The Mary Washington Way
By Janet Marshall Watkins
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
Still, as he walked the short distance from his office to Jefferson Square, Paino was nervous. He and other university leaders in Virginia had been warned by state law enforcement officials that “outsiders” might join students on campus and create large encampments. With graduation just a week away, Paino and his administrative team had decided to create a new policy that banned the students from keeping their tents up. The student protesters had complied the first evening. But Saturday, when it started raining, the tents went back up.
Were the students escalating the situation, giving Paino the middle finger? Or were they just trying to stay dry? Paino didn’t know. Creating the “no tents” policy meant the students could be arrested for trespassing—the ultimate lever he could pull. But little Mary Washington was no Columbia U, Fredericksburg no NYC. Paino knew the small band of protesters posed no threat to the community. They’d been holding bake sales to raise money for relief organizations in Palestine, and writing chalk messages on the sidewalks to call attention to the starvation and deaths of Gazan children as Israeli bombs continued to fall.
Paino thought of his own daughters, just a little older than these students, and tried to imagine what it would be like if they were handcuffed and taken to jail for protesting a war. How would it shape their lives? Paino pondered it all as he approached the UMW students in their tents that rainy Saturday night, knowing in his heart that conversation, not confrontation, was the best way forward. He opened the flap on the largest tent, the one that held most of the protesters, and asked if he could come inside.
As word spread about what Paino had done, other college presidents started following his lead, sitting down with student protesters in honest dialogue, not always in agreement—far from it—but in the spirit of mutual respect and understanding. People began calling it the Mary Washington Way.
***
That, of course, didn’t happen. Paino didn’t visit the students in their so-called encampment or engage them in dialogue about their reasons for protesting. Instead, he caved to fear about what might happen if he allowed the students to keep protesting the war from the semi-comfort of camping tents. It’s not clear whether protesting in sleeping bags or cardboard boxes would have been OK. But tents were a step too far. So that Sunday evening, Mary Washington police—with backup from state troopers and city police—arrested nine students and charged them with trespassing on their own campus, a Class 1 misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Three community members were arrested, too.
Officers zip-tied the protesters’ hands behind their backs while cameras flashed,
then drove them to the regional jail. The arrests landed UMW in the New York Times, CNN, and elsewhere on maps charting where students in the U.S. had been arrested for protesting America’s support for bombings by Israel that have killed more than 35,000 people.
The students were released within an hour or two—without bail since they don’t pose a threat to the community. Most have since been arraigned. While Paino says he doesn’t want them saddled with criminal records, he has no control over what happens next in the criminal “justice” system.
It’s doubtful the students will face jail time even if they’re convicted. They are nonviolent young people charged with a nonviolent crime. I know some these students because they’re my daughter’s friends and classmates. But a prosecutor or judge could decide to make examples of them, and therein lies part of the stress of being entangled in the criminal system. There is nothing just or consistent about it, no way to fully predict the outcome.
Defendants with good criminal defense lawyers nearly always have better outcomes than those without. But paying for a good attorney while simultaneously paying college tuition bills is a financial challenge to say the least. Even with a good attorney, there’s pressure to take a deal, and when the threat of jail time hangs over your head even just a little, it’s tempting to plead to something, anything, to make the stress go away.
Pleading has some upsides: It can take jail time off the table, speed up putting the whole thing behind you, and possibly result in the charge being dropped after a period of community service and good behavior. But pleading to something can also mean you’re stuck with a criminal record for the rest of your life.
Prosecutors might decide to nol-pros—that is, drop charges. But even if that happens for these students, the charge may remain on their records unless they pay an attorney to petition a judge to have their record expunged. For now, anyone with access to a computer can easily find and track the charges against these students online.
***
I know what some people are thinking: Poor babies. If they didn’t want to go to jail, they should have followed the rules. Over and over in my head, I hear that old, misguided trope: Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. For generations, that catchy little rhyme has preserved the power of police and other authorities to control some people’s behavior. It makes sense if you don’t think too much about it. It used to make sense to me. But surely everyone knows by now that only some people who commit wrongdoings are ever put in the position of having to do the time.
