Dear President Cudd,

We are appalled that you have made the decision to investigate and discipline PSU student groups, graduate students, PSU Vanguard employees, and faculty members in response to a peaceful protest of PSU’s relationship with The Boeing Company. You have used your position to subject a group of mostly BIPOC students to a McCarthyite campaign of retribution, when they have done nothing but speak out against one of the great moral catastrophes of our age. We call upon you to rescind the retaliatory measures taken against Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER) and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA), and to drop any outstanding investigations or disciplinary actions against other students, staff, and faculty. We also call upon you to take your students’ demands seriously and reexamine PSU’s partnership with Boeing–a partnership that links the entire PSU community to a military contractor profiting from war crimes.

We condemn your assertion that protestors were violent toward the PSU Board of Trustees and campus security, when all evidence available widely on social media points to the contrary: that PSU armed security were physically violent toward the demonstrators. We condemn your decision to sow discord among your own faculty body and administrative personnel by alleging, during Faculty Senate meetings and other public events, that protestors committed acts of “violence”–conflating chants and minimal, reversible property damage with bodily harm. We reject your use of the word “evacuation” to describe the voluntary relocation of the board meeting in response to the protest, and likewise find your use of the word “molestation” in your recent interview with the PSU Vanguard slanderous and offensive. We roundly reject the assertion that Board Members were unsafe during this protest, when students and faculty members are now faced with retaliatory disciplinary action that puts them in a position of precarity and further marginalization. It is racist and defamatory to treat students and faculty of color as though they constitute a particular threat to campus safety.

Your hostility to protest is moreover a slap in the face to your PSU students of Palestinian descent, who have seen dozens of family members–entire branches of family trees–buried under rubble or torn apart by Israeli armaments supplied by the United States. As you said in your Vanguard interview, students, staff, and faculty of every background deserve to feel safe on campus. But “safety” does not mean protection from facts that may be hard to hear. It is a fact that Israel is carrying out a campaign in Gaza that has been found plausibly genocidal by the highest international court in the world. It is a fact that Israel is intentionally starving Gazans by blocking aid. It is a fact that the United Nations Security Council has called for an immediate ceasefire. It is a fact that the United States is funding and enabling Israel’s actions. And, relevant to the events on the PSU campus, it is a fact that since October 7, Boeing has been fast-tracking the manufacture and transfer of deadly weapons to Israel for murderous use on a trapped civilian population.

Your condescending dismissal of the protestors’ demands as being “loosely related to a ceasefire” during a faculty senate meeting is a deflection from their concrete call to end PSU’s relationship with Boeing–a company, it should be noted, that is also the subject of scandal and legal scrutiny for shoddy management and safety practices that have led to hundreds of deaths on passenger airlines. Why should PSU insist on being one of only 13 Boeing supply-chain focused universities? Why should you insist on maintaining ties to a company that, as you yourself stated in your press release, provides no more than a few thousand dollars in student internship money? Washington University in St. Louis recently voted to divest from Boeing, and many academic institutions have voted to divest from Israeli financial products after pressure from similarly conscientious students–the University of California at Davis, McGill University, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Houston, to name only a few.

PSU protests are part of a rich American tradition of campus war resistance. The most significant student protest movements, namely against the Vietnam and Iraq wars, have been resoundingly, and tragically, vindicated by history. In a nation that has condemned the deaths of civilians on October 7, university leaders should welcome the use of nonviolent tools to resist occupation, apartheid, and human rights abuses. Protest and divestment campaigns (of which the Boeing campaign is a part) are tried and true–and indisputably nonviolent–methods that have been used to redress injustices including the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Your choices while in office have shown little regard for the wellbeing and equal rights of BIPOC students and colleagues at PSU, despite your public statements of commitment to DEI initiatives on campus. The mandate of your Presidential Task Force, which is meant to “build community through dialogue” across “cultures, faiths, identities and experiences,” rings hollow when you have created an atmosphere of fear among the students and faculty of color you purport to value.

We acknowledge the difficult position of administrators juggling the conflicting beliefs and sincere pain of a broad swathe of their students, staff, and faculty. But facing facts is part of being a leader, and the facts in Gaza are irrefutable, difficult though they may be. You hastened to remind your Vanguard interlocutors that you are only seven months into your tenure as PSU President. We–a broad coalition of PSU alumni, current students, staff, and faculty, as well as their allies nationwide–urge you to change course on the censure of members of your campus community, and to consider their reasonable demands. Otherwise, your presidency will be defined by a callous if not outright racist disregard for marginalized students, and by a tremendous failure to meet this historic moment.