“The Administration Acted Reasonably” in Repressing Protest: Investigators Hired by UMass Chancellor Exonerate UMass Chancellor

Fact-check of Twelve of the Prince Lobel Report’s Key Claims

The University of Massachusetts Amherst made headlines in May 2024 for deploying heavily armed police who arrested, often violently, 134 peaceful activists who were protesting the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. In the wake of the May 7 protest and police rampage, the undergraduate student body, the graduate employees’ union, and the faculty and librarians all issued votes of no-confidence in Chancellor Javier Reyes. The campus’s five biggest labor unions forcefully condemned the repression.

Among the important people, the reaction was quite different. UMass trustees, the UMass system president, and the Massachusetts governor all praised his leadership and/or condemned the protesters. Other administrators, ex-trustees, and a few vocal faculty did the same. Some explicitly justified the police violence, saying things like “that’s what happens when you get arrested.” They also attacked those who criticized Reyes, accusing us of antisemitism as well as racism for condemning the first Latino chancellor.

The formal UMass Amherst administration response to the outcry involved two measures announced by Reyes in June. One was a “Campus Demonstration Policy Task Force” charged with making recommendations about potential policy changes. The body was dominated by top administrators and their faculty allies, and it predictably reached the desired conclusions. The report endorsed the use of police in response to all “illegal acts,” explicitly defined to include “trespass” and “substantial disorder.” Because the chancellor has unilateral power to determine when a protester is “trespassing” or causing “disorder,” his actions on May 7 were presumably justified and would be justified again.

The second institutional measure was an “independent review” commissioned by the Reyes administration, to be carried out by the Massachusetts law firm Prince Lobel under the direction of Republican ex-district attorney Ralph Martin. Over a seven-month period, and at undisclosed expense to taxpayers, the firm carried out numerous lengthy interviews with witnesses and other concerned parties. Chancellor Reyes shared their report with the campus on January 16.

I was one of multiple witnesses who provided the Prince Lobel team with evidence that refutes the key aspects of the Reyes administration’s narrative. That evidence included the transcript of the May 14 meeting where Reyes and other leaders defended their actions. It also included sources containing hyperlinks to extensive supplementary evidence.

The Prince Lobel team appears to have ignored that evidence almost entirely. The central conclusion they draw from their “findings” is that Reyes’s deployment of the police was justified:

“We have little difficulty concluding that the Administration acted reasonably when it decided to remove the April 29 and May 7 Encampments. Its assessment of the risks, especially of violence, was understandable based on the information it had about the Encampments on its own campus and the chaos that was engulfing some other college campuses where encampments had been established.”

The authors assert that the chancellor’s actions were “reasonable” or “understandable” a total of ten times.

The report includes a few gentle criticisms of Reyes, perhaps to prove it was truly an independent investigation. Reyes overestimated the danger posed by the protesters, he could have been more “flexible and deliberative,” he could have done better with “communication.” Yet the good faith of Reyes and other administrators is always assumed. He genuinely “believed that particular characteristics of the May 7 encampment reflected an urgent health and safety risk.” The evidence for this claim is unspecified, but it appears to come primarily from administrators’ testimonies. Because Reyes has professed his concern for health and safety, we can presume he’s sincere. This argument is logically akin to a judge dismissing a claim of racial discrimination because the perpetrator didn’t openly admit his racism.

Whenever the authors meekly offer a critique, they hasten to attach a qualifier. “We have the benefit of information and hindsight that the Administration did not enjoy.” Reyes was acting “in real time and under pressure.” His misperceptions were “understandable.”

I was one of multiple witnesses who provided the Prince Lobel team with evidence that refutes the key aspects of the Reyes administration’s narrative….The Prince Lobel team appears to have ignored that evidence almost entirely.

None of this should surprise. There’s no reason to expect that an investigation commissioned by UMass administrators and directed by a Republican ex-DA would conclude that UMass administrators were anything but reasonable in their actions. The report reflects Prince Lobel’s “client-centric vision of providing excellent outcomes, service and value.”

the report…. is riddled with logical contortions, self-contradictions, and omissions of crucial facts.