You can repeatedly molest a child in this community and never get arrested; I know that from my time as a child advocate. You can smash your wife’s face into a porcelain sink and not get prosecuted; I know that from my time as a journalist. You can be a UMW faculty member and drive drunk, crash into two students’ cars, and endanger the lives of people all along College Avenue, and Mary Washington will keep paying your high salary and bestow emeritus status on you when you retire; I know that as a longtime community member with deep ties to UMW. And you can get wasted in the dorm behind Jefferson Square and not get arrested despite being underage because breaking that law isn’t something UMW brings in the police for.
Things that routinely happen on campuses and in communities—drinking to blackout, abusing illegal drugs, sexual assault—rarely lead to criminal charges. They’re handled quietly or not at all. Donors don’t threaten to pull funding over those things. And UMW doesn’t call in the police. I graduated from Mary Washington, my husband taught there, my mother-in-law went there, and now one of our children is a student there. I never once heard of a Mary Washington administrator calling in state police to help mass arrest students for breaking underage drinking laws. In fact, the only time I can recall administrators calling in state police was to arrest students in 2015 for participating in a sit-in to protest fossil fuel investments.
***
Whatever happens next for the nine students arrested in late April, I doubt they will ever forget what it felt like the moment they entered police custody and, however briefly, lost their freedom. I have seen images of them, standing upright, serious expressions on their faces, hands pulled behind their backs. I wonder if those photos will land in family scrapbooks. I wonder if they will carry their arrests as badges of honor—proof of their willingness to stick to their principles and not cave to pressure to shut up and go home—or if their arrests will leave them fearful.
Some people who get arrested get claustrophobic in police cars. Some get tossed around and injured in the back of police vans because they aren’t buckled in. Some resist arrest when their flight instinct kicks in and get charged for that. Some feel handcuffs slice into their flesh. Some get murdered in custody. Some are forever after filled with fear at the sight of a police cruiser. Some swear off ever calling police or assisting with investigations. Some carry on, seemingly unfazed. Some compartmentalize their rage. Some feel emboldened.
No one forgets.
***
Student protesters across America find themselves in the unique position of being treated like criminals while at the same time being told they are too young and naïve to know what they’re doing. Those protesting the war in Gaza don’t understand history, people say. They’re ignoring the reality that values they hold dear, like LGBTQ+ rights, aren’t shared by Hamas. They’re sympathizing with Gazans without speaking up for Israeli hostages, and some are chanting things like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” not understanding the fear that strikes in many Jewish people. They blame Israel for the bombs, and America, too, but don’t express anger toward Hamas for using civilians as shields. On and on the criticism goes.
Agree with them or not, the students I’ve talked to are far more knowledgeable about the situation and the history of Israel and Palestine than many if not most Americans. Their knowledge has gaps, to be sure—as does mine. We are all informed by our own education, media consumption, and life experiences, not to mention our family history, trauma history, and religion. And it should go without saying that there is no clear path to peace.
But several things are extremely clear to me: The student protesters are angry and distressed that 35,000+ people have been killed and that far more are injured or starving. They’re appalled that the U.S. government continues to support Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, with no end in sight, despite an abundance of evidence that what’s happening is genocide. They’re outraged that what began as a retaliatory strike on Hamas quickly evolved into a mass murder campaign that hasn’t toppled Hamas or freed all the hostages but has killed at least 10,000 children and wiped out the infrastructure Gazans need to survive.
This is also clear: The student protesters bring a passionate, youthful drive to their efforts to make the world a more just place. But they bring a sophisticated, weary cynicism, too. These are the children born just before and after 9/11. They have not lived in peaceful times. They engaged in regular mass shooter drills at school, came of age during the incendiary Trump presidency, had their lives upended by COVID, and saw their school resource officers tear-gas their classmates during Black Lives Matter protests. They watched in shock as white supremacists marched through UVA chanting Nazi slogans and as armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol.
