In a separate interview with the Gazette, Losier said that students involved in the Gaza protests had reached out to a number of faculty to provide support as they navigated the school’s disciplinary process.

“Just witnessing how that process has played out has raised a lot of questions, not just in terms transparency, but in terms of whether or not the university’s office that handles questions of student conduct is actually following its own guidelines,” Losier said. “It seems to treat what students did in terms of sitting in an administrative building as analogous as somebody breaking in or facilitating somebody else trespassing in a residence hall or a dorm or something like that.”

In a statement provided to the Gazette by UMass spokesperson Ed Blaguszewski, the school said the sanctions placed against the students were applied in a content-neutral fashion, and were consistent with existing disciplinary codes. 

“The characteristics of every student conduct matter at UMass Amherst are distinct, including those related to protests, and they are taken into account in reviewing potential discipline,” Blaguszewski said. “In fact, counter to what the petition asserts, the Student Conduct and Community Standards Office notes that the sanction of university probation has been applied in the past to cases when students were cited for unauthorized access to university property.”

The demonstrators also expressed solidarity with students at Smith College who have occupied the College Hall administration building for two consecutive days, with Diana Sierra Becerra, an assistant professor of history at UMass who specializes in women’s history, filming a video of the protest to send to the Smith students. Sierra Becerra also read a statement from the Smith students who vowed to continue on their fight.

“We are resolved to stay and occupy this space until Smith divests,” the statement said. “We are following in a tradition of student organizing at Smith, particularly inspired by the 1986 student sit-in in this very building which drove Smith to divest from South African apartheid.”

Following the demonstration, Weber and several of the students entered the building to hand in a petition. Cedric De Leon, a professor of sociology and labor studies at UMass, led demonstrators in chants of “What do we want? Drop the charges!” and “This is what democracy looks like!”

Weber also introduced a new chant during the protest, to the tune of 1989 Biz Markie song “Just a Friend,” with protesters singing, “You, you should do the right thing! Drop the probation, or face escalation!”

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.