Even so, because UMass administrators will cast the Prince Lobel report as an authoritative source on the events of May 7, it is worth dissecting the report’s claims. It is riddled with logical contortions, self-contradictions, and omissions of crucial facts. This is particularly disappointing because the Prince Lobel team had been provided – by me and multiple other witnesses – with evidence that refutes the administration’s claims. They chose to ignore it. Instead they adhered to their “client-centric vision” by endorsing most of the administration’s narrative.

Fact Check
Here is a fact-check of twelve of the report’s key claims, using evidence that didn’t make the authors’ cut. Quotes in bold are from the report.

“We do not think it useful for us to weigh in on police tactics or management of police resources.”

Misleading.

It was appropriate for Prince Lobel to focus their investigation on Reyes and other top administrators, but omitting consideration of police actions is problematic for several reasons. Obviously it was the orgy of police violence (see also here) that led directly to the no-confidence votes and to the administration’s need for PR damage control, including the Prince Lobel investigation.

Second, the UMass Police Department doesn’t exist in an autonomous domain. It lies under the authority of the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life. Without orders from Chancellor Reyes, the UMPD wouldn’t have amassed at the scene and wouldn’t have summoned State Police and other outside forces.

It could be objected that Chancellor Reyes had no direct, immediate control over police behavior. True enough. Individual officers and commanders should be held accountable for their actions. But that hardly excuses the one who gives the initial order, since the consequences were predictable. Police, especially in this country, should be expected to behave in violent, authoritarian, and discriminatory ways – “that’s what happens when you get arrested.” That statement is an indictment of Reyes’s leadership, not an absolution as the speaker intended it.

“The protesters felt they had failed with the First Encampment [on April 29–30], which they only agreed to remove because of problems with their internal planning.”

Misleading.

This claim is partly true in that the students felt unprepared, but it neglects what they needed to prepare for: the prospect of a violent mass arrest by police. Student organizers knew about the presence of outside police. They knew that failing to comply with the administration’s order to remove their tents would result in their arrest. It is dishonest to characterize the organizers’ decision as un-coerced, as Chancellor Reyes also did on May 14 when he told the Faculty Senate the decision was “collaborative and amicable.”

Prince Lobel was aware of this detail but omitted it. My report on the May 7 negotiations, which the investigators told me they had read, had stated that the April 29 encampment “was dismantled by the students after administrators threatened them with arrest and/or disciplinary action.” I reiterated during our meeting that this was the reason for the students’ decision. On May 1 a campus-wide email from Interim Provost Mike Malone had also admitted the presence of State Police on campus on April 30.

“In making the decision, we find that the primary considerations for the Chancellor were ‘safety’ and ‘precedent.’”

Unsubstantiated, and contrary to most of the available evidence.

The sources for this “finding” about May 7 are unspecified, but again, the finding appears to be based on testimony from the chancellor and his team. It is central to the report’s conclusion that the administration was not hostile to expressions of solidarity with Palestinians but rather made a viewpoint-neutral decision.

Regarding precedent, the report concludes that Reyes “was concerned that allowing a protest encampment to remain in violation of the Land Use Policy would tie the University’s hands in the future.” Reyes himself has repeatedly conjured the specter of all hell breaking loose should students get away with flouting an arbitrary rule against temporary tents. As the report notes, he and his team have claimed that allowing one set of tents would open the door to encampments by all manner of “abhorrent” groups (they’ve mentioned the Proud Boys, for example). They have thus conflated peaceful and non-threatening activists with white supremacist paramilitaries. The report regards Reyes’s concern as excessive but understandable. 

