Above photo: Thorne Hall at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Wikimedia/Crewfan94.
Parents of students involved in the movement for justice in Palestine at Occidental College write an open letter to school leadership.
Protesting the harsh punishment given for protesting the school’s complicity in the Gaza genocide.
Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to to the President, Board and Administration of Occidental College on August 1, 2025. The letter was signed by 23 parents of current Occidental students, and 139 additional supporters: current students, alumni, faculty and more. Signatures were sent but were not made public.
To President Tom Stritikus and the Board of Trustees of Occidental College
CC: the administration, faculty, students, and campus community of Occidental College:
We write this letter in alarm, as parents of students in the student movement for justice in Palestine at Occidental College. We are responding to the college’s threat against several students with conduct violations which could possibly result in punishments as severe as suspension and expulsion. We strongly object to these charges against the students as ungrounded, and ask that the college immediately drop the charges. We request instead that the college procures an independent and politically neutral investigation into the April 25th incident at issue here, and invite the students into a productive dialogue or restorative justice process with the administration, faculty and campus community to resolve this issue. Expulsion is a drastic punishment and, in this case, fully unwarranted.
We have watched the video footage of the April 25th incident, in which a number of students with keffiyehs covering their faces attempt to enter an event, presumably in order to protest the inauguration of President Stritikus. We see that the campus security guards were unnecessarily aggressive, and in some instances clearly violent with the student protesters. We understand that the college does not want such volatile protests on campus, and for this same reason, we object to the very presence of security guards tasked with physically obstructing the movement of student protesters–an unusual strategy at Occidental College, where dialogue with student protesters has been historically a standard practice. Further, we believe that this incident should be both investigated and addressed in the context of the nearly two years of struggle in which this protest took place. Therefore, in this letter, instead of addressing that incident in detail, we have chosen to share our interpretation and feelings about the antagonism, dismissiveness, and even degradation which our children have faced from the university administration–at the same time that they attempt to draw attention to, and take action against, an ongoing genocide on ethical grounds.
For the past 20 months, we have watched our children–your students–bravely respond to what scholars agree is a genocide, the “crime of crimes,” often referred to as the first “live streamed” genocide humanity has ever witnessed. The horrors that we have watched on our screens, as Israel has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza with an excruciating daily regimen of bombing, shooting, and starvation, has often been too much to bear. We know that Israel has killed more than 17,000 children in Gaza—an average of 27 per day for 20 months—and that this is an underestimation of the total number of those killed. In response to these horrors, supported by the US, the largest student protest movement in the US since the Vietnam War has swept universities across the nation. Now, the Trump administration has launched what many describe as a “new McCarthyism,” arresting, detaining and deporting student activists, while calling university administrators to testify before Congress, where protests in support of Palestinian rights and freedoms are falsely characterized as “antisemitism” –even while openly antisemitic politicians freely publicize their abhorrent views. This is the fraught scenario our children navigate as they learn to become better informed, more skilled and more ethical participants in transforming this world for the better.
We sent our students to college with immense hopes, only to find them mired in an intractable fight for justice and peace in a time of mass violence and the shattering of norms of international law and human rights that many of us had hoped we could take for granted. Some of the families of students in SJP knew people who were in Gaza when the bombing of civilians began. Those of us who are Jewish witnessed major protests in our progressive Jewish communities, contesting the Israeli state’s claim to represent us all. Throughout this period, we have increasingly observed attacks on activists, including doxxing and smear campaigns that vilified protesters–some of this quickly turned into repressive university and state policy. We felt a mixture of fear and pride when we observed our children join this global movement, knowing that they were taking risks to speak out for the possibility of a better world, where the dignity and freedom of Palestinian people would prevail, alongside many other struggles for justice and freedom.
Along with our children, we chose Occidental College in part for its activist reputation, and its values of antiracism and social justice. We support our children’s journey to become political thinkers and activists, in college and beyond, because we see in them a spark, an inspiration to contribute to transforming the world in the direction of a just peace. We place them in the capable hands of college professors and administrators who can support them in their journey to build skills for study and for professional life–and for joining in the efforts for social change that are foundational to participation in democratic society. We believe that our children’s action in the Palestine solidarity movement echo our own families’ and communities’ experiences protesting the horrors of our time, from the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the historical struggles against US intervention in Central America and Vietnam, and US support for apartheid South Africa. Our children are part of a global movement to counter apartheid and genocide. We are proud of them, and we ask the faculty and administration of the school to join us in appreciating and celebrating their bold stand and their right to take it.
Last year, our children exposed a nearly million dollar investment that Occidental College holds in what they called the “genocide five:” Lockheed Martin, Maersk, Boeing, Elbit Systems, and Caterpillar. They challenged the college to divest from these companies, which are profiting from the acts of ethnic cleansing currently underway. We support the students’ assessment that Occidental College violates basic guidelines for ethical investment, since they support corporations that cause incalculable suffering on civilians. The June 2024 letter from the Board of Trustees shows little knowledge of the student groups involved in the effort for college divestment, or the political situation at hand; it frames the protest against genocide as a public relations rather than a moral issue. Trustees resorted to focus groups with constituents, rather than reflecting on an ethical mandate of social responsibility to guide their decision-making. We object to the college’s decision against divestment on moral grounds: we know that every school and university in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed in acts that genocide scholars have named “scholasticide.” We have seen more evidence than we ever want to see of the slaughter wrought by US funding, weaponry, and personnel provided to the Israeli state. If the trustees choose not to divest from these killing machines that deprive students in Gaza of education or even access to survival, they must live with their actions. But the administration should not pretend that the cause is not worthy or that it poses a danger to society or the campus.
While the presence of dissent is undoubtedly a challenge, it is a democratic right and part of the job of university administrators to navigate it skillfully–more so in the dire time we are living through, in which a far-right administration has launched a wholesale attack on the university writ large. In this context, the university president and administration should take student protest seriously, and value it. We object to a president so antagonistic to student protesters that he does not even respond to a student-led hunger strike–one which ran on national news. Our children instigated a wave of demonstrations that crossed the country, engaging in one of the most intense forms of protest, one of the harshest for the protesters, evidencing the compassion they have for those suffering under the massive violence and now, famine, that besets the people of Gaza. And yet the Occidental College administration refused to even acknowledge the protest. This dismissal of students is not only unjust–it is bad pedagogy and it is mistreatment.
We are but some voices among many insisting that the administration of Occidental College must reconsider the decisions they have made, that produced such conflict between the very students they recruited to their school, and a college that makes claims to progressive thought but dismisses students’ protests against investment in war. We ask that you do more to understand and work with students who attempt to resolve this contradiction through ethical action for social change. We are available to meet with the administration and the entire campus community about these matters, but urgently and first, we ask for all conduct charges and threats of suspension and expulsion to be dropped.
