Student protests are ramping up, and university administrations are menacing students with police and surveillance.
Student protests are ramping up, and university administrations are menacing students with police and surveillance.
As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the West Bank mounts daily, campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continue to spread across the U.S., where students and faculty often face police crackdowns. Student activists from Pomona Divest from Apartheid in southern California, The Coalition for Mutual Liberation at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Resist WashU in St. Louis, Missouri, told Truthout the blows landing hardest are the ones from their own chancellors and deans. The activists say university administrators are waging an asymmetrical campaign of enforcement against students demanding an end to their schools’ complicity in the slaughter of Palestinians.
“We see Pomona for what it is: serving capital and empire. And we know the way to win our demands is to disrupt their flow of cash, disrupt their reputation,” said Amanda Dym, a 21-year-old humanities student at Scripps College, one of the five colleges in the Pomona consortium. “We won’t allow our administrators who facilitate and defend investments in an apartheid state to go about their work undisturbed.”
Dym was among 20 students arrested by cops in riot gear during a sit-in outside Pomona President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office on April 5.
“A televised genocide live-streamed on our phones is obviously unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetimes,” she said. That’s why Dym and others were moved to demonstrate, but she says when Starr called in the riot police, the president put them in a whole other category of risk.
“Obviously, it was a scary day, to watch 30-plus riot cops from three cities come in and start bringing my comrades out, one by one,” Dym told Truthout. “The cops were in full gear with automatic weapons, bigger guns than some of us had ever seen. They were yanking students up off the ground, zip-tying their hands so tightly they were losing circulation.”
Dym, who identifies as Jewish and white, says she can’t take genocide or the arrests and banishment from the Pomona campus lightly. But she wonders about the administration.
“We were sitting in the lobby [for] nearly two hours. Starr had — along with the vice president, COO and treasurer Jeff Roth, and other administrative staff members — locked herself in her office. Periodically, we heard laughter emerge from the president’s office,” she said. “As to whether [Starr] took putting her students’ lives on the line seriously or not, I don’t know. But I do remember quite vividly their laughter as these events were unfolding.”
Seven Pomona College students were suspended for participating in the April 5 sit-in, and four of them have not had their interim suspension lifted yet, according to Dym.
“They’ve been tossed around by the school, evicted from their housing, were not able to go to the dining halls, had to be escorted by a campus safety officer to pick up their belongings,” Dym said. “These are Black, Brown, low-income students who were engaging in the sit-in the same as the rest of us, but for some reason got treated completely differently.”
Every attempt to divide and conquer only strengthens the students’ bond, she said, adding, “I don’t think President Starr is really reckoning yet with the possibility that students overwhelmingly are demanding divestment. We’re not some fringe group; we were backed by 60-plus organizations on campus. We will not stop in this fight until we win divestment.”
It’s not just Pomona where protesters have felt threatened. Cornell and Washington University administrators have called police to arrest and frighten their students this spring. The charges so far have been petty misdemeanors such as failure to disperse, trespass and disturbing the peace, but there’s nothing nonchalant about encounters between protesters and armed police.
RJ Lucas, a Washington University senior of Bolivian heritage, celebrated on March 19 when the Student Senate passed the Divest from Boeing resolution by a vote of 15-5.
