Dear UCLA Anthropology Community

We are writing to express our grave distress over the horrific events that have transpired last week at UCLA. We know that faculty, students, and staff alike have been deeply impacted by the violent unprovoked attacks that happened on Tuesday night and the shocking police raid and arrests that happened the next night at the encampment.  We are deeply troubled by the pain, trauma, and hurt that these tragic events have caused our community. We also know that there is still much uncertainty about where our campus community goes from here, as today’s ongoing current events on campus attest.

In the meantime, we impress upon the University leadership the need to:

• Release a public statement acknowledging (and condemning) the University’s failure to protect students’ and colleagues’ safety and right to free speech.
• Conduct an independent investigation into the timeline, decisions, and actions of the University administration from the time of the encampment’s founding until its destruction.
• Provide amnesty and legal support for all students, staff, and faculty facing legal jeopardy.
• Provide assistance to injured students through payment of their medical bills.
• Engage the matter of disclosure and broad divestment from military weapons production companies and systems beginning with the formation of a committee made up of students, faculty, staff, akin to the one that has already been ratified at UC Riverside and amongst other universities in recent weeks.

Signed,

Members of the UCLA Anthropology Executive Committee

There has never been a better time to study Anthropology — nor a better place to study it than UCLA. Examining the complexity of the human experience, past and present, our discipline encompasses the full sweep of the world’s cultures across time.

Anthropologists investigate such challenging questions as how humans evolved and came to adapt to diverse environments, what led to the rise of urban life, what causes disease and death, how people imbue their lives with meaning, and how language reflects and shapes social life. Anthropology seeks to draw back the curtain on humankind’s most vexing problems from intractable political conflicts to the human consequences of globalization. Anthropologists also study such contemporary issues as how the new media influences the ways we experience the world and how individuals and families balance the increasingly diverse demands in their lives. – Read more