To whom this may concern,
I am an experimental filmmaker and third-year Ph.D. student in Visual and Performing Arts at UTD. I have moved from France to come study in this program, for which I received a five-year scholarship in the form of a film teaching assistantship appointment. However, I have decided to drop out of my Ph.D. at UTD following the university’s announcement in April that UTD had begun terminating employment without a grace period for all students whose visas had been revoked by the Republican administration, as is arbitrarily the case for thousands of students nationwide.
UTD’s decision to fire all these worker-students is in line with the university’s administration’s politics for the past two years: refusal to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine or to divest from the weapon manufacturers benefiting from it; censorship of the student newspaper The Mercury after it covered the student protests and voiced its support of Palestine; violent arrest of student, staff and faculty protesters peacefully exercising their freedom of speech; banning students from attending graduation over the fear of disruption; and so on.
The statement President Benson emailed to the entire university on Oct. 16, 2023, completely left out the Palestinian civilians massacred by the IDF following the Oct. 7 attack and solely expressed solidarity with the people of Israel. I emailed him twice, urging him to extend his empathy to the Palestinians too, at a time the United Nations had already qualified the bombing of hospitals and blockade of access to electricity, food, and water in Gaza as ethnic cleansing. He did not reply. Just like he ignored for months the requests of the members of UTD’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to meet until SJP was left with no other option but to carry out a seven-hour long sit-in in the administration’s building. Such a lack of response to a genocide from a university is appalling and irresponsible.
This most recent move feels like an irrecoverable betrayal of all the values of an institution of higher education. We are living through terrifying times for migrants in this country, and universities should be a haven for the most vulnerable communities, not traitors to them. The role of a university is not to preempt the desires of a fascist government like a well-trained lackey, but to build the tools to resist its violent, oppressive ideology by all means necessary. It would be bad faith not to withhold my labor from a university that teaches Edward Saïd in the morning, then calls the state troopers on its students in the afternoon over the exercise of their right to protest a genocide. Such a position is morally not tenable to me; therefore, I quit.
The professors on my committee — that is, the faculty members who accompany me in my research project — have reached out in solidarity with me, and I am grateful for this. However, I have seen no mass movement among faculty to oppose this genocide. At a university with so many Arab students who cannot stand up for fear of losing their visa, it is the faculty’s job to make students feel safe on campus, as only they can make a difference. A part of the student body is already doing this work; it is about time professors begin stepping in en masse. A meaningful resistance through a collective movement from the faculty would have made this place an environment where I could have stayed.
Since my livelihood in the U.S. depended on my student visa, which was terminated following my resignation, I have moved out of the country to begin a new Ph.D. at Central Saint Martins college at the University of the Arts London. I invite other graduate students who are able to quit UTD to do so in a mass collective resignation to protest this morally bankrupt institution.
I stand in solidarity with Professor Ali Asgar Alibhai, who is suing the university over his violent arrest and the discrimination he claims he was a victim of following the arrest. It is unfortunate that the school’s administration displays such disdain for the people who make this university. To be so at odds with its students and faculty is unsettling to say the least. Most importantly, I stand in solidarity with Palestine.
Until liberation,
Célia Hay
MFA in Photography and National Higher Degree in Visual Expression (MA).