U Can Stay Feigning — A Tale of Repression and Hypocrisy at UCSF

The following has been endorsed by the student boards of the following organizations at UCSF: Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, Pride in Medicine, Human Rights Collaborative, and South Asian Medical Student Association.

WCNSF — Would you be able to guess what this medical acronym stands for? 

As healthcare profession trainees, we encounter hundreds of acronyms and end up using several dozen in our day-to-day work. Acronyms reflect the material conditions faced by their creator. 

In this case, WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family,” was invented merely months ago in Gaza, where a ravaging American-backed Israeli genocide necessitated healthcare workers document this common occurrence in the hospitals to rapidly triage injured children. The WCNSF written on children’s arms is shorthand for the past, current, and future trauma Palestinian children endure.

For the past ten months, healthcare workers in the U.S. have sorely witnessed their colleagues in Gaza get tortured, bombed, and killed with munitions and impunity provided by our government, funded by our tax dollars. We have seen children in Gaza pulverized, dismembered, burnt, and finally, put in pieces into plastic bags. 

UCSF — a leader in global health — decided to respond to this public health crisis by initiating a relentless campaign of repression against its own trainees, faculty, and staff members who chose to take a principled stance against these crimes against humanity and mass slaughter. UCSF leadership insisted that discussing this genocide in the workplace or classrooms was unprofessional due to the discomfort it brought to some colleagues.

Wearing symbols of solidarity, such as a watermelon pin, was deemed detrimental to patient care because some patients were uncomfortable seeing support for Palestinians. Concerns about the supremacist political ideology of Zionism in affecting health outcomes were dishonestly framed as antisemitic — even when raised by people of Jewish faith. 

Provost Lucey did, however, invite UC Berkeley Professor and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies Ron Hassner, who wrote a book called “Anatomy of Torture” to promote academic dialogue. In that conversation, Provost Lucey nodded affirmatively as Hassner characterized the UCSF encampment as antisemitic and devalued Palestinian and Middle Eastern lives. 

Furthermore, despite overwhelming opposition from the UCSF employees, trainees, and students, the UCSF Office of Diversity and Outreach sponsored Elan Carr on campus, who previously incited violence against students at UCLA,thus gravely harming many members of the UCSF community.

It is clear that UCSF values the comfort of people who hold Zionist beliefs and maintain anti-Palestinian bias over the right of Palestinians to life. By conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, UCSF manipulates the dialogue to prevent substantive disagreement about the violence confronting Palestinians as Israel’s genocide continues, despite widespread international condemnation and against the will of a vast majority of Californians, the people we serve.

Recently, the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Sam Hawgood, threatening to withdraw funding due to concerns about “antisemitism,” citing examples by UCSF faculty who have taken principled stances over the course of their esteemed and internationally renowned careers to stand against racism and its role in creating poor health. Genocide is the most egregious example of racism.

Silencing our opposition to genocide is a form of abetment to what the International Court of Justice, numerousinternational law experts, and human rights organizations, including the Israeli organization B’Tselem, have deemed genocide and even crimes against humanity. Before UCSF capitulates to the demands of genocidaires in Congress — which it will — we are attaching our letter to the UCSF leadership signed by 156 medical students, 38 nursing students, 21 dentistry students, and 32 students from other disciplines.

This letter garnered no response.

May 28, 2024

To Chancellor Hawgood, UC Regents, EVCP Lucey, and Other UCSF Leadership:

As students, many of us chose to attend graduate and professional school at UCSF over institutions of equal caliber due to the school’s outwardly progressive P.R.I.D.E. values and long legacy of student-led activism for just causes. We are writing to you because we share a profound sense of disappointment in Chancellor Hawgood’s recent decision to dismantle the peaceful UCSF Free Palestine Encampment outside of Kalmanovitz Library, his refusal to negotiate with Encampment organizers, and his refusal to acknowledge and address the ongoing genocide in Gaza despite numerous meetings with and letters from UCSF students, faculty, and staff over the past 8 months. These actions make it clear that UCSF’s alleged progressivism, commitment to diversity, and newly released Anti-Oppression Curriculum are merely fronts for the institution’s ongoing complicity in oppression and settler-colonial violence toward marginalized groups – most notably the Palestinian people.

