Cassidy Crane, Special to The Denisonian—
On April 19, over 100 Columbia University students were arrested for trespassing on their own campus. They held an encampment in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to ask their administration to divest from any financial holdings in companies that economically further the genocide.
In response, their administration called in the NYPD and had them arrested. Their belongings were discarded in an alleyway. Three students were suspended by Columbia directly as a result of their organization.
On Nov. 30 of last year, 11 Denison faculty members published a letter in The Denisonian as a response to Denison’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine’s open letter and petition asking Denison administration to speak out against the genocide and to call for a ceasefire.
In this letter, they “call upon our community to come together in the tradition of civic discourse to listen, discuss, and learn about the complexities of the situation,” despite not having discussion with SJP prior to the letter’s publication.
I bring these situations up to call attention to the fact that we, as college students, are not in a vacuum. We are underneath people who use their positionality in systems of power to attempt to silence, sometimes successfully, the voices of the student body. Coming upon my graduation, I can’t help but reflect on November’s letter being published and the ripples of fear I felt through my community.
To see 11 faculty members, many in chair positions, most tenured. Margot Singer, Adam Davis, Mikey Goldwater, Andy Katz, Lisbeth Lipari, Amanda Gunn, Matt Kretchmar, Wes Walter, Joan Krone, and Matt Neal all felt confident enough in their positionality to put their names on a letter that claimed their students showed “support and sympathy for jihadist terrorists.”
And perhaps they were right to, because ultimately, Denison’s administration did nothing. There was no public statement, there was no statement against the genocide, and there was no apology. The most we got was Laura Russell removing her name from the letter, saying she did not understand the implications of the letter.
Both Columbia’s administration and Denison faculty have made their student body feel like they know better than their students. They know what a protest should look like, and they know that the way their students are doing it is wrong.
Despite being institutions that pride themselves on creating discerning moral agents, they have made it clear that we must discern what is moral in the way that they paint, and we must act in the way that they find appropriate.
It doesn’t matter that the SJPs at Columbia and Denison have always been peaceful. What matters is that those who are in power will exercise it over those who have much less of it.