The following is a letter from a member of the Refuse and Resist Chapter at the Univ. of Arizona and an organizer with World Can’t Wait-Drive out the Bush Regime. Along with the college’s attacks on World Can’t Wait, the university has denied funding to another progressive/radical student group SDS ( Students for a Democratic Society) this past month.
Dear President Shelton,
We are representatives of Refuse & Resist, a student group here at the University of Arizona. We are writing to request a meeting with you to discuss some troubling recent events, which have left us feeling that our student group is being unfairly singled out by the UA Police Department and Veda Kowalski, the Associate Dean of Students.
Two examples help to demonstrate this. We had planned on having an all-day music and art festival on the UA Mall on Saturday, November 4. We went through all the proper channels and had our event approved by Mall Services. However, in the week before the event, we were presented with steadily escalating requirements for our event by Veda and the UAPD. Finally, just three days before the event, we were told that we had to pay $1600 for the UAPD to provide security. We had previously been told that we did not need any security because there was no foreseeable threat. This sudden requirement forced the cancellation of our event, into which we had put considerable time and resources. The festival was going to be one of our major events of the semester.
We were told that security would be necessary because we had anticipated attendance, at any given time, to be between 50 to 100. However, another student group had an event on the Mall that weekend that had the same attendance estimate – and they were not required to have any security.
Indeed, it seems that none of the demands made of us were made of this other group. Clearly, different standards were being applied to Refuse & Resist. Our suspicion is that someone decided that our event was not going to be allowed and that policy was made (or enforced) on that basis.
The other example is even more troubling. We had been asked by the UA Debate Club to participate in a public debate on the question of civil liberties. Due to a miscommunication between our groups, we got the date of the debate wrong – we thought it was November 10 when it is actually November 17. The erroneous date was used on a notice on our website, where it was clearly indicated that the Debate Club was sponsoring the event. (The website is http://tucsonworldcantwait.org/Home.html. It has not been updated since these events.)
What happened next is the troubling part. The UAPD, which evidently routinely monitors our site and possibly our MySpace account, saw the notice. They then called Mall Services, which checked and found that there was a different event scheduled for the Alumni Plaza on that day (most likely a Homecoming event). We then received a rather angry phone call accusing of us of having an unapproved event which could disrupt the event actually planned for that day.
First, we are simply outraged that the UAPD is monitoring our website. Such surveillance is a tactic appropriate for a police state, not a university. We feel quite adamantly that such monitoring, of us or any other group, should stop immediately. Second, the fact that the UAPD called Mall Services suggests that they were looking for some kind of problem. On the face of it, there was no reason whatsoever to contact anybody – it was simply a short announcement of an event. We doubt seriously that the UAPD has a policy of checking on every single event by every single student group to make sure that they have turned
in all the right forms. And since the announcement clearly stated that the Debate Club was sponsoring the event, why were accusations made towards Refuse & Resist? Why were we even called? Why was the suggestion made to Mall Services by the UAPD that we were planning on disrupting a University event?
Refuse & Resist has been active on the UA campus for more than four years. We are committed to making our university an intensely democratic space, with full, open and public wrangling over ideas, beliefs, and policies – and not just among its students but among the community more generally. We have put on scores of diverse events (forums, film showings, rallies, etc), in which
many thousands of students and community members have participated. We have brought nationally recognized authors and experts to the campus – our next event, assuming the UAPD will let us have it, will be a major lecture by Rev. John Fife.
We will continue doing this. But we are very concerned that these recent events are setting in place a pattern, if not a policy, of unfairly targeting a student group and, further, of the outright suppression of free speech and political debate. We would very much like to meet with you to discuss this.