Students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, are calling for a boycott of classes and campus activities during a four-day span next week when Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and Steve Bannon are expected to speak on campus.
More than 170 professors and graduate students at Berkeley signed an open letter titled “Boycott the Alt-Right @UCBerkeley” that called on faculty to cancel clases, close campus buildings and allow staff to remain at home from Sept. 24 to Sept. 27. The group also said that students who decide not to attend classes that are held should not be punished.
“Milo, Coulter and Bannon do not come to educate; they and their followers come to humiliate and incite,” the signers said in their letter. “If the administration insists upon allowing the Alt-Right to occupy the center of our campus for four days to harass, threaten and intimidate us, as they did during Milo’s visit in February, then faculty cannot teach, staff cannot work and students cannot learn.”
Yiannopoulos, Coulter and Bannon are scheduled to attend “Free Speech Week” at Berkeley, which includes four days of rallies and speeches. The event is a collaboration between Yiannopoulos and a conservative campus publication called the Berkeley Patriot.
Though there is a call from some on campus to boycott classes and campus activities, it’s not clear if “Free Speech Week” will move forward as expected.
Event organizers haven’t paid the required fees and rent for the space on campus, university officials said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, students helping orchestrate “Free Speech Week” haven’t made the necessary security arrangements.
The Berkeley Patriot has missed the deadlines to confirm use of the campus facilities, according to the Daily Californian.
Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at Berkeley in February, but the speech was canceled after violent protests, blamed on “150 masked agitators,” erupted. The university said the protests caused $100,000 in damage to Berkeley’s campus.
His presence next week, coupled with the stabbing of a University of Maryland student, the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., and the stabbing deaths of two people on a train in Portland, Ore., heightened the need for the boycott, the signers of the letter said.
“As faculty committed to the safety of our students and our campus, we are calling for a complete boycott of all classes and campus activities while these Alt-Right events are taking place at the very center of UC Berkeley’s campus,” they wrote. “As faculty we cannot ask students and staff to choose between risking their physical and mental safety in order to attend class or come to work in an environment of harassment, intimidation, violence and militarized policing.”
