Fans watched in confusion as 15 students staged a sit-in on the field at Saturday’s football game between USC and California, protesting for the reinstatement of a suspended UC Berkeley professor.
The game was delayed for about 10 minutes before the protestors were arrested and escorted off the field of UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, according to a statement from the University of California Police Department. The department said 14 adults were transported to Alameda County Jail, and one juvenile was transported to UCPD.
Many USC students present at the game were unaware of the circumstances of the protest.
“We didn’t really understand what was happening because they also weren’t presenting it on any of the JumboTrons,” said Kyra Aligaen, a junior studying occupational therapy. “We were pretty high up, as well, so all we could see was a group of 10 to 15 people sitting down on the field with posters, but we couldn’t exactly read what the posters were.”
The protestors were with Justice4Ivonne, a student campaign to reinstate Ivonne del Valle, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Del Valle was suspended following three university investigations that found evidence of her harassing and stalking Joshua Clover, an English and comparative literature professor at UC Davis, according to KQED.
Alejandra Decker, a PhD student at UC Berkeley and an organizer with Justice4Ivonne, said that Justice4Ivonne’s protests are in response to a lack of action from UC Berkeley’s administration to reinstate del Valle as a professor.
“This case has been going on for more than five years now. The protests are really just the latest in a long fight for Professor Ivonne Del Valle’s reinstatement,” Decker said. “The Justice4Ivonne campaign that’s been going on since August is really a product of the administration’s silence on this issue and the fact that they haven’t acknowledged even how damaging it’s been to our department.”
Clover was accused by del Valle of hacking her phone and computer and harassing her. The professors reportedly met in 2018 when they met in person about a panel discussion del Valle was leading. The UC Berkeley Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination found “insufficient evidence” to support del Valle’s claims that Clover hacked, harassed or stalked her, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
KQED reported that after the first investigation in 2019 that found del Valle’s violation of the university’s provisions against stalking and sexual harassment, she violated the no-contact agreement in 2021 by leaving messages outside Clover’s mother’s home. The third investigation in 2022 determined that del Valle violated the no-contact order again when she posted about the situation on social media.
Clover said in Berkeley’s 2019 investigation report that there was a “mental toll by being stalked,” and that he felt “remarkably unsupported” by the university, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Del Valle admitted to some of the accusations in the investigations, such as keying Clover’s car, contacting his friends and mother, writing “here lives a pervert” outside his door and posting a picture of his partner online.
“I’m not proud,” del Valle said in an interview with KQED. “If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do them differently.”
Decker said that del Valle was acting in “self defense” against Clover.
“We believe that she is the victim of cyber stalking, that her personal devices have been compromised in a way that completely violates her privacy and is incredibly humiliating and that she was alone and wasn’t given any support,” Decker said.
Del Valle has garnered some public support from the UC Berkeley community. Faculty members asked Berkeley’s chancellor and then-vice provost to reconsider the case against del Valle in December, and students have continued to call for del Valle’s return to campus, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Some UC Berkeley students, including Decker, have noted del Valle as a “key mentor” on campus, particularly for students of color.
“[Del Valle] is always that safe haven for a lot of students of color, for a lot of Latinx students, first generation students or students from low income backgrounds as well,” Decker said. “Her influence is spread far beyond herself. And you can see that in all of the students that she’s mentored and their incredible careers now.”
Decker said that students involved in Justice4Ivonne are trying to highlight that del Valle has “been punished enough.”
“We’re really focused on our main demand just being her reinstatement, because we know that once she gets back to her job, to her community, to the people that ground her — then that’s the first step in healing a lot of this trauma that’s been unresolved,” Decker said.