Regarding safety, the report also takes Reyes at his word. “The Chancellor and others in leadership believed that particular characteristics of the May 7 Encampment reflected an urgent health and safety risk,” even if they overestimated the risk. Of course, it is not possible to prove that safety was not of concern to Reyes, since we haven’t seen his diary and he did not take a lie-detector test prior to sending in the police. Reyes later claimed that safety was his concern, and never consciously admitted that it wasn’t, so by the credulous logic of the Prince Lobel report he must have been worried about safety. The report does not offer any substantive evidence to demonstrate that safety was a “primary” consideration in the decision.

Notably, in the negotiations with students on the afternoon of May 7 – by which time the chancellor had secretly summoned the police to begin amassing near the encampment – the chancellor and his team did not emphasize the alleged safety risks posed by the encampment. I observed that meeting and transcribed as much of the dialogue as I could type. One of the students asked the chancellor, “Who’s being made unsafe by [the] encampment?” Even then, he did not cite safety concerns as a reason why the tents must be removed. Instead he stated, “The main reason is we have a land-use policy.” It’s possible that I misheard or mistyped that interchange, or that the chancellor misspoke, but I am reasonably confident I recorded it accurately.

At one point in the meeting Reyes did mention the example of UCLA. Days before, a violent civilian mob and then a mob of LAPD officers had assaulted UCLA student campers. “I saw what happened at UCLA and it’s not gonna happen on my campus,” he said. Of course, half of that outcome did happen on his campus, due to his decision to deploy the police. The prospect of the other half, right-wing civilian terrorism, was plausible but was hardly a valid reason for repressing the protesters. If anything, the lesson of the UCLA episode is that UMass administrators should help protect the nonviolent protesters through their personal presence onsite, rather than by siccing police on them. To my recollection, and based on my transcription, this was the administration’s only allusion, in that lengthy negotiations meeting, to the possibility of violence as a reason for sending in the police. The campus’s obscure and arbitrary rule about land-use was the “main reason” mentioned by Reyes and his team.

Read More: Report on the Meeting Between Student Negotiators and UMass Amherst Administration, May 7, 2024 (Amherst Indy)

What else could have compelled Reyes to summon the police? The most likely answer, but one unmentioned by Prince Lobel, is pressure from wealthy and powerful voices who favored repression. This influence has been quietly acknowledged by UMass administrators. One told me in September 2024 that amid antiwar demonstrations on campus the previous year, the administration had been “email bombed” with outside complaints about how Jewish students at UMass weren’t safe.

Victor Woolridge, former chair of the UMass Board of Trustees, elaborated on this point on May 20:

“Several college and university presidents and chancellors have been thrust into the national spotlight of second opinions and judgment for decisions made or not made when responding to student protests. For the most part, campus communities have advocated a more laissez faire approach, while boards and donors have tended to advocate a harsher response. Campus leaders are often criticized for failing to meet the vacillating demands of these opposing constituent groups. If it appears leaders have bent too far in one direction, faculty senates have turned to consideration of votes of no-confidence, while industry partners and donors have threatened the retraction of valuable partnerships or gifts to endowments.”

The rest of Woolridge’s piece was a rather unhinged diatribe aimed at derailing the faculty vote of no-confidence scheduled for the day it was published. But his above observation was valid. Reyes and other chancellors are indeed beset by “opposing constituent groups.” Above them is an aristocracy of political appointees (we call them Trustees), wealthy donors, and corporate “partners.” Those constituents “have tended to advocate a harsher response” to protesters who oppose the genocide. Their demands are irreconcilable with those of “campus communities” – that is, the students and workers who comprise the university. 

“We do not agree with the critique we heard from some participants that the Chancellor changed his rationale after-the-fact (from a policy infraction to safety) for the decision to remove the Encampments.”

Unsubstantiated, and contrary to the publicly available evidence.

This may be an allusion to something I told the Prince Lobel investigators. I had said that, in the days and weeks after May 7, the administration had offered multiple different justifications for its actions, and that they had seemed to adopt their emphasis on safety as the main justification only after May 7. This has been a pattern under this administration. When faced with scrutiny, Chancellor Reyes has a tendency to lob handfuls of you-know-what at the wall and hope that one of them sticks.

