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Student Protests Have Wash U in the Hot Seat Over Its Ties to Boeing

Published

3 weeks ago

April 27, 2024

On April 13, activists blended in with a crowd of nearly 500 parents and prospective Washington University students as they entered Graham Chapel for Admitted Students Day. Partway through the event, they made their move.

Three students unfurled a banner, while 17 others marched to the stage while chanting for a free Palestine. Less than 30 minutes later armed police stormed in with zip ties.

Activists were given three warnings to disperse. Then the arrests began. Twelve people were arrested. Three students were suspended.

Nearly two weeks later, two Wash U students sit around a kitchen table in University City to talk about genocide.

The table is covered in political science and abolitionist texts and both students’ phones alert them consistently throughout the conversation. They have already spent a busy morning fielding texts from other organizers working to pressure the school to divest from Boeing and the work to organize future protests is in constant motion.

It is evident during the conversation that the protests are highly organized — with designated de-escalators, designated observers and photographers, and a clear distinction between who could risk arrest and who must be protected at all costs.

Daniel Cazares, a senior studying business and computer science, is one of three students who was suspended, and one of 12 activists slapped with court summons, for protesting inside the chapel.

He and Sonal Churiwal, a sophomore studying women, gender, and sexuality studies and political science, are both involved with Resist Wash U, an activist organization calling on the university to divest from Boeing amid Israel’s brutal attacks on Palestine.

Cazares tells RFT activists disrupted the event for admitted students because it is one of the final times the school has the opportunity to sell itself to potential students. Demonstrators wanted to make it clear to the prospective students and their parents that the school has close ties with Boeing.

While some parents and prospective students attending the event were adamantly opposed to the protest, others — particularly families of color — were sympathetic or spoke with protesters to learn more. “A few families actually stay behind in the chapel for at least 30-40 minutes with us, either throwing peace signs or chanting with us,” Cazares says.This helped give protesters courage because as the chanting continued, armed police entered the chapel, he says.

Rather than being taken to jail, the arrested protesters were issued court summons. Cazares believes that’s because the administration didn’t want photos of students being escorted in public view in handcuffs. (It’s also worth noting that what they were cited with — disturbing the peace and trespassing, municipal ordinance violations for unincorporated St. Louis County — are often handled without people being booked into jail.)

Churiwal remained outside with other students, alumni and activists to hold the line until all arrested protesters were released. They remained there for about two and a half hours, she says.

The arrested activists must now appear in St. Louis County’s municipal court in Hazelwood on June 4.

Cazares also received an email later that day saying he was suspended and banned from campus until the disciplinary process plays out. He wasn’t surprised. In November he’d received a warning, one complete with vague surveillance footage that administrators claim showed him hanging up Pro-Palestine posters on campus. Luckily Cazares was taking the semester off from classes and the suspension won’t impact his graduation date, he says.

One week later, on April 20, Churiwal says she was part of a group that organized a rally on campus. This time, it was the university’s alumni weekend.

Alumni, including a graduate student at Columbia who had been arrested at an encampment there, helped set up a Pro-Palestine encampment on the campus.

“We were making banners and we had food, and within minutes, the Washington University Police Department came over and they had a megaphone and they declared the encampment unlawful, gave us five minutes to leave, and said if we don’t leave, we’re gonna be arrested for trespassing,” Churiwal says.

Multiple departments responded — including the Wash U campus police, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, Richmond Heights Police and Clayton Police — surrounding the encampment with over half a dozen squad cars. At this point the police outnumbered students and alumni.

“To our knowledge we were not breaking any university policy,” Churiwal says.

After some back and forth with protesters, activists were told they were violating the campus’ space utilization policy. Churiwal says they asked what part of the policy was being violated but received no response.

“We were forced to leave and students were walked off campus if we didn’t leave,” she says. “It was clearly an intimidation tactic. […] The university is definitely on edge and definitely wants to shut things down before it has a chance to escalate.”

Wash U students are among the ranks of university students across the U.S. protesting the ongoing onslaught of Gaza and calling on their respective administrations to divest from companies like Boeing.

Wash U’s involvement with Boeing includes an accelerated leadership program, funding for scholarships and tuition discounts for Boeing employees. Boeing is one of the largest employers of Wash U graduates, she says.

In addition to taking direct action, Churiwal worked with Wash U’s student union to formally demand the university divest from Boeing and end those programs.

