The Purdue Chapter of the American Association of University Professors emphatically condemns the violent campus police attack on Adonis Tuggle that occurred on February 4, 2022. Adonis is a junior studying psychology, is a member of the Boilermaker community, and is one of a small and easily targeted group of Black men on this campus who are disproportionately targeted by local police and suffer just as disproportionately from the discretionary use of force by police. The police officer who assaulted Tuggle also threatened Tuggle’s girlfriend, an act that is also unacceptable.
We join the condemnation issued in a recent statement by PSG co-presidents Shannon Kang and Olivia Wyrick on behalf of the undergraduate student body. We stand in solidarity with student groups like the Purdue Black Student Union who are organizing around this issue. We appreciate the leadership of these student groups, and offer our support, advocacy, and expertise to them as they move forward with their demands to the administration for accountability. As part of our commitment to racial justice on campus, and following the lead of our students, we will also consider new or continued work that faculty can do to push for an improved administrative response, given its history of inadequate responses to racist acts on campus in the last 5 years and beyond.
Passed by the AAUP-Purdue Executive Committee,
February 13, 2022