Dear President Benson and UT Dallas Administration,

We are reaching out regarding the University's response to recent Pro-Palestine protests and encampments on May 1st. When UT Dallas students walk onto campus for the first time, they are met with overwhelming welcome. They are placed on a path to carve their own career and livelihood in a place of acceptance. Students are ushered into auditoriums and classrooms and told one thing: the future is fluid, and it is our generation’s for the making.

As alumni and current students of this university, many of us take part in human rights initiatives both on and off campus and found UT Dallas to be a space to foster support for growing our views about the world. The recent response to the genocide in Gaza has been disheartening, to say the least. 

UT Dallas likes to brand itself as a progressive university, a liberal hotspot in Texas that enables its students to speak out regarding issues that concern them. Several student-run organizations have incited meaningful change on campus to support marginalized groups and UT Dallas, as an institution, has benefited from their students’ activism, portraying a safe space and attracting prospective students to a university claiming to be all-inclusive. 

For many of us who attended class throughout the pandemic, we know this not to be true. In light of recent events, the following offenses highlight a pattern. Since 2020, the university failed to:

• Provide proper support for students who were unable to come to campus due to health concerns during COVID-19.
• Provide proper screening and removal of professors with reputations for spreading biased views regarding race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
• Provide concrete statements of support for the Black Lives Matter Movement post-George Floyd’s death.
• Provide concrete support and defense for students impacted by the rise in Anti-Asian hate during COVID-19.

During this time, the university also:

• Prohibited student free speech on the UTD Spirit Rocks.
• Removed UTD Spirit Rocks from campus to prevent expression of beliefs regarding the ongoing Palestinian Genocide and Transgender Day of Remembrance.

It’s disheartening to see the administration sacrificing the university’s ethical standing for the sake of financial investments from Zionist organizations. You claim to be an administration that hears its students, staff, and faculty. However, our community spoke on May 1st, and the administration failed to support us. Our community is screaming for you to divest from organizations supporting genocide. The administration’s response was to bring in State Troopers and law enforcement against peaceful, unarmed civilians protesting on a public campus. 

As an administration, you enabled and endorsed the arrest of well-respected faculty and students who have placed faith in your leadership. Your administration hid behind glass walls while students, ones you claim are some of the smartest people in the UT System, if not the country, begged you to help end a humanitarian crisis.

Your response to a protest was to hide behind the words of the Code of Student Conduct. Your students and faculty are taking a stand for a marginalized group experiencing active ethnic cleansing for the last 75+ years, and you had them arrested. 

President Benson, we are far more than disappointed. We are embarrassed by this administration’s course of action. We are sickened by the blatant disinterest in student and faculty safety. We are morally against UT Dallas’s silence and condonement of the genocide in Gaza and flagrant disrespect of free speech on our campus. 

We want a brighter future that is lit by acceptance and knowledge of other communities, not one plagued by bigotry and genocide. 

We want our campus to be on the right side of history; enable us to do so. We call you to meet SJP's demands as an organization in Dallas. 

• Divest from all organizations supporting the genocide in Gaza.
• Reject the anti-Palestinian executive order that is working to censor students' free speech.
• Make a public, university statement denouncing the genocide in Gaza.
• Work with Justice UTD, the new student government, as well as organizations like SJP to lay out a plan for enabling free speech and activism on this campus without unjustified future consequences.
   

We will say you are right about one thing; we are the future. We are the future of the world we live in and the future of this esteemed University. The future is ours to be molded and created, and your students and alumni have spoken. We will not continue to invest in a campus that supports the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent people. 

Help us make UT Dallas the university it was meant to be, a place of learning and growth.

From the river to the sea, we stand with Palestine.

Regards,

UT Dallas Alumni and Current Students of UT Dallas.