“Admin hasn’t even felt it necessary to communicate with us on it,” she says. “So if the institution is frustrated by direct action responses, we have also gone through the proper channels for advocacy, and receive absolutely no response.”

Faculty and staff have also expressed disappointment in the university’s attempts to suppress student protests and published a letter on Friday demanding the administration stop calling in armed police and reverse the student suspensions.

RFT asked Wash U by email whether police would be called to future protests, what the university’s response was to claims that these demonstrations have been treated differently than others in the past, and what comment the university had in response to calls to divest from Boeing.

Assistant Vice Chancellor for News & Media Relations Susan Killenberg McGinn emailed the following response: “We fully support free expression and will allow demonstrations that follow our policies. Our policy on Demonstrations and Disruptions is available here. Our policies apply to all demonstrations, regardless of the topic.”

While free speech issues on campus are receiving wide-spread media attention right now as police continue to arrest peaceful protestors from Columbia to the University of Texas, activists hope to keep the conversation centered around Palestine.

“St. Charles’ Boeing factory is the final stop where these planes, bombs, missiles go before getting shipped off to Israel,” Cazares says. “Not even the university but just by being in the city we are so tied to Boeing, and therefore also tied to the genocide that’s going on. So tied to these 40,000+ lives that have just been decimated and erased. It’s heartbreaking every day to be made complicit to that.”

Churiwal says one of the arguments student organizers have heard from the administration is that they shouldn’t be so concerned about Palestine because it is thousands of miles away.

“You all have PhDs, do you not see that the genocide is manifesting abroad but you are manufacturing it here?” she asks. “The genocide is happening in our backyard.”

Cazares adds that the protests have revealed the true attitudes of Wash U administrators.

“The real Wash U is a university that will not hesitate to send armed officers to physically police students, to put their hands on Black and brown student bodies,” he says.

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Mayor Wants Plan for Railway Exchange and Millennium Hotel by September

Published

3 days ago

May 17, 2024

Natural Bridge

Mayor Tishaura Jones held a press conference this morning with Greater St. Louis Inc. and the St. Louis Development Corporation asking them to create a plan to address two troubled downtown buildings: the Railway Exchange Building and Millenium Hotel.

In a post to X (formerly Twitter) Jones said she asked the two organizations “to deliver a plan for bold action” to address the buildings, which she says have been neglected for far too long.

“We want downtown to be [a] place where you can feel safe doing something or nothing,” Jones added. “We also want downtown to be a place to work collaboratively and build camaraderie.”

In a press release, Greater St. Louis Inc. said, “In addition to developing a plan in the next 120 days for the Railway Exchange Building and the Millennium Hotel, city and business leaders announced that work to revitalize 7th Street between Ballpark Village and the America’s Center is slated to begin in the coming weeks.”

This area of downtown was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal, which referred to the area as a “doom loop.”

Last session the St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed Board Bill 130, sponsored by Ward 8 Alderwoman Cara Spencer, authorizing a blight study and eminent domain for the area encompassing the Railway Exchange building and an adjacent parking garage.

RFT photojournalist Zach Linhares recently tagged along with urban explorers visiting the Railway Exchange Building, which once held the Famous-Barr department store — and found multiple groups of bored kids from the suburbs in a wildly dangerous setting.

“Inside was a scene straight from John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape From New York, famously filmed in St. Louis. Complete chaos. The place was pitch black, its glass panels smashed, with holes in every wall, collapsed ceilings, stairs falling apart, amateur graffiti on the walls and the remnants of wannabe arsonists trying to start fires,” he writes.

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Professor Suspended by Wash U After Protests Hears Only Silence

Published

3 days ago

May 17, 2024

Natural Bridge

Aaron Neiman was excited to move to St. Louis for a job as a lecturer at Washington University.

His position in the anthropology department was his first job after earning his Ph.D.

Before the April 27 protest on campus, he’d accepted a different position with the university, one that would allow him to spend more time on his research.

But the demonstration resulted in more than 100 arrests, including at least four faculty members. Six faculty members including Neiman were suspended from the university, and ordered to have no contact with students or colleagues.

Now he has no idea what will happen to his employment, where he stands with the university, or if he will be able to continue to call St. Louis home.

