Statement on the repression of campus speech and police militarization
The CUPE 2278 Executive Committee approved the following statement in a meeting on March 17, 2025:"
As the CUPE 2278 executive committee, we watch in concern and alarm as essential campus freedoms are rapidly eroded for our colleagues in the United States (US). In the past few weeks, particularly at Columbia University alongside other universities throughout the US, student protestors who participated in anti-genocide peaceful protests have been targeted, expelled, and in some cases arrested and threatened with deportation. We are appalled at the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, as encouraged by the Trump administration, and at the US State department’s planned use of AI to profile the social media accounts of international students to revoke their visas. We affirm that all people, regardless of their status with respect to a settler-colonial state, have the intrinsic right to free speech and expression; the exploitation of status to target protestors is unconscionable and antithetical to equality for all people.
The erosion of essential freedoms runs concurrent with the erosion of union rights as well. Columbia University’s unprecedented expulsion and termination of the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local Union 2710, representing graduate student workers at that university, should put our entire labour movement on watch. Participation in a labour union should be a protected right for all workers, and Columbia’s symbolic targeting of a prominent union leader harkens back to a time where McCarthyist paranoia in the US enforced an ideological anti-union and anti-working class agenda, severely choking the power of working people.
Such denials of academic and labour freedoms have been made possible by excessive surveillance of student life by militarized police–a trend that has affected our members at UBC as well. Just a few weeks ago, armed RCMP officers in tactical gear appeared (without permission of the GSS [Graduate Student Society]) in the UBC GSS Loft and around campus. This followed the excessive police response to peaceful student protests against the ongoing genocide in Palestine and UBC’s ongoing complicity therein over the last year. In addition, the RCMP’s visit to the Ubyssey, in search of contact information for sources, challenges the sanctity of journalistic independence and reveals broader efforts to surveil and undermine lawful peaceful demonstrations on campus. We urge UBC to expand their protections for academic freedom and work alongside campus members and unions to oppose militarization and excessive policing and to make our campus safe for all community members.
We stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Columbia and in the United States more broadly and reaffirm the rights of students and workers to attend their jobs and classes without fear of surveillance and targeting by militarized police and the threat of expulsion or deportation. One of the ways that fascism operates is through the stifling of free speech and academic freedom. This is not just a US problem–campus speech suppression is alive and well on our own campuses in Canada as well. Now, more than ever, it is up to unions to stand up together for our basic rights and freedoms integral to a democratic society and fiercely oppose the imposition of fascism into our daily lives.
CUPE 2278 Executive Committee