Friends,

A. While our students were under attack by the administration and we were all preoccupied with the genocide in Gaza and disproportionate charges against the Halimy Hall student protesters, Cunningham was busy meeting with national security and weapons manufacturing firms, taking photos next to Lockheed Martin's VP/CTO, selling UMN property to North Wind to build deadly hypersonic Missiles, and solidifying plans for a "National Security Institute" at UMN. On February 24, when Cunningham was happily selling UMN to deadly weapons manufacturing companies and collaborating with security industries, according to UNRWA, six newborns died from the cold in Gaza. The same source reported that by February 24, 2025, at least 48,348 Palestinians had been killed and 111,761 injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Not only does Cunningham not divest from weapons manufacturing companies and the genocide in Gaza, but she also proudly enhances UMN's ties with the military and weapons manufacturing companies.

Subsequently, the Board of Regents' Finance and Operations Committee voted to sell 60 acres of UMN property at U More Park to North Wind in the May BoR meeting. The sale agenda item was buried in the "consent report" in the docket and easily missed! (To learn more about the North Wind and the hypersonic missile testing at U More Park, look out for the research that our brilliant students at SDS have conducted. They will release more information soon).

Update: SDS just issued this IG post and this petition. Please sign.

B. While the admin is selling UMN to North Wind and securitizing the University, Cunningham has also introduced a 7% budget cut (not from Cunningham's $1 million salary, but from the academic budget!) and is imposing an unprecedented tuition hike! ​

C. As we mentioned in our last email dispatch, Rebecca Cunningham announced that Gretchen Ritter has been named the new Executive Vice President/Executive Provost .

Ritter has a history of suppressing academic freedom when it comes to Palestine speech. She has imposed draconian measures to criminalize protests, threatened to collaborate with the FBI to discipline student protesters, and has silenced Palestinian speech in classrooms and cancelled Palestine-related events (long before the UMN administration caught up with her on our campus!) To make matters worse, the UMN search for Vice President was conducted in a secretive and undemocratic manner. Faculty were not included in the finalist interviews. The finalists' names were not announced publicly. Cunningham's claim that a secret search was necessary to get strong candidates is a lie! Names of candidates were released during the Presidential search last year. (Is Cunningham suggesting that she was a weak candidate, since her name was announced publicly last year as a finalist for the Presidential search? (We agree, but for different reasons!) Like other undemocratic decisions that the administration, under Cunningham's leadership, has made in the past year, the decision to hire a major public-facing position was made behind closed doors. The faculty gave a vote of no confidence to Croson last year (which Cunningham completely dismissed when she started her position). Are faculty, students, and staff expected to have confidence in a candidate who has been criticized by AAUP and MESA for her horrifying violations of academic freedom at Syracuse? (If you don't believe AAUP and MESA, ask BIPOC students at Syracuse and see what they have to say about Ritter).

The Board of Regents will be voting to hire Ritter and discuss Cunningham's proposed budget cuts in their June meeting this Thursday!

We cannot allow the administration to use our campus for developing deadly weapons used to kill tens of thousands of human beings in Gaza! We cannot allow the administration to pretend to adhere to the principles of Responsible Investment while developing hypersonic aerospace technologies that have a drastically harmful environmental impact! We cannot allow the administration to cut more funding from academic programs (we know which departments and programs they always cut from!) and increase students' tuition, while making contracts to profit from wars, securitization, and genocide!

URGENT ACTION NEEDED FROM THE UMN COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITY AT LARGE:

Please call the Regents, UMN President's Office, and the Provost and tell them to:

1. Stop the Contract with North Wind!

2. Do NOT Hire Ritter!

Here are their numbers:

President: 612-626-1616

VP/Provost: 612-625-0051

All the Regents: 612-624-6608

Here is a sample text for the call-in:

"Hello, my name is __ and I am a (student /faculty /alumni/ community member of the University of Minnesota. I am calling to express my outrage about the University’s sale and exploitation of the land at U More Park for war industries and militarization. I am also calling to demand that you stop the undemocratic and secretive hiring of Gretchen Ritter as the new Provost!