The Protest

At the start of the afternoon of April 27, Neiman stood under a cluster of trees with students, community members, alumni and other faculty members, protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Wash U’s ties to Boeing.

Neiman himself is Jewish, and sees his actions that day as allied with his heritage.

“I sort of see a through line between participating in the protests and Jewish values as such, you know, the idea that you have a responsibility to go and address wrong that you see in the world,” he says. “Why I attended that day specifically, was to support the students and to try to, if nothing else, show that they had support ideologically and materially, in terms of showing up … from at least some of their faculty.”

The protestors marched through campus and set up an encampment. Within about 30 minutes, Neiman says, police told protestors to disperse and they moved the encampment.

Police issued several warnings to disperse during the demonstration, but as afternoon turned to evening many police officers left and protestors began eating and praying. Then the officers came back, forming a line in front of the encampment and descended on the group, violently arresting dozens as the protestors locked arms around the encampment.

Neiman was one of the first to be pulled out of the circle and arrested. While Neiman wasn’t injured, the arrest was still violent.

“I was dragged, I was laying on my stomach. I was wearing a windbreaker because it started drizzling. I was picked up from the back by the hood so I couldn’t breathe briefly,” he says. Then he was walked to a waiting van for detainees. “It was a very chaotic moment. Lots of other people were also being arrested at the same time.”

They waited in the suffocatingly hot back of the paddy wagon for “at least an hour” as police continued to make round after round of arrest, he says.

The Aftermath

Neiman received his suspension letter from Wash U two days later. The letter from Provost Beverly Wendland is nearly a carbon copy of others shared with RFT and forbids him from contact with faculty or students.

It details some of the terms of his paid administrative leave, and towards the end of the letter includes this line: “Please note it is imperative that you not engage in any act of retaliation against anyone who provides information in connection with the investigation.”

Both Neiman and Brendan Roediger, the attorney advising him and a number of other impacted faculty, say it’s been nearly radio silence from the university since that initial letter.

No hearings have been spoken of or scheduled, Neiman says. On Monday (the same day as the university’s commencement ceremony), he and the other suspended faculty members lost all access to their university systems and email.

Neiman worries about the impact on his students.

“We have a lot of students going to med school, who I’ve promised letters to, and I outlined in the suspension appeal letter that this would be — they would be essentially collateral damage in this,” he says. “They either read it and didn’t care or didn’t read it because the email has been shut off.”

On May 7 Neiman sent the university’s Advisory Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure a letter appealing his suspension. He has not received a response other than an acknowledgement that it had been received.

“This extraordinary punishment threatens to give students and colleagues the false impression that I am being investigated for a much more serious infraction — one that would genuinely threaten the safety of students or colleagues, for example interpersonal violence, verbal abuse, or untoward sexual contact,” he points out in the letter.

Roediger tells RFT that the response from the university and their decision to suspend Neiman is disproportionate given that university policy typically deploys suspension only to those who stand accused of much more serious offenses, such as threats of physical harm, sexual misconduct or being intoxicated on the job. Yet he’s been suspended even though his arrest has yet to result in criminal charges.

“The administration has not yet produced any evidence whatsoever demonstrating either the allegedly imminent threat I posed on April 27, or on the allegedly general threat I pose to the University community as a whole,” Neiman writes in his appeal. “Nor have criminal charges been filed with the relevant authorities on behalf of the Washington University Police Department, nor any of the other police departments involved in making arrests that evening. Indeed, it does not seem that there are any charges to be discussed at all. I urge the administration to substantiate the very serious claims made in Provost Wendland’s letter as soon as possible.”

Neiman adds that it would be wrong to suspend him for any implications that he was specifically dangerous to the Jewish community on campus as he stood with Pro-Palestine protestors because he is Jewish.

“My ancestors include Talmudic scholars, Holocaust survivors, shtetl peasants, and working-class Brooklynites,” he writes. “I was raised Jewish and continue to cherish my Jewish identity, even in these extremely fractured times for our people. I reject any implication that I pose a threat to fellow Jewish students or colleagues as itself an antisemitic negation of my Jewishness.”

Washington University did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, the university has said it cannot discuss personnel matters.

“There’s no communication and no sense of what this investigation entails or when it could possibly be over,” Roediger says.

Next Steps

Roediger, a Wash U alum, says the university’s silence and actions at the April 27 protest are new to the institution, but suspensions are not.

