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Student Activism

Students Achieve Israeli Divestment Victories On US College Campuses

Two significant US campus divestment victories were hard-won by students and community activists in San Francisco, California, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On 19 April, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Graduate Student Union democratically adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the MIT community to cut all research and financial ties with the Israeli military. According to the MIT Coalition for Palestine, along with BDS Boston, the Industrial Liaison Program of MIT officially cut its ties with Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

City University Of New York Hunger Strike for Gaza!

Starting May 27, 2025, students, faculty, and staff from the CUNY Graduate Center, School of Labor and Urban Studies, Baruch, and Brooklyn Colleges launched an indefinite hunger strike on the steps of the Graduate Center. Our demand is clear: that Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees divest immediately from the zionist settler colonial state and from all weapons and tech manufacturers supporting the ongoing Israeli-US genocide in Gaza. As Gaza faces mass starvation under total siege—with over 300 already starved to death, 14,000 babies at risk in the next 48 hours, and nearly a million children facing imminent death—CUNY continues to invest in the corporations enabling this violence.

Hundreds March Outside ICE Facility Where Mahmoud Khalil Remains

On the morning of Thursday, May 22, detained Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil had an immigration hearing after US officials allowed him to meet his 1-month-old son, Deen, for the first time. As Khalil testified in an immigration court in rural Jena, Louisiana, dozens rallied outside of the immigration detention and court building, protesting against the continued detention of Khalil. Khalil has been in ICE custody since he was arrested outside of his own home in New York City on March 8. In the months since his arrest, support for Khalil’s release has not abated, with supporters rallying on Thursday in cities across the country, including New York City.

Columbia Students Boo President, Cheer Mahmoud Khalil At Graduation

Columbia University held its graduation ceremony this week. When acting school president Claire Shipman addressed the crowd, she was met with a loud chorus of boos and “Free Mahmoud!” chants. “Good morning, Class of 2025. I know that many of you feel some amount of frustration with me, and I know you feel it with the administration,” she told the students. Shipman’s attempt to separate the two entities was met with louder boos, and why wouldn’t it be? Since Columbia students erected a Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring, the school has worked to stifle pro-Palestinian activism on campus.

Graduating CUNY Law Students Walk Out Of Ceremony

Dozens of City University of New York (CUNY) law graduates walked out of their graduation ceremony on Thursday, May 22, in solidarity with Palestine and in protest of their administration’s repression of pro-Palestine protest activity. Students donning keffiyehs and sporting Palestinian flags walked out of the ceremony which took place in the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and rallied together a few blocks away at the monument to Adam Clayton Powell. “We’re walking out of our own commencement ceremony today in protest of CUNY law’s suppression of free speech, and the CUNY system’s investments in Israeli settler colonialism and genocide,” said CUNY law graduate Parima Kadikar at the Adam Clayton Powell monument.

Drop The Charges And Full Amnesty For Brooklyn College Protesters

Fourteen pro-Paelstinian student protestors were arrested at Brooklyn College following a brutal police raid where students were beaten up, dragged, and tased. Those students, who were entirely peaceful , were viciously attacked by police at the command of the CUNY administration and now seven face charges of disorderly conduct and trespassing and risk punishment from Brooklyn College. The Brooklyn College administration recklessly endangered all of their students, staff, and faculty, protesters and non-protesters alike, by bringing cops on campus to protect a genocide and attack the right to protest. The cops, in the name of genocide and as enemies of democratic rights, punched, kicked, and tased students for practicing their right to speak out.

Stanford Students And Faculty Launch Hunger Strike For Gaza

Yesterday we began our hunger strike. In every slowed minute we remember the children of Gaza, now surviving on boiled weeds and muddy water. It is now day 584 of the genocide in Gaza, and more than 60,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the Zionist entity. Just last week, at least four separate massacres have occurred in Gaza, leaving hundreds murdered and wounded. Two months have passed since Israel’s total siege of the strip on March 2nd, completely blocking all food and aid from entering Gaza. Israel has completely weaponized food; aid convoys remain blocked, grain silos stand empty and parents barter wedding rings for flour that never arrives.