UMN should not have sold its land to North Wind. Nor should the administration have entertained a contract to participate in the development of deadly weapons in the name of “research”! As if it was not bad enough that the University has been using the Park gun range to train the university police to brutalize students and train ICE to abduct immigrants, now it is turning Indigenous land into a testing range for weapons of mass destruction! North Wind has close ties to the military and weapons manufacturing companies such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Motors. Its hypersonic technology generates severely high temperatures and has devastating climate effects.

Raising tuition rates and cutting the academic budget while spending students’ tuition money on war profiteering is unacceptable! While children in Palestine are being starved to death and 65,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the administration continues to trade with and invest in weapons manufacturing companies. How could you, Rebecca Cunningham, trade in your humanity for greed while lining your pockets in blood? How could you, the Regents, allow this to happen on your watch?! You MUST stop all contracts with North Wind and weapons manufacturing companies immediately!

Lastly, hiring a new Provost secretly, without including faculty in interviews and without announcing the names of finalist candidates, is outrageous, undemocratic, and corrupt! Gretchen Ritter has a negative reputation at Syracuse University. She has repeatedly violated academic freedom, punished student protesters by reporting them to the FBI, and has not supported faculty against hate attacks. Replacing Croson, who received a vote of no confidence, with Ritter is a slap in the face of faculty, students, staff, and the community who have been kept in the dark about the hiring process.

I demand that the University promptly and transparently begin righting its wrongs.

Stop U War Park! Stop the hiring of Gretchen Ritter!" No budget cuts! No Tuition hikes!

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• Also, IF YOU HAVE NOT DONE SO YET, Please send this letter to the Regents and ask them NOT TO HIRE Ritter as UMN's new Executive Provost! All you need to do is to click "send." Don't forget to type your name at the bottom of the letter. **For those whose browsers do not work with "Mailto," please see the text of the letter and email addresses of the regents at the end of this email and before "Upcoming Events"). You can just copy and paste the letter and email addresses.

D. As of Today, Monday, June 9, Trump's Travel Ban on mostly Muslim and African countries went into effect, banning nationals of 12 countries from entering the United States. These countries are: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

In addition, partial travel restrictions (entrance into the U.S. under several visa programs is suspended but a complete ban is not implemented) is imposed on the nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

EJP stands with all immigrants and denounces this racist and xenophobic ban. The ban, along with the attacks on undocumented immigrants and ICE raids in the name of "national security" (a euphemism for war mongering and racism, in which the UMN President, Cunningham, is shamefully complicit) will have horrifying effects on our students, faculty, staff, and our community members in Minnesota and across the U.S. No to deportations, no to racist immigration bans, no to policing!

Upcoming Events

Monday-Friday THIS WEEK! IF POSSIBLE, CALL BEFORE THURSDAY WHEN THEY VOTE ON RITTER'S HIRING! Call-In Campaign to Say NO to UMN's North Wind Contract and the Hiring of Gretchen Ritter! ​ ​President: 612-626-1616 VP/Provost: 612-625-0051 All the Regents: 612-624-6608 ​ SDS and EJP: In May, the Board of Regents Finance and Operations Committee voted to sell 60 acres of property at U More Park in Rosemount to North Wind to build a hypersonic missile testing site. UMN will lead the “national security” research on hypersonic wind tunnel test facility in that site. They are also voting to hire Gretchen Ritter, as the Provost in a highly secretive process. Ritter has a reputation of suppressing Palestine speech and violating academic freedom! Call this week in to demand that BoR: Vote NO to war profiteering and genocide! Vote NO to the undemocratic hiring of a genocide supporter! SEE THE SAMPLE SCRIPT ABOVE.