The record of administrators’ public statements on May 7 and the weeks thereafter shows that their emphasis did shift “from a policy infraction to safety” as the justification for their decision. Neither of the key campuswide emails sent out between April 30 and May 7 – from Interim Provost Mike Malone on May 1, and from Chancellor Reyes the evening of May 7 just as the arrests were beginning – mentioned safety as a reason why the tents must be dismantled. Malone’s stated concern was that “university policies were followed (no amplified sound, no unauthorized structures, etc.).” Reyes’s message cited “violations of university policy and the law” as the basis for his deployment of police. One local reporter noted on May 9 that “UMass has not pointed to any incidents of violence among the protesters or specific threats that warranted involving law enforcement.”

Their public claims shifted in the week that followed May 7. On May 14 Reyes and other administrators were called before a special meeting of the Faculty Senate. There, according to the official meeting transcript – which I provided to Prince Lobel – Reyes spoke of the “violent rhetoric” by protesters and their “verbal and physical intimidation of staff. He also referred to a makeshift collection of wooden pallets as “a fortified encampment built at the center of our campus.” (That phrase, “fortified encampment,” repeated many times by administrators, drew rebuke even from the editors at MassLive.) Reyes did not explain why a few wooden pallets were dangerous enough to justify police. UMass Police Chief Tyrone Parham also said that “we had officers that found at least one pile of rocks. So there’s definitely concern about potentially being hit in the head.” Lob everything at the wall and hope something sticks.

Reyes and Parham also introduced the new claim that an “assault” had occurred at the site of the encampment prior to the arrests, and that the report of it had contributed to their decision. Reyes later told press that “one counter-demonstrator reported being assaulted before police had arrived.” Opponents of the protesters ran with the story, citing it numerous times in the weeks that followed. One news story cited unattributed “reports that a Jewish counter-protester was assaulted and injured,” a claim that the outlet would later retract.

Reyes’s claim was a lie: the incident occurred, and was reported, around 6:40 p.m. – hours after “police had arrived” on campus. Moreover, the incident occurred at some distance from the encampment, did not involve individuals involved in the protest, and entailed such little physical contact that the counter-protester, who was notorious for attending Gaza solidarity protests and trying to provoke protesters, declined to pursue the complaint. The Prince Lobel report itself acknowledges that this incident “played no role in the Administration’s response to the encampment, which was already determined earlier in the day (if not, the prior week).” Thus the report’s own findings refute the chancellor’s claim about timing and his claim that the incident was “among the risks I had to consider.” Yet the Prince Lobel authors do not cite Reyes’s statement and don’t point out his lie, instead denying that Reyes “changed his rationale after-the-fact.”

“The Chancellor’s decision to enforce the preexisting, content-neutral prohibition on unauthorized ‘structures’ did not constitute a prohibition on protesting the war in Gaza.”

Misleading.

There are two questionable claims here: that Reyes enforced the rules in a “content-neutral” way and that he did not infringe on free-speech rights by restricting the manner in which protesters expressed themselves. On the first point, it is clear that Reyes’s repression of the Palestinian solidarity movement breaks with past precedent on this campus. The Reyes administration has tacitly acknowledged this, with Interim Provost Mike Malone brazenly stating that “Chancellor Reyes is not required to enforce policies in a manner identical to the 30 chancellors who preceded him.” They adamantly deny that they’re discriminating based on content. Their claim is impossible to disprove definitively because Reyes’s short tenure has included no other cases of civil disobedience to which we might compare his response. Nonetheless, the Reyes administration’s accumulated pattern of action since October 2023 is strong evidence of anti-Palestinian bias.

