By the time the tear gas came we were ready for it. The police had already been gathering for hours along the university’s serpentine walls, forming ranks and donning battle gear. I’d dashed home and grabbed my camera, then talked my way back past the officers securing the perimeter against the thousands of students who’d come running from dorms and libraries to witness the standoff.

“I’m a professor,” I told a cop. “I need to be with my students.”

I pulled out my camera near a portico where, the night before, administrators told us they were pleased with how peaceful the student encampment was. They even thanked us for our work. This, it turned out, would be the first in a string of untruths the University of Virginia would tell in an attempt to vilify their own students and faculty.

Then the police started to march. I will never forget the screams as the mace was sprayed across the students’ bodies. Many of them were mine, students I had taught in class, students who chose to think deeply about the horrors of the world, and who were now brave enough to do something about them. I remember how helpless I felt in that moment, and how ashamed I was that I could not protect them. All I could do was take photos.

The University of Virginia is a strange place. It sees itself as an elite institution, capable of driving national discourse, but, because of its relative seclusion in the rural South, student movements do not receive the same media attention or community support as their peers at Columbia or UCLA. When our students created the UVA Encampment for Gaza on April 30, they did so with the understanding that no one else would come to their aid, and that whatever happened to them would happen in isolation, largely unrecognized by the national media. The only way to document the impending police violence, we knew, was to do it ourselves.

I was part of a small group of professors who’d worked to keep the encampment safe. Every student movement is different, and at UVA, the students had asked that, instead of participating in the encampment directly, faculty act as liaisons between them and an increasingly hostile administration.

In truth, the encampment was respectful possibly to a fault. Their single letter to the administration demanded the university divest from all institutions involved in genocide but stopped short of calling for the resignation of anyone at UVA. Other than the odd speech delivered over megaphone, the protest was so unobtrusive, so tucked away, that even after three days several students in my classes were shocked to learn there was even an encampment at all.

We faculty members took shifts to sit with the encampment around the clock, including through the night. Nights were when the students were subjected to the most verbal abuse, as drunk college kids—usually young men in polo shirts—would wander by. “I hope you all die,” shouted one student. My colleague tracked him down and reported him to the administration. Nothing, as far as we know, was ever done.

Instead, the administration was hyperfocused on prohibiting the encampment from erecting tents. Graduation was around the corner, and it seemed they did not want an “eyesore” on the otherwise pristinely manicured grounds. The students had generally obeyed, but on the fourth night it had begun to rain, and, after a Shabbat vigil, they raised several tents to keep dry. When UVA police chief Tim Longo demanded the students take them down, they politely referred him to a university policy that, by their interpretation, stated the tents were permissible.

A tense late-night negotiation ensued between the encampment and police, but by midnight or so the matter seemed resolved, and the students were allowed to keep the tents up. Several administrators thanked the faculty liaisons for facilitating level-headed communication. “You have my word,” Tim Longo told us, “this isn’t a ploy.”

Less than ten hours later, the police stormed in—from local, county, and state. From my vantage point in the portico, they appeared as a roiling mass of shields, tasers, bulletproof vests, armored vehicles, and so many varieties of guns I could not identify them all. Over a hundred men dressed like soldiers in order to “combat” approximately 15 students sleeping in tents, politely asking that their tuition dollars no longer be spent to drop bombs on the heads of children. Now more of that money would be spent to injure them as well.

In the end, 27 people were arrested—including those in the encampment, but also mere bystanders. Many more were maced and bludgeoned.

We would learn later that, right before the police charged, UVA had quietly changed the policy that students had cited, removing the language protecting their tents. This new “infraction” was what supposedly triggered the beatings, but none of the students—nor anyone else—was informed of it beforehand.

As I snapped photos of the melee, an officer blocked my camera and said he would arrest me if I did not retreat to the crowd. I decided then to also start recording video on my phone.

To my right, I spotted an older faculty member being jostled by police. She walked with a cane, and I rushed to steady her before she was knocked to the ground. This only agitated the cops further, and an officer no more than a few yards away pointed a gun directly in my face.

Later, I learned the gun shot “pepper balls,” supposedly non-lethal rounds, but in the moment I had no idea, and I remember the peculiarity of wondering if this was how I was about to die. In a strange coincidence, or perhaps not so strange, it was May 4, the anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, when police shot and killed four students and injured nine others protesting the Vietnam War.

Then, a stranger—who I would later learn was a local photographer named Kristen Finn—came to help. “At your own pace,” Kristen was saying to my colleague, “go at your own pace,” when an officer yanked her behind police lines. Kristen had not even faced the cops directly, let alone touched them, but they claimed she had attacked first. She would face felony charges for battery of an officer.

These were the people UVA administrators summoned to ambush their own students. Liars, bullies, brutes.

Fortunately, I was still recording.

The University of Virginia fancies itself one of the country’s premier “free speech” universities. Right-wing speakers of all stripes regularly prance about the campus, including antitrans activists, war apologists, and conservative economists advocating the end of social welfare. It is safe to say that no right-wing event has ever been met with the same police violence the encampment suffered.

