No way to educate: Brown needs to drop charges against protesters | Opinion

Matt Garza is a Brown University Class of 2011 alumnus and activist. Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor is a Class of 2013 alumnus and sitting member of the Brown University Community Council.

We implore Brown University President Christina Paxson and Brown’s leadership to drop the criminal charges against the Brown Divest Coalition 41.

We believe in the power of diverse communities coming together to engage in critical and compassionate discourse and practice and hope to address the foundational injustice embodied by Brown’s arrest and pursuit of criminal charges against the BDC 41 — the 41 students, predominantly Black and Indigenous and students of color who organized a peaceful on-campus protest on Dec. 11, 2023, calling on President Paxson to bring a divestment resolution to the corporation in support of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

More: Brown University hunger strike ends. But students didn't get what they wanted.

We also ​​call on our community to discourage Brown’s use of public resources to pursue a lawsuit against the peaceful on-campus protests of its own students.

Brown’s enduring refusal to drop the charges against the BDC 41 contradicts and dismembers the open curriculum and sets a dangerous precedent for future on-campus organizing, especially after dismissing the charges against the 20 Brown students in Jews for Ceasefire Now, who engaged in a peaceful protest similar in nature and in alignment with the mission of the BDC 4, on Nov. 8, 2023.

During a recent faculty meeting, President Paxson is reported to have claimed that if [Brown] dropped the charges, they would have no tools to make sure that students understand their responsibilities and the consequences. It troubles us that the leader of any school would feel that the criminal justice system is the best and only tool to educate, when there are such profoundly more effective evidence-based pedagogies and philosophical methods to education.

Brown’s decision to arrest the BDC 41 endangers the culture of Brown’s pedagogy towards one of fear, suppression, and the punitive criminalization of critical perspective, contradicting the charge Brown gave itself in its Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2006, establishing “the importance within the Brown community of continued inward examination and ongoing accountability for the profound consequences of racial slavery, including systemic racism and economic inequality.”

Does Brown want to persecute its own students into the criminal justice system or teach them to be deeply creative thinkers, intellectual risk-takers and global problem-solvers? Even if Brown’s leadership believes the BDC 41 didn’t design and facilitate their protest effectively, Brown, as an institution for learning, has a responsibility to engage these students in reflection, feedback, dialogue, authentic listening, responsive action and care-centered practice. Create a syllabus with students, not a criminal record.

More: From Cambodia to financial aid, a history of protests at Brown University

If Brown is not honoring its powerful history of on-campus student organizing and its institutional commitment to facilitate critically diverse spaces of learning for its students, then how could you expect students not to scream and shout and do anything necessary to get your attention?

Together, we have an opportunity to demonstrate humility; to show the world a process where institutions and people and communities can move through painful tensions tenderly, with skillful compassion and intellectual rigor. Let’s move forward together. Brown, we beg of you, please drop the charges against these passionate students and take the time to facilitate a meaningful dialogue that seeks a non-criminalizing resolution.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: The 41 students organized a protest on Dec. 11 to call for a divestment resolution in support of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.