With furry costumes, water jugs and tambourines, tiny Cal Poly Humboldt became a Gaza flashpoint
ARCATA, Calif. — Before dawn Tuesday, more than 100 law enforcement officers in riot gear marched into the quad of Cal Poly Humboldt, clutching guns and batons.
They encircled a small group of protesters — including a furry one in a lime-green costume — who knelt on the ground, holding hands and reciting native chants.
“Resistance is justified!” the crowd yelled as officers informed them they were being arrested before pulling them up, one by one, and fastening their hands with zip ties.
The scene capped an extraordinary weeklong protest at this public university that has emerged as California’s strongest epicenter of civil disobedience over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Students at the state’s major campuses, including USC and Berkeley, have made the news over the last week. But Cal Poly Humboldt, tucked at the base of a redwood forest in rural Northern California and home to 5,976 students in Arcata, has taken on an out-sized role. Students have engaged in more vigorous disruption, occupying an academic and administrative building, painting buildings with graffiti and twice forcing police to retreat.
Humboldt is one of the smallest and most isolated of the Cal State schools, a hub for students in the rural towns and former logging communities of California’s far north coast and interior.
Yet those on campus understand why it has become such flashpoint.
Faculty leaders say activism is in the college’s DNA, noting that students and professors have practiced nonviolent civil disobedience for more than half a century — from the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s to the forest defense movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
“People ask, ‘Well, why do they occupy? Why don’t they do what everybody else does and sit outside in tents?’ ” said Anthony Silvaggio, the chair of the sociology department.
“It’s because we’re Humboldt,” he said, noting that as a graduate student in 1997 he was arrested during the Headwaters Campaign to save the last remaining old-growth redwood forests. “We occupy space! We have a rich history of taking over space and a long genealogy of direct-action tactics.”
After resisting multiple attempts by police in riot gear to remove them from a building, students renamed it “Intifada Hall.” They scrawled slogans such as “land back,” “destroy all colonial walls” and “pigs not allowed” up and down its corridors and wrote “BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS” across the wood-paneled walls of President Tom Jackson Jr.’s office.
They said they would not leave until the university disclosed all holdings and collaborations with Israel, cut all ties with Israeli universities, divested from companies “complicit in the occupation of Palestine” and publicly called for a cease-fire. They also called for the dropping of any legal charges against student organizers.
Jackson said Tuesday “it breaks my heart” to see arrests. “Unfortunately, serious criminal activity that crossed the line well beyond the level of a protest had put the campus at ongoing risk.”
But some faculty and students reject that narrative, accusing administrators and authorities of escalating a peaceful situation by bringing in riot police the first evening of the occupation. The closure of the entire campus, they argue, was unnecessary.
“These are the actions of conscientious individuals working to end a genocide, not the actions of criminals,” the faculty union, the university chapter of the California Faculty Assn., said in a statement
One of the activists arrested, assistant professor Rouhollah Aghasaleh, vowed to reject any bond and embark on a hunger strike until he and all his students were released.
“I refuse to accept the label of criminal for standing up for an ethical reason.” he wrote in a statement before his arrest.
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At the heart of the showdown is a dispute that stretches beyond the Middle East to the question of how central activism is to the university’s mission.
Faculty leaders blame Jackson, who became president in 2019 and has overseen the university’s transition to a polytechnic. The new designation, made in 2022, was designed to increase sagging enrollment with high-demand STEM education and research offerings.
Officials hope the changes will result in a better university. But critics accuse Jackson of being out of sync with campus culture and failing to appreciate the university’s long history of environmental and social justice activism.
According to Silvaggio, Jackson has ruffled feathers by telling faculty, “We’re not here to train activists.”
Silvaggio — who said he learned tactics of non-violent civil disobedience from his professors, who were activists on the defense of native forests — now teaches courses in community organizing and social movements.
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