The Best Protection For Students Is A Mass Movement

On March 20, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) hosted a conversation with Cornell University student and pro-Palestinian activist Momodou Taal. Less than a week prior, Taal had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging the new executive orders that sought to target international noncitizen students for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. The day after this conversation, Taal was told to surrender into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. On March 31, he self-deported. In this conversation, in which Taal is interviewed by Nidaa Lafi, an organizer with PYM’s Dallas chapter, Taal shares his first-hand experience with being targeted for peacefully protesting, discusses the true function of universities today and offers wisdom on why the increasing repression against students is a sign of empire’s weakness, not its strength.

Johns Hopkins Students Met With Police Repression And Violence

On the morning of May 8, students at Johns Hopkins University launched an encampment on Keyser Quad, declaring it the Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Liberated Zone in solidarity with the people of Gaza and in protest of the university's ongoing complicity in genocide. Within the hour, demonstrators were met with indiscriminate aggression and physical harassment by armed Johns Hopkins Police and Baltimore Police officers, resulting in the injury of two students and the destruction of personal belongings. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, which Johns Hopkins Police themselves admitted, they issued multiple threats of imminent arrests, engaging in threats and verbal harassment well outside the scope of their putative role of enforcers of public safety.

California Students Go On Hunger Strike For Gaza

On May 5th, seven students from California State University, Long Beach, launched a hunger strike as part of an organized protest across four CSU campuses: San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Jose State. In total, twenty-five students are striking for Gaza. They join a wave of nationwide protests demanding an immediate end to the United States’ arming and facilitating a genocide in Gaza by Israel. The seven strikers announced on the campus their commitment to refuse food until their institution divests from companies that supply weapons, military equipment, and surveillance technology, among other demands, to Israel’s military.

NYPD Arrests Dozens Of Pro-Palestine Protesters After Columbia Occupation

Roughly 80 pro-Palestine protesters were arrested on Wednesday night after occupying a library on Columbia University’s campus. Demonstrators rushed through Butler Library’s security gate at about 3:00 p.m., hanging banners, tagging shelves with graffiti, chanting pro-Palestine slogans, and renaming it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” a reference to the Palestinian writer who was killed by the Israeli army in 2017. By 7:00 p.m., the school had called in the police. A volatile scene had already developed, as a crowd of supporters gathered outside the building and public safety officers prevented students from leaving the library without showing identification.

Pro-Palestine Student Activists Occupy University Of Washington

We are taking this building amidst the current and renewed wave of the student Intifada, following the uprising of student action for Palestine after the heroic victory of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th, which shattered the illusion of zionist-imperialist domination and brought Palestine to the forefront for all justice-loving people of the world. We respond to the call made by the Palestinian student movement in Gaza to “raise the pace and ceiling of your struggle and your honorable stances, quantitatively and qualitatively, against the institutions, corporations, and governments that participate in the slaughter of our children, our students, and our people.

NYU Law Students Refused To Sign Away Their Right To Protest

Pro-palestine law students at New York University have secured a major victory against the university administration’s attempts to silence protests. On May 4, the NYU administration confirmed that 31 law students who had been barred from campus and prohibited from sitting for final exams, unless they sign away their right to protest, are now permitted to take their exams. “This type of public pressure, the backlash that [the administration] got from not allowing students to sit for exams, was not something that they expected,” said one of the affected NYU law students, who spoke to Peoples Dispatch about this latest decision.

Why Protesters Are Being Sent To For-Profit ICE Prison In Rural Louisiana

In recent weeks, students Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Alireza Doroudi were abducted by ICE and are being held in ICE detention centers in rural Louisiana. Khalil’s powerful statement connects multiple realities that demonstrate how state repression is activated to support the rise of authoritarianism.  That Khalil and others are being sent to detention centers in remote towns across Louisiana is not an accident. Rising authoritarianism requires a police state, and the expansion of prisons, police, and detention centers is extremely profitable. As the current U.S. government disappears people to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador, they are also moving people to rural Louisiana in attempts to disappear people within the United States borders. 

Student Activists Pass Municipal Resolution To Make Polluters Pay

Northampton, MA. – Sunrise Movement activists at Smith College and local advocates passed a Climate Superfund Resolution in Northampton last Thursday. On Earth Day dozens rally in Amherst, calling on the Amherst Town Council and other municipalities in the Connecticut River Valley to join the call to make polluters pay. Thursday’s resolution in support of H.1014/S.588, “An Act to Establish a Climate Change Superfund”, was the first to pass in Western Massachusetts, following previous resolutions in Boston, Cambridge, Medford, and Malden. “I’ve watched my generation strike, resist, campaign, lose hope, and get back up again,” said Emma Coopersmith.
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