“The use of suspensions is sort of one of the primary tools of private universities around the country,” he says, noting that long-term suspensions create less risk for the university.

“It’s what [the] general counsel tells universities to do,” he says. “Put folks on paid suspension, make the process as vague and complicated and endless as possible, and in the meantime, we’ll figure out what the next steps are. And hopefully some of these people will just go away.”

Roediger takes issue with the university’s demand that suspended faculty have no contact with colleagues and students even off-campus. Roediger says he has never seen a clause like this implemented before, and doesn’t know how it could be.

“It’s not illegal to write that in a letter. I don’t know how one would enforce it,” he says.

No one knows what comes next, Roediger says.

“Everyone is afraid that they will still be in this status a month from now, two months from now, six months from now,” he says. “That … what Washington University wants is this: Nobody knows what’s happening. Nobody knows what the future holds.”

RFT asked Roediger if he anticipates suing Wash U on behalf of faculty members like Neiman.

“I certainly hope not,” he says. “These are folks who want to get back to serving their students and they want to give back to serving their students quickly. These are folks engaged in extensive research projects that they want to return to. These are not folks that are hungry for litigation. But if Washington University continues in the direction that it’s heading, it seems unavoidable.”

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St. Louis Man Is Innocent in 36-Year-Old Rape Case, Lawyers Say

Published

3 days ago

May 17, 2024

Natural Bridge

The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office has agreed to review the 1988 rape conviction of a man whose attorneys say was targeted by police.

Fredrico Lowe-Bey has been in prison for more than 30 years after being found guilty of raping a woman who was abducted in the early morning hours of May 21, 1988, in the city’s Tiffany neighborhood. The victim had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend and began walking home, but a man pulled up in a car, jumped out and dragged her into an alley, where he sexually assaulted her.

Lowe-Bey, then 27, was arrested the next day after the victim identified him, saying she recognized him “”from the neighborhood.” By the end of the year, he had been found guilty on three counts related to the attack, including forcible rape, forcible sodomy and tampering with a witness, and sentenced to 85 years in prison.

However, Lowe-Bey’s attorneys now say that he was targeted by two police officers, Rubin Haman and James Long, with whom he’d had prior run-ins.

Jamala Rogers, the executive director of Organization for Black Struggle, a criminal justice reform organization, says that the two arresting officers had it out for Lowe-Bey because he was a member of the Moorish Science Temple of America, an organization whose activities law enforcement have historically taken a keen interest in.

Lowe-Bey’s legal team includes Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey-based nonprofit, and Rick Sindel, a St. Louis-based attorney with a long history of post-conviction appeals.

A press release from Lowe-Bey’s attorneys says the two officers who arrested him for the rape had previously arrested him on “trumped-up” narcotics charges, a case that fell apart when it went to trial. Lowe-Bey had also previously filed an internal affairs complaint against the two men.

The 1988 rape arrest, Lowe-Bey’s attorneys say, was the result of Haman and Long’s “one year campaign to secure revenge on Lowe-Bey.”

The jury in 1988 was not allowed to hear about Lowe-Bey’s previous drug arrest by the two officers and the subsequent acquittal.

The attorneys also say that when evidence in the rape case was tested for DNA, there were no matches to Lowe-Bey. The victim in the case also reported her attacker had “scary” freckles; Lowe-Bey’s features are unfreckled.

Rogers says that during the case, the victim became a “pawn” of the prosecution. She has since passed, leaving what Lowe-Bey’s attorneys say is “a travesty of justice behind for a new circuit attorney to sort out.”

Lowe-Bey’s legal team previously presented the case for review to the Circuit Attorney’s Office when it was run by Kim Gardner, to no avail.

Under current Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore, the Conviction Integrity Unit is run by retired Missouri Supreme Court Justice George Draper.

Asked whether Gore’s office is taking wrongful conviction reviews seriously, Rogers says, “We’ll see.”

Christine Bertelson, a spokeswoman for Gore’s office, confirms that the Conviction Integrity Unit agreed to review the case, saying, “There is no timetable for the review process, which is just beginning.” In 1991, the officers behind Lowe-Bey’s arrest, Haman and Long, were at the center of a police brutality lawsuit after roughing up a 22-year-old woman while arresting her in the Fox Park neighborhood. A jury awarded the woman $10,000 in damages.

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