Student Activism

University Of Rochester Students Face Seven Years In Jail

December 15, 2024 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. Educate! Campus Movement, Israel, Legal System, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Repression, Rochester, Student Activism

Last month four students at the University of Rochester were charged with second-degree criminal mischief for their connection to “Wanted” posters that were put up around campus. The posters accused a small number of faculty members of enabling genocide and supporting the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Not all the faculty members identified are Jewish, but the university immediately sent out emails tagging the action as antisemitic. Pro-Israel campus groups condemned the posters, including the school’s Hillel chapter which claimed they “disproportionately singled out Jewish faculty and staff and used language that spreads harmful, antisemitic ideas about Jewish people.”

University Of Toronto Students Score A Win For The Climate

December 14, 2024 Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! climate crisis, Divestment, Fossil Fuels, Higher Education, Student Activism, Toronto, Victory

When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research. “This victory shows students have the ability to enact institutional change,” said Erin Mackey, a leader of the group Climate Justice UofT, which pushed for the fossil fuel money ban. “That’s especially important when, at many universities, students who want to make change are having the door slammed in their faces.”

Wisconsin Students Charge UW Board Of Regents With Genocide

December 9, 2024 Fight Back! News. Resist! Anti-war Movement, BDS Movement, Campus Movement, Israel, Madison, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Student Activism, Wisconsin

Madison, WI – In a show of student power, nearly 50 protesters marched into the UW board of regents meeting Thursday, December 5, to put Palestine and divestment on the Finance Committee agenda. This latest militant action comes after a large-scale administration failure to uphold the Madison and Milwaukee encampment agreements on disclosure and divestment from apartheid Israel. Despite the freezing temperatures, the students opened with a rally outside the event hall. During the rally, SDS and Freedom Road Socialist Organization member Kayla Patterson told the crowd, “The simple truth is that the board of regents stands on the wrong side of history.

Berkeley Free Speech Movement Forged An Organizing Blueprint

December 1, 2024 Derek Seidman, Truthout. Strategize! Berkeley, Campus Movement, Free Speech Movement, History, Repression, Student Activism

U.S. universities have always been sites of contestation and political struggle. Today, their governing bodies are dominated by representatives of corporate power. Issues like the student debt crisis and military research are bound up with universities. The right wing, often joined by establishment Democrats, attacks college curricula and scapegoats students to score political points. Student activists today are challenging university ties to everything from fossil fuels to racist policing — and, of course, to the genocide in Palestine.

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Targeting Pro-Palestine Activists

November 25, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Resist! BDS Movement, Campus Movement, Divestment, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Massachusetts, MIT, Palestine, State Repression, Student Activism

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken severe measures to suppress the voices of two prominent pro-Palestine activists on campus: PhD student Prahlad Iyengar and Dr. Michel DeGraff, a professor who has taught linguistics at the university for over 28 years. Iyengar has been banned from campus, which is also his place of work, without due process. He has also been denied union representation by MIT’s administration, despite himself being a union steward. He faces imminent threat of suspension as well as expulsion. MIT prohibited Dr. Degraff from teaching a course on Palestine, suspended his annual pay raise, and had his official status at the university changed from “Professor of Linguistics” to “Faculty-at-Large,” also without due process.

Week Of Action For Tulane Encampment Defendants

November 25, 2024 Fight Back! News. Resist! Campus Movement, Israel, Louisiana, New Orleans, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Student Activism

New Orleans, LA – Protesters gathered twice at New Orleans Municipal Court during the week of November 18, as six activists who were arrested during the student-led Popular University for Gaza encampment attended their first days of trial. They all face misdemeanor charges, ranging from trespassing to battery on an officer. The activists were all arrested by Tulane University Police Department in the first hours of the Encampment, which was held for two nights in April and May this year. Supporters of the defendants held a “phone zap” on Monday to flood the phone lines of the city attorney’s office.

Northwestern’s Campaign Against Palestine And Anti-Zionist Jews

November 13, 2024 Paz Baum, Mondoweiss. Resist! Anti-Zionism, Campus Movement, Higher Education, Israel, Judaism, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Repression, Student Activism

On the first day of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest holiday, I joined my fellow members of Northwestern Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in constructing a sukkah on our campus. Just hours later, Northwestern staff tore down our religious structure — allegedly, they claimed, in the name of fighting antisemitism — but really because it dared express solidarity with Palestinians. Sukkot honors the displacement of our ancestors and the temporary structures they inhabited while fleeing slavery, and erecting a sukkah, a temporary shelter in which we dwell for eight days, is an essential part of celebrating this holiday.