Monday, June 23 6 PM Fighting Pinkwashing & Navigating Queer/Transness in Our SWANA and Muslim Communities ​ ​Room 1200 MN Senate Building - 95 University Ave W, St. Paul, MN EJP, Mizna, Afghan Cultural Society, and US Palestinian Community Network, MN: Join us for a conversation among SWANA queer and trans activists, artists, and scholars to discuss the challenges of organizing against the Israeli settler colonial occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while navigating queerness and transness in our multiple communities. Fighting anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant, and anti-SWANA hate while facing anti-queer/trans hate/discrimination from White supremacists and Zionists is exhausting. Being discriminated against and devalued by some members of our own communities is not only demoralizing, but it weakens our collective movement to end U.S. imperialism and Israeli occupation. ​ In this conversation, speakers will discuss the U.S. and Israeli pinkwashing propaganda machines that attempt to instrumentalize our lives and our struggles for their imperialistic and Zionist expansionist agendas. We will also discuss what it means to be queer and Muslim, queer and Palestinian, or queer and SWANA when the dominant binary discourses (which assume the incommensurability of queerness and Islam, queerness and Palestinian-ness, or queerness and SWANAness) erase/exclude those who refuse to choose between multiple facets of their identities and struggles. In a time when the Muslim ban, ICE raids, and anti-trans laws target our communities, we find it necessary to build stronger coalitions. ​ Neither mimicking liberal ideals of queerness/transness, nor assuming queerness/transness to be byproducts of “westoxification,” the speakers will engage in a conversation about the history and the present of queer and trans life in the SWANA region, the role of colonialism and imperialism in regulating sexuality, and the importance of discussing Palestine as a queer issue. We will discuss strategies to sustain our coalitions through meaningful connections between our struggles. Our hope is not just to imagine a livable and just future, but to practice that future here and now. ​ This conversation is organized by EJP and endorsed/co-presented by Mizna, USPCN, and the Afghan Cultural Society. 🇵🇸✊🏽 Instagram Post

Friday, June 13 5 PM DFL Dines While Gaza Starves: Rally outside the DFL’s annual Humphrey-Mondale Dinner fundraiser The Minneapolis Hilton, 1001 Marquette Ave.​ ​ Antiwar Committee: Oppose Trump’s agenda! Divest Minnesota from Israel! ​ Israel’s genocide is becoming undeniable. On top of daily bombings of schools and hospitals, Israeli forces have now repeatedly killed dozens of Palestinians trying to access food at Israel’s much-criticized distribution sites. Even major U.S. allies are beginning to cut support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing system in Palestine. ​ Join us to demand our state leaders join them by divesting Minnesota funds, managed by the State Board of Investment, from Israel. Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, State Auditor Julie Blaha and Secretary of State Steve Simon make up the SBI’s board members and are prominent DFLers. They have the power to take action against both the ongoing genocide, and against Trump’s extremist, full throttle attacks on all fronts, domestically and abroad. ​ State divestment from Israel would not only weaken support for its massacres in Palestine — it would send an important message that Minnesota is ready to fight Trump’s agenda across the board. ​ It’s time for the SBI and DFL members to do what’s right: Oppose Trump’s agenda! Divest Minnesota from Israel! Instagram Post

Saturday, June 14, 2 PM Decolonizing Queerness ​ ​American Indian Center (1530 E Franklin Ave) Taking back pride Coalition: Come join Taking Back Pride on Saturday, June 14th at 2PM at the American Indian Center (1530 E Franklin Ave) learn about pre colonial and non white queer identities. ​ Instagram Post

Wednesday, June 18, 10 AM Pack the Room at the MN State Board of Investment Meeting! ​ ​Room 1200 MN Senate Building - 95 University Ave W, St. Paul, MN AWC: 🚨 The previously postponed State Board of Investment meeting has been rescheduled! Pack the room with us as we demand the SBI divest from occupation, apartheid, and genocide! WE WON'T BE SILENCED! 🚨 Instagram Post

Saturday, June 21 2 PM Resisting the Raids: A Panel on Police Violence and Resistance from Stonewall to ICE ​ ​New City Center 3400 15th Ave, Minneapolis Taking Back Pride, MIRAC, and TCC4J: Join us for a Juneteenth edition of our Resisting the Raids panel with @tcc4j and @miracmn Learn about queer resistance to police violence and repression from Stonewall to ICE. Instagram Post