The most infamous example of this, of course, was the Unite the Right rally of 2017, in which hundreds of avowed white supremacists descended upon UVA. Just steps away from where the encampment would be created seven years later, this horde of bigots gathered in the name of protecting their cultural heritage, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

I cannot help but compare this rally to the encampment. The two situations seem almost perfect inverses of one another.

In the first, a group of openly antisemitic outsiders descended upon Charlottesville, justifying their hatred by pretending to be victims of a “white genocide”—a genocide that everyone knows does not actually exist. They were permitted to march through the University of Virginia unchallenged, and were even granted police protection on campus and the greater Charlottesville area in the name of “free speech.”

The encampment, on the other hand, was formed by UVA students and Charlottesville locals, but was maligned from the beginning as a safe harbor for “outside agitators.” It specifically drew attention to a real genocide, a genocide that everyone knows is happening at this very moment, but one the administration has refused to acknowledge as real. When students requested the university divest from corporations funding the genocide, their freedom of speech no longer mattered. Charlottesville is a small place. Many of the police who protected the white supremacists are the same ones who attacked our students.

After Unite the Right, UVA encountered a rare instance of national criticism. Students, faculty, and local organizers had warned the administration that a white supremacist rally was about to take place on university property, but nothing was done. UVA’s then-president, Teresa A. Sullivan, resigned in disgrace not long after.

UVA’s current president, Jim Ryan, has faced no such backlash or scrutiny. It has been rumored—though not confirmed—that at the time he was in the running to replace Harvard president Claudine Gay, who had recently stepped down after Zionists criticized her for not doing enough to repress pro-Palestine organizing on campus. Were that to be the case, Ryan siccing the police on his own students was, essentially, an audition. He certainly understands how to play the game. At literally the same moment the Virginia State Police were macing the encampment, the UVA President’s Office—in a twist that feels almost too on the nose—was sponsoring a catered conference celebrating student activism during the Civil Rights movement.

The horrifying realization is this: Assaulting and arresting students—rather than being blemishes on university leadership’s records—is quickly becoming a key bauble on their resumes, a means of demonstrating to donors and corporate partners that they are willing to go to any length to protect the university’s endowment and brand. Want to fail upward? Easy. All you need to do is beat the shit out of your students.

Here, the “free” in free speech does not mean open minded. It means cheap. So long as speech is cheap to the neoliberal university, it is embraced, or at least tolerated. But as soon as speech becomes costly—as soon as students make demands of the endowment—they must be silenced.

Of course, this kind of speech is costly for our students as well. Instead of their tuition going toward the basics of campus life—books, building repairs, departmental budgets—it is gobbled up by the ever-expanding glut of university bureaucrats and police departments. Students now take out loans in order to pay the overtime of the very people who physically abuse them.

In the aftermath of May 4, the administration changed their story. When community members expressed shock at the reports of students being tear-gassed simply for sleeping in tents, police chief Longo announced he had evidence there were four masked “outside agitators,” dressed all in black, who had joined the encampment. These unknown people were potentially threatening, and so the area was secured for the safety of the community. Of all the footage of the police attack that day, including my own, none has emerged that proves these four masked people ever existed.

Another story was that the administration was worried the encampment was irreparably damaging campus architecture. It was announced that, moving forward, protests near UVA’s famous Rotunda—designed by Thomas Jefferson, and a UNESCO world heritage site—were strictly forbidden. As the Rotunda is the central building of the campus, this regulation effectively bans visible student protests in the name of cultural preservation. There were no such concerns after the 2017 white supremacist rally, which actually occurred on the Rotunda steps. Now it is UVA administrators who threaten students in the name of protecting heritage.

What has happened is that, as the university transforms into a hedge fund with classes on the side, administrations have grown to loathe their own students. They loathe them because the students are a reminder of all the ways the administrations lie every day. Increasingly, the university does not actually exist to educate. It exists to bring in tuition dollars. It exists to sell subpar housing and subpar MBAs and to move large and opaque chunks of capital around the world.

It also exists as a holding pattern for politically ambitious but unaffable people, those who can neither win votes from the public nor approval from their fellow professors. There are certainly some decent people within the UVA administration, but deanships and university boardrooms across the nation are increasingly populated with failed academics and failed politicians. They are continuously rewarded so long as they throw the rest of us—including and especially the students who make their entire existence possible—under the bus. After squashing the encampment, UVA was named the nation’s number one free speech campus by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization bankrolled by right-wing billionaires.

After May 4, I handed over my footage to Kristen Finn’s attorney. The police had arrested her for no reason and then lied about it repeatedly, claiming to be the victims themselves, until my video evidence proved otherwise. If I had not been recording by chance, the police could have ruined Kristen’s life.

No one, so far, has been held accountable for that lie, or for any of the others. 

Levi Vonk is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. He does not have tenure, or the protections that come with it.

Featured image of a pepper-sprayed UVA students getting their eyes flushed out by Levi Vonk