Read More: Opinion: UMass Chancellor Reyes’ Police Action Was Unnecessary and Unprecedented. A Brief History of Dissent At UMass Amherst (Amherst Indy)

The Prince Lobel report is contradictory on this point. The authors observe, rightly enough, that “the regulation which the decision enforced – the Land Use Policy – is not content-based in nature.” However, in the same sentence they concede that “we do not believe that the Administration would have had the same apprehension if the First Encampment had been less controversial and/or non-political in nature.” The term controversial can be assumed to have its standard technical meaning: a viewpoint to which the writer objects. The statement seems like an unwitting acknowledgment that administrators did treat – or at least were mentally inclined to treat – these protesters differently based on what they were saying.

The other questionable claim is that prohibiting tents didn’t deny protesters the right to protest because administrators promised them they could protest in other ways. This is true, but placing arbitrary conditions on the right of protest can still be an undue infringement on protester rights. As the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) noted in a forceful statement last August, the highly restrictive policies of administrators on many U.S. campuses “go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions” and “impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression.” That shoe certainly fits UMass Amherst.

“Without question, by the early evening on May 7, the situation on the ground had become dangerous, even combustible.”

Potentially contradictory, and certainly unsubstantiated.

This statement appears to contradict statements elsewhere in the report, in which the authors judge Reyes’s perception of danger to have been mistaken. In any case, the report’s authors provide no evidence that protesters were dangerous, nor that anyone else present at the encampment, other than the police, presented a significant and credible danger of violence. The authors characterize “the protesters’ calls for reinforcements” in the evening as a provocation of the police, almost as if the protesters were taking up arms for a military offensive. This vague but ominous characterization echoes certain claims from administrators, such as Police Chief Parham’s strange statement on May 14 that protesters “were continuing to basically to go at the officers as they’re trying to leave.”

It is unclear if the Prince Lobel authors use the term “combustible” in a literal or figurative sense. If intended literally it presumably refers to the pallets, or maybe to the trees above the tents. Administrators and their partisans have elsewhere implied there was a literal risk of fire. This is technically true. Wood is indeed combustible, just as the wooden desk where I’m sitting is combustible.

“A more flexible and deliberative approach would probably have led to consideration of other paths,” but the deployment of police was “a last resort.”

Logically incoherent.

The statement that “a more flexible and deliberative approach would probably have led to consideration of other paths” is a gentle way of recognizing that Chancellor Reyes did not consider “other paths.” How can this be reconciled with Reyes’s May 7 statement, cited several times in the report without critique, that “involving law enforcement is the absolute last resort”?

These statements are only compatible if the authors mean that Chancellor Reyes mistakenly but sincerely believed that police were “the absolute last resort.” Here the report’s insistence on the good faith of the administration collapses. As the Prince Lobel investigators well know (I told them, and sent documentation), Reyes and his team were explicitly informed in advance of the arrests that other paths were available. Specifically, the student negotiators informed Reyes of other U.S. campuses where administrators had chosen to negotiate in good faith or at least not arrest campers. Because the administration knew other paths were available and chose the path of repression, the statement that police were “the absolute last resort,” or even that Reyes believed there were no “other paths,” is factually untenable.

“We enjoy the luxury of time and information the Administration did not have.”

False.

This and similar statements appear multiple times in the report. It’s a standard strategy for defending officials who resort to violence or repression and then face criticism for it. Critics are typically accused of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” This charge was brought by Victor Woolridge in his May 20 polemic. Woolridge implied it was unfair to criticize campus leaders who must navigate “a tempest-tossed sea of awful choices.” Yet as the record shows, the quarterback was shown the alternatives before and during the game itself, not just the morning after. He rejected them.

“We do not refer to this meeting as a ‘negotiation,’ because we find that neither side was truly willing or able to make material concessions.”

False.

As I noted in my report on the May 7 negotiations, and in a later analysis (both known to the Prince Lobel team), the student negotiators showed at least some flexibility on their demands. They did tell the administration that “we’re a democratic encampment” and therefore that the negotiators could not make immediate or unilateral decisions for the others.

