From Nell Gluckman, ‘Call the Philosophy Department Office and Tell Them I Have Been Arrested’, MAY 7, 2024
Tell me what that day, April 25, was like for you. How did it start?
I’m chair of my department, and we were having our once-every-10-year external-review process, so I went to pick up the guests, the reviewers — one of them was a professor at Columbia University — and on the way there I heard on the news, or maybe I heard from my phone, that there was activity on the quad. It didn’t say stay off. It just said keep your distance.
Students were chanting. It’s so peaceful. Faculty were gathering around just observing. It’s just a beautiful day. Then the Georgia State Patrol just run in and attack.
I go down around 10 o’clock, and I see a colleague of mine from the AAUP, and I said, “Oh, at least the Atlanta Police Department aren’t here.” And he said, “They are.”
It’s the Georgia State Patrol, and they come in a line of about, I don’t know, 25. The students are in a tiny little quadrant of the quad. The Georgia State Patrol come in and get to right where they are.
Before this it was sunshine. Students were chanting. It’s so peaceful. Faculty were gathering around just observing. It’s just a beautiful day. Then the Georgia State Patrol just run in and attack. I now know that their mission was to clear the encampment of three tents that had been there for two and a half hours.
They were also clearing anybody who was right there. Students are just being pummeled. And so I go walking a few steps over, and then I see this child on the ground, a 20-year-old being pummeled by the police. There’s like two of them pulling and pushing. Her head is on the ground as she curled up in a ball, trying to put her arms over her head to keep them off of her. So I’m standing back six feet holding my camera at them, and I started yelling, “Stop, stop!”
I know the police, and I was very careful to have a nonconfrontational posture, to look calm. It’s a superpower of mine. I can look calm. I made a point of standing a good distance. I was on the pavement. I wasn’t on the grass, where they are.
Then they stood up. It was an APD. He steps a couple of steps closer to me and says, “Ma’am, you need to step back.”
And there I very consciously made a decision. I knew I could have taken a step back, and probably that would have been enough for him. But I was fed up, and I just said, “No.”
Then he just comes around and arrests me. So then they take me around the back to where they have the wagons. Somebody stops, a graduate student, and says, “Ma’am, are you OK?” So you’ve seen this, along with 22 million other people.
They had wagons that they put the prisoners in. I was in the first one, and I was like, “You know, I have an external review going on. I was just standing there. I have a meeting. Can you just give me a ticket and let me go, and I’ll go to court?”
I was taken to the jail. They decided that they would just give me a ticket for disorderly conduct. They released me. I mean, they opened the fence so I could leave. I waited for another student, who got the same thing. It was weird. I called an Uber. We took an Uber back to campus. I go in and finish up. I go to the external-review committee. It’s so surreal. Of course, they were also very worried.
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Neville Buch