On May 18, 2024, Chancellor Hawgood instructed the UC Police Department (UCPD) to launch a hostile raid and completely dismantle the non-violent UCSF Free Palestine Encampment. Prior to the raid, UCSF had already taken the following actions:

1. Ordered UCPD to conduct two violent “sweeps” of the Encampment (video evidence available).
2. Permitted UCPD to illegally steal the property of UCSF affiliates.
3. Significantly increased the number of police officers with guns at our school.
4. Shut down Kalmanovitz Library for a week to serve as UCPD headquarters, disrupting student learning.
5. Installed military-grade infrared surveillance cameras with AI-driven technology to monitor the Encampment AND the main entries to the Clinical Sciences and Medical Sciences buildings, where most classes are held.

Chancellor Hawgood’s response deviates markedly from the actions taken by all other UC Chancellors and institutions, in that every other UC school has agreed to initiate negotiations with anti-genocide activists. We believe that the suppression of free speech among UCSF students, faculty, patients, and staff stems from institutional ties to the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which has donated a total of $1.15 billion to UCSF. The Helen Diller Family Foundation (HDFF) is an Islamophobic non-profit organization that routinely funds hate groups. HDFF has donated $100,000 to Canary Mission, a site that doxxes pro-Palestine anti-war activists and features multiple UCSF students and faculty. HDFF also funded the American Freedom Defense Initiative (an anti-Muslim extremist group) and Project Veritas (a far-right anti-abortion Evangelical hate group). Despite these and other actions by HDFF, many on-campus buildings continue to bear Helen Diller’s name.

An examination of the history of student protests in the 20th century offers substantial evidence that time will once again vindicate the cause of Palestinian liberation from Israel’s apartheid regime and ongoing ethniccleansing campaign. From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, students organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War on college campuses across the nation. Students at Columbia College occupied Hamilton Hall in1968 – the same building that pro-Palestine activists seized and renamed “Hind’s Hall” this year. In May of1970, the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia led students at nearly 900 college campuses to stagemass strikes and walk-outs. The National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State who participated in the strike, which further galvanized the movement.

Furthermore, student protests in the mid-1980s helped catalyze the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These anti-apartheid demonstrations ultimately prompted 155 universities to divest from companies that continued to do business with the South African government, and U.S. Congress quickly followed suit. At UC Berkeley, students organized their first large-scale anti-apartheid demonstration in December of 1984, and these protests continued until 1986. The most famous demonstration occurred in the spring of 1985 after the University of California voted not to divest from holdings with ties to South Africa, which led students to organize a week-long sit-in at Sproul Plaza. In response to this sit-in, UC Berkeley officials authorized armed police in riot gear to violently arrest 158 students. In July of 1986, the University of California finally voted to divest its $3.1 billion in holdings at companies complicit in the South African apartheid – the largest divestment in the country. Today, the University of California brags about this history of anti-apartheid activists while withholding key details about police brutality towards UC students on its website.

Through the lens of hindsight, University of California officials and the broader public regard the actions of these brave students and anti-genocide protestors as just. Simultaneously, UCSF leadership has continued to re-enact similar policies and procedures to those of the protests of the 1960s and 1980s. We condemn these actions and urge Chancellor Hawgood, EVCP Lucey, and other UCSF leadership to contact pro-Palestine organizers to discuss the following demands:

1. DIVEST from all companies, programs, and organizations profiting from and aiding in the occupation and genocide.
2. DELINK from any Israeli universities, organizations, and institutions that are complicit in the genocide through academic boycotts.
3. REINVEST in Palestinian Studies programs and support for Palestinian students/faculty affected by the genocide.
4. AMNESTY for students, faculty, and community members who protest the genocide and who call for liberation.
5. POLICE ABOLITION by cutting ties with police departments, ceasing the use of military weapons on campus, and creating a community-controlled system of safety.
6. CORRECT THE NARRATIVE by calling for an end to the occupation and acknowledging that anti-Zionism ≠ anti-Semitism.

Chancellor Hawgood, UC Regents, and EVCP Lucey: Why does UCSF oppose every war except the current one? Why does the school endorse all civil rights movements except for the one going on right now?