Dear President Wagner, As faculty members at Emory University, we are writing to request that you ask that all charges be dropped against the seven students who were arrested on Monday evening, April 25, 2011, for peacefully protesting on the quadrangle. Two of these students, Ms. Andrea Nicholls and Mr. Roger Sikes, are active and valued second year students in the MPH program in the Hubert Department of Global Health. As faculty members who have been training and mentoring these students to become leaders in global health, we are appalled that their commitment to principles of social justice would be disciplined by arrest and criminal charges. Free speech and the freedom of association are crucial to our everyday endeavors as educators. We believe that this exertion of authority was disproportionate to the character and intensity of the protest; we cannot condone the use of police intervention in the absence of imminent danger to the broader community. At the same time, we understand that the issues behind the student protest and administration response are complex. Engaging those debates is not the purpose of this letter; however we would welcome an opportunity to do so in the very near future. We believe that these debates can and should be resolved within the Emory community, and feel that dropping the charges against these students would constitute a key step on the part of the administration toward de-escalating the conflict that currently characterizes these debates. We feel it is particularly important for the morale of our students and faculty that the charges be dropped before the commencement exercises scheduled for May 9, 2011. Sincerely,