I stand with SJP at University of Michigan-Dearborn

Use this template to send a letter in support of SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. To get fully informed on their difficulties in dealing with administration and advisors in silencing their voices, please read the December 14 article of the Arab American News detailing it all.

I stand with SJP at University of Michigan-Dearborn

Dear UM President Mark Schlissel, Chancellor Domenico Grasso, Dean Martin Hershock, and the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan,

I am writing to you to express my concern after reading the December 14th article in The Arab American News concerning the state of advocacy for Palestine on the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus. (https://www.arabamericannews.com/2018/12/14/u-of-m-dearborn-students-accuse-administrators-of-attemping-to-silence-them/)

I support the \"Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) in their demands to speak in their own voices, and I am disappointed and angry to hear that Palestinian students were pressured by the Director of the Center for Arab American Studies to meet behind closed doors with Regent Mark Bernstein, who was openly and aggressively hostile towards them during a Board of Regents meeting.

I stand with SJP at UM-Dearborn in affirming that the leadership on conversations, projects, and forums about facets of Arab American life and identity should be led by Arabs speaking in their own voices. I am concerned about the leadership of the Center and of the University, and I call on you, the University leadership, to be accountable to your constituents, the students of this institution.

I urge you to question and investigate the abuses of power occurring on the Dearborn campus. I further stand with SJP at UM-Dearborn in demanding a public apology from Regent Mark Bernstein in connection to his 2017 comments, where he referred to a divestment resolution as an “intellectually bankrupt and morally repugnant expression of anti-Semitism.” (https://www.michigandaily.com/section/administration/regents-discuss-union-renovations-and-divestment-controversial-meeting)

Advocacy for Palestinian human rights, including for BDS, does not equate to anti-Semitism, and I urge you all to join me in resisting this harmful conflation.

I call on the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters, Martin Hershock, to also apologize to the SJP students for his implication that student advocacy and organizing was done on behalf of a faculty member rather than as an expression of self-determination.

I acknowledge that students have and will exercise the right to speak on behalf of themselves and condemn the chilling of student advocacy and organizing on not only the Dearborn campus, but throughout the University system.

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