The students may be young. They may have much to learn. But they have empathy and resolve, and they’re willing to sit in difficult emotional and intellectual spaces and hold more than one thought at time. Such as: What happened Oct. 7 was atrocious. What’s happened since is atrocious 50 times over.
The students are studying the history of conflict between Israel and Palestine, trying to deepen their understanding of complex issues, and how trauma begets trauma, during a time when many of their peers are absorbed in TikTok and partying. And they are walking the fine lines set in ink by generations before them: If you question the Israeli government’s actions, you may be accused of antisemitism. And if you question the U.S. government’s actions, you may be accused of being un-American and told you should go live somewhere else.
Freedom and democracy and humanity are messy, complicated things. Some people—college presidents included—want to sanitize them, and they will use the police to do it. If the students didn’t already know it, they now know there are costs to being caring, outspoken people in an often callous world.
One cost is being held to a different standard. Rowdy, disruptive revelers often get a pass after big college games. Police often get a pass for brutality. Countries that bomb civilians often get a pass because we’ve been conditioned to think that’s just what happens in war. When it comes to protesters, though, we demand that they be orderly, police themselves, make sure everyone toes the line.
I hope the arrests don’t dampen the protesters’ empathy. The world needs more people, not fewer, who are willing to speak up in the face of suffering no matter how uncomfortable it might get.
***
After the arrests, Paino blamed the students. They were “engaged in an unsanctioned event on campus…knowingly violating university policy,” he said in one of his two statements about the arrests. “It is necessary to impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.” Rules are rules. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Paino surely has a whole chorus behind him, echoing these thoughts.
Paino said he “could not ignore the warnings” he received from law enforcement about what might happen if the tents stayed up, because “student safety is my top priority and greatest responsibility.” He didn’t note that exactly zero students were physically endangered by the presence of the tents; the protesters inside were shielded from the rain, and anybody bothered by them being there could have easily avoided the small area they occupied. Nor did Paino address the hazards to which students were potentially subjected when police intervened, and that we saw again and again in police response to the BLM protests: use of force, chemical agents.
The truth is that Paino considers it his job to protect the safety of some students, but not all. But that’s not what really bothered me. What got me was that Paino, in his initial statement, encouraged students to seek out counseling if they needed it in the aftermath of the arrests. He even reminded them about the on-campus counseling center. I’m all for counseling, but this is like punching a person in the face, blaming them for getting punched, then reminding them that ice packs are in the fridge. I only hit you because you made me. Sorry if you got hurt, but if you’d just listened, none of this would have happened.
What irked a lot of other people in the UMW community was that the students were arrested just a short walk down campus from a bronze bust honoring James Farmer, the late, great civil rights legend, who taught at UMW for many years before his death.
A few days after the arrests, a group of UMW faculty members and students walked to the bust, laid down flowers, and propped a petition against the base with the signatures of dozens of faculty members, expressing their support for the protests.
Paino, in a statement to the community two days later, said the students were honoring Farmer’s tradition of civil disobedience. And not just Farmer’s, but MLK’s, too!
But if the students were following in the footsteps of Farmer and King, then what was Paino doing, and whose legacy was he honoring? He has failed to say.
***
On April 30, between issuing his first and second statements about the arrests, Paino held a small invitation-only in-person meeting with 17 UMW students who were appalled by what had happened. One of my children was among them, and she and her cohort passionately challenged Paino and questioned his actions.
The statement he issued two days after that meeting confirmed what the students and many others in the community knew: “By all accounts, our student protesters were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
Nevertheless, Paino continued trying to justify the actions of police and his administration. He told the students he did what he did to protect their safety and the safety of everyone in the campus community. What he meant, of course, was that he did what he did to protect the “safety” of non-protesters—those who were nowhere near Jefferson Square, who could have been in their dorms doing Fireball shots for all he knew.