UCSF Health Professionals Charge Leadership With Complicity In Genocide

November 11, 2024 UC People’s Tribunal For Palestine, Mondoweiss. Resist! Accountability, California, Genocide, Health Professionals, Israel, Palestine, People's Tribunal, Student Activism, University of California

Almost a year ago, on October 31, 2023, faculty held a press conference in front of the Helen Diller Medical Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in order to amplify the warnings of Palestinian colleagues at al-Ahli Hospital who predicted that Israel’s bombing of the hospital would be the first in a campaign that would decimate Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. At the time, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, addressing the world while standing among the dead, stated that Israel’s targeting of al-Ahli Hospital signaled a decisive shift, marking the moment when its assault on Gaza “stopped being a war, and became a genocide.”

University Of California Community Members Launch People’s Tribunal

November 8, 2024 The UC People's Tribunal for Palestine. Popular Resistance. Organize! Campus Movement, Palestine, People's Tribunal, Student Activism, University of California

Faculty, staff, and students of the University of California and concerned community members launched the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine to hold their leadership–UC President Michael Drake, the UC Regents, and Governor Gavin Newsom–accountable for complicity in the devastation and destruction of the Palestinian people. Beginning on November 11, 2024, members of the UC community will assemble to charge UC leaders with direct and indirect complicity in genocide and Nakba, the ongoing process of dislocation, fragmentation, and mass killing that seeks to complete the work of erasing the existence of the Palestinian people that began in 1948.

The Crisis Of The Neoliberal University

October 30, 2024 Maryam Alaniz and Tatiana Cozzarelli, Left Voice. Strategize! Capitalism, Democrats, Higher Education, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Student Activism, Working Class

This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers.

University Of Pennsylvania Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home

October 27, 2024 Penn Students Against the Occupation of Palestine, Popular Resistance. Educate! Campus Movement, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education, Palestine, Police, State Violence, Student Activism, University of Pennsylvania

On Friday, October 18 at 6 am, 12 Penn Police officers and one Philadelphia Police officer raided the home of pro-Palestine Penn students organizers. After threatening to break down the door with a battering ram and pointing a gun at their neighbor, they stormed the house in full tactical gear. The police banged on each door as students were sleeping, pointing rifles and handguns at their heads as they exited their rooms with their hands raised. Officers refused to show a warrant to residents of the house, and refused to provide their names and badge numbers. While the students were corralled by police in a room, one student was separated and taken in for questioning.

Students And Faculty Encountering Stricter Anti-Protest Rules

October 20, 2024 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. Educate! Campus Movement, Free Speech, Israel, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Repression, Student Activism, Suppression

This semester returning university students have encountered stricter anti-protest regulations at their schools, while advocates continue to deal with fallout from last spring’s Gaza solidarity “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” wrote National SJP organizer Carrie Zaremba in September. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this Fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.” Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath told Mondoweiss those changes have included new encampment bans, stricter rules against wearing masks, a weaponization of ‘Time, place, and manner restrictions’, and stricter rules for holding protests.

Lessons From The Tulane And Loyola Encampments For Gaza

October 18, 2024 Lev Deane, Fight Back! News. Strategize! BDS Movement, Campus Movement, Israel, Louisiana State University, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Student Activism, Tulane

Baton Rouge, LA – On October 9, Louisiana State University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a panel on the Tulane and Loyola University encampments for Gaza as part of their October 7 Week of Rage. LSU SDS invited members of Tulane and Loyola SDS and a member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) from New Orleans. They highlighted their wins and explored lessons learned from planning and implementing the encampment. Last spring, the National Students for a Democratic Society put out a call for campuses across the country to enact encampments for Gaza on their universities’ lawns to escalate the fight for divestment.

The Student Movement Awakes With A Roar In Argentina

October 17, 2024 Juliana Yantorno, Left Voice. Resist! Anti-Austerity, Argentina, Higher Education, Javier Milei, Student Activism

When far-right president Javier Milei intervened to veto a Congressional bill to fund public universities and keep his slashes to the education budget intact, he had no idea that he would wake up the sleeping beast of Argentina’s student movement. Between October 14 and 15, students and faculty held more than 100 assemblies to decide how to organize the fight against the far right government’s attacks and many voted to occupy their universities. Students are now occupying 72 different schools and departments across the country and they are holding public classes in the streets in 30 universities across Argentina.

Cornell Black Students Denounce University President’s ‘White Supremacist’ Language

October 5, 2024 Amandla Thomas-Johnson, Popular Resistance. Resist! Campus Movement, Cornell University, Deportation, Free Speech, Momodou Taal, Repression, Student Activism

Black students at Cornell have denounced the University's Interim President Michael Kotlikoff for deploying “white supremacist caricatures” as he pursues a war of words against Momodou Taal, a graduate student facing deportation for taking part in pro-Palestinian protests. Following a meeting with Kotlikoff earlier in the week, Black student groups on Wednesday said they “no longer felt safe on campus” and urged the university to “create an open forum to repair the administration’s relationship with Black students.” It comes as a petition supporting Taal surpassed 10,000 signatures.

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