Ali Imran and Greta Schreiber, Staff Writer & Special to The Denisonian—

In case you haven’t been glued to your phone for updates as we have been: Last week Columbia and Barnard University students set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” to demand that their universities divest from Israel, thereby ending their complicity in the current genocide and the 75-years long occupation of Palestine. The students timed the set-up of this encampment to fall on the day their president appeared in a McCarthyite congressional hearing. During the hearing, Republicans and Democrats joined forces to demonize Palestinians and student protestors – a distraction from the genocide they continue to fund. 

The president of Columbia University caved to the pressure and sold out her students. The university suspended and evicted students and President Shafik ordered the NYPD onto the campus to sweep the encampment, leading to the arrest of every single participant as well as legal observers. While right-wing forces and their liberal allies thought this crackdown would crush students’ resolve, hundreds more Columbia and Barnard students quickly took their place, re-creating the encampment, which is ongoing. This outrageous repression has galvanized students on campuses across the country and created an entire new wave of demands for divestment in a matter of days. 

For the past six months, students have witnessed the failure of our institutions to prevent, intervene in, or even address the slaughter of over 34,000 Palestinians in a genocide. Hundreds of thousands have come to the realization that our institutions, including universities, have a vested, profit-making interest in maintaining the military-industrial complex and the colonial occupation of Palestine. While our classes educate us in principles of human rights and assign us readings by anti-colonial theorists (such as Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar who taught at Columbia University), our universities expect us to ignore the fact that their investments are funding the death and destruction of millions of lives. While they advertise themselves as harbingers of progress, justice, and democracy, do they expect the students they attract to stay silent in the face of their complicity?

Denison University administers a $1 billion endowment, shrouded in secrecy, and possibly invested in industries deeply complicit in the colonization of Palestine as well as death and pollution all over the world. This is because of the lack of policies in place such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) or Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) policies to prevent this, and by Denison’s own stated values, this is unacceptable. Yet when students demand transparency or protest against violations of international law and injustice, they are treated as the problem, told that they are not choosing the right “time and place” to discuss these things, attacked by faculty, and called into administrative meetings where they are threatened.  Let us be clear: these tactics are nothing more than an attempt to distract from the problems that students are attempting to call attention to all across the United States.

Being met with these repressive tactics for taking any action at all and inspired by our comrades at Columbia, Barnard, UNC, and Rutgers, we are drawing a red line that our administration must confront. To reiterate what we published in November, we demand that Denison:

  1. We demand that Denison provide transparency around financial investments.
  2. We demand that Denison divest all of its finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.
  3. We demand that Denison’s administration publicly join the call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and end to the occupation of Palestine.

Under the banner of the Popular University for Gaza, we vow to use our resources as students such as  educational events, petitions, meetings, protests, boycotts, and similar means to meet these demands. We are joined by the youth and students across the country and beyond. 

We have spent the last two years organizing with some of the most passionate and principled people at Denison. Unlike some administrators, students are motivated by a desire for justice, not profit. What is driving us is a commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people, founded on unconditional and unwavering solidarity, and that is something forces and allies of oppression do not understand. Unless Denison divests from colonialism and militarism, the students will not back down. In the words of revolutionary Marxist poet Faiz: we shall see, it is inevitable, we too shall see that day.

Ali Imran ‘24 is a Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology and Sociology major from Lahore, Pakistan. Greta Schreiber ‘24 is a History major from Columbus, Ohio.