At the meeting, my daughter delivered a letter to Paino from me in which I told him about my deep connections to Mary Wash. I told him I knew many of the student protesters and that my daughter could have been arrested if she hadn’t left Jefferson Square to meet a friend who’d just arrived in town. I wrote about the lasting economic, employment, physical, and mental health problems that involvement in the criminal justice system can cause—because I wanted him to know that while he might be able to put that night behind him quickly, that wouldn’t be the case for the students.
I figured he was getting attaboys from his peers, so I wanted him to hear from someone else—someone who was willing to tell him what is abundantly clear: that he was blinded by the power of law enforcement, ignored what he could see with his own two eyes, and distorted the facts to cover his tracks.
As I told him:
Your press release listed, as a precipitating factor in the arrests, the “outside influence invited to campus to grow the encampment.” The “encampment” was a handful of tents that took up a fragment of Jefferson Square on the outer edge of campus. The “outside influence”—invited to campus by students and faculty members alike—included students, alums, college employees, parents, and others, like me, who are not violent, not disruptive, and not antisemitic, but who believe a war supported by our government that has killed 35,000+ people needs to end.
PR 101: Don’t lie if you want to be seen as ethical. Tell the truth, especially to people who know the campus and the students well. I lived in Jefferson Hall many years ago, and the sit-in out front this weekend didn’t even register on the noise and disruption scale compared to the drunken bacchanals that took place in that dorm then and surely still take place today.
You must know there were roughly the same number of students inside Jefferson Square last weekend as have camped out in Ball Circle over the years for Professor Shawn Humphrey’s live-on-$2-a-day challenge. Campouts, noise, tents, groups of students congregating outside—they’re all acceptable at Mary Washington unless they involve discussion of serious issues that skittish college officials and politicians would rather not have anyone address. Is that the message you want to send?
By your complicity in ordering the student protesters arrested, you sent the message that it’s better to party than to protest, to stay silent than speak up, to be apathetic than to care. These students, though they no doubt already knew, have now experienced firsthand the way armed police can be tools used by politicians and other “leaders” to protect their own interests—and how university administrators’ concern for students’ well-being is superficial at best….
PR 201, which should also be leadership 101 for anyone who wishes to be seen as ethical, would involve this: Issue a new statement. Apologize for the arrests and your part in them. Acknowledge that you were complicit in using the police to harm students who committed no crime other than the manufactured one of trespassing on their own campus….
You set the trap. Stop blaming peaceful students for getting caught in it. Mary Washington has an Honor Code signed by every student pledging to always tell the truth. It needs your signature, too.
***
Paino never responded to my letter. Perhaps he thinks the whole thing has already blown over. It hasn’t. In the next few weeks, UMW students are scheduled to have adjudicatory hearings, an early step in the criminal court process. Things could end there if the prosecutor drops the charges. Or a trial date could be set.
Also now facing the prospect of a trial: The leaders of Hamas and Israel. The International Criminal Court just announced it is seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, along with the top three leaders of Hamas, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Nearly 4,000 students around the country are facing criminal charges for protesting the suffering that led the ICC to seek those warrants, and for urging their colleges to divest from financial investments in the war machine.
Recognizing suffering, being appalled by it, protesting it, identifying the causes, working to effect positive change—all while being open to dialogue with others who hold different views: that was the James Farmer Way, and could have been the Mary Washington Way, if not for the arrests.
It should be the American Way, too.
***
Janet Marshall Watkins is the co-founder and co-editor of Pie & Chai. She’s a graduate of Mary Washington College, where she served as news editor of the student paper and captain of the varsity softball team. She made wonderful, lasting relationships at Mary Washington and thinks the campus is one of the most stunningly beautiful around, thanks largely to the amazing skills of Joni Wilson, the school’s now-retired director of landscape and grounds. Watkins knows the best education often happens outside the classroom.