The administration was entirely inflexible. Chancellor Reyes began the meeting by saying “there’s nothing that I can do,” which, as I noted in those other pieces, is untrue. He had also secretly summoned the police before he entered the negotiations meeting. The one substantial promise he did make was a pledge that the students’ proposal for divestment from weapons contractors would be discussed by the Board of Trustees on June 7. He repeated that promise at the May 14 Faculty Senate meeting. The Board never discussed the proposal.

“We have no difficulty finding that a core group of protesters on May 7 were committed to, and perhaps hoped for, a ‘heavy-handed’ police response, which would help generate publicity for their cause. However, the same could be said of almost all acts of civil disobedience throughout history.”

Tendentious and historically dubious.

It is unclear where the term “heavy-handed” comes from. The passage implies that it was a direct phrase from a protester. Personally I didn’t encounter any protesters before or during the May 7 protest who hoped for violent police repression. They knew arrests were possible, but the police violence shocked everyone with whom I spoke. This sort of claim about protesters’ wishes is another common tactic of apologists for repression: They asked for it. The Prince Lobel statement is consistent with other caricatures of student activists as intransigent and reckless.

The historical claim is odd. It is apparently made in sympathy with the protesters. But as a historical generalization it grossly oversimplifies. Yes, in some times and places, movement organizers have viewed some level of state repression as potentially beneficial to their cause. However, it’s empirically outrageous to say that “almost all” disruptive movements hope for repression, let alone violent repression. The authors’ comment appears to endorse the common fallacy that a movement’s success is dependent on the shock engendered by repression.

“It is impossible to say what portion of [the] student body are distrustful of the Administration due to these events.”

False or highly misleading.

The day after the arrests, the Student Government Association passed a no-confidence resolution with which 91 percent of undergraduate student voters agreed. The graduate workers’ union did the same. Prince Lobel was aware of these votes. To omit mention of them is dishonest.

“We have tried to present a full picture of the ‘testimonies’ from the relevant constituencies about the Gaza protest encampments on the UMass Amherst campus.”

No.

You didn’t try hard enough. See above for some parts of the picture that were left out.

One other major omission from the Prince Lobel report was the background on campus prior to April 29, 2024. Critics of Reyes have been accused of creating “an unnecessary air of toxicity” at UMass Amherst. If we’re sticking to factual reality, though, we must recognize the numerous ways that Reyes and his team toxified the campus climate between October 7, 2023, and April 29, 2024. A short list would include the harsh sanctions against students who organized a sit-in at Whitmore administration building on October 25; Chancellor Reyes’s mendacious misreading of the Student Code of Conduct; the UMass system president’s cheerleading for US-Israeli violence even after it was widely deemed genocidal by legal experts; the doxing of student arrestees by the UMass Police Department; and the failure to protect Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and others who were targeted by Zionist harassment.

One additional relevant bit of context was the administration’s handling of a racist social media post by one of its top officials. On November 19, 2023, Kalpen Trivedi, the UMass Amherst Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Director of the International Programs Office (IPO), wrote a Facebook post justifying Israel’s terror assault on Al-Shifa Hospital. He said that “the doctors, the UN, the WHO, [and] the media” were “all Hamas” and “all grotesquely evil.” On December 15, acting in his capacity as IPO Director, Trivedi unilaterally barred student protesters who had been arrested on October 25 from participating in the study-abroad programs in which they had enrolled for Spring 2024. In the time in between, Interim Provost Malone, and perhaps Chancellor Reyes as well, had been provided with a screenshot of Trivedi’s post. At no time, to my knowledge, have they questioned the authenticity of the post, nor did they address the matter when the post later received coverage in national news and became widely known to students and employees. They even chose to leave Trivedi in a position of power over the students. The only action they seem to have taken was to tip off Trivedi, who quickly deleted the post and changed his profile photo. (The original profile photo had featured a bizarre photo of a grinning Trivedi sitting in a throne with an Israeli flag over his midsection).

All this information was delivered, with documentation, to the Prince Lobel team. None of it was included in the report.

Kevin A. Young teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a member of Faculty for Justice and Palestine, and also serves on the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy, which has compiled an online archive of attacks on critical thinking.