Two weeks after their May 6 encampment of tents had been established and three days after they had occupied and barricaded administration building Ludlow Hall, students demonstrating at Bard College, primarily members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), came to agreement with the college. Bard agreed to abide by a set of ethical investment guidelines to govern the entirety of its endowment and to create a democratically elected watchdog body to keep an eye on where the investments are going.
Students climbed into the Ludlow Hall through a window on Friday and blockaded it from the inside. Meanwhile, students moved their encampment to surround the administration building and prevent anyone from entering.
Many hours of negotiations took place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On Monday the students relinquished the building, and the encampment began packing up. Bard College has managed to avoid the splashy headlines and galvanizing optics created by other colleges which like SUNY New Paltz chose to activate police forces to quell dissent rather than entertain lengthy discussions with the student rebels.
In New Paltz, the substantial critical sentiment that greeted the college administration’s choice has become a cautionary tale that is by no means done playing out. The school’s faculty has given voice to all manner of suspicions, from the possibility that pressure from wealthy alumni or donors may have had a role, or the influence of pro-Israel special-interest groups, or even a decision by the governor herself.
On May 15 the faculty senate of SUNY New Paltz passed a resolution 35 to 2 calling upon the state attorney general “to investigate all state agencies and officials, including but not limited to local, state and county police, the governor’s office, Ulster County sheriff’s office, and officials in SUNY administration at all levels, involved in the SUNY-wide crackdown on student protests … to determine who ordered, oversaw, and executed encampment evictions and to identify if they violated state law, SUNY policies, or misused public resources.”
Community support
By comparison, Bard College presented a love fest.
“They had about 20 tents up for 14 days,” said an untenured-professor at Bard, “and they were doing what they call a Popular University. They had canopies up and a little library. Professors were doing teaching outside. They had workshops. And we had a faculty group that was supporting called Faculty for Justice and Policy.”
A grad student involved in the occupation of Ludlow Hall tells a tale of teach-ins and community support. “Basically, we had tents and sleeping bags and blankets,” she said. “And then the larger community within the Hudson Valley really showed up, and they were bringing enough food every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as like water and literally everything.”
The diplomas were in there
According to members of the SJP, there was never a plan to disrupt the graduation ceremony itself. Bard planned to award an honorary degree to Imad Abu Kashik, the president of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. “And so us disrupting the graduation was going to look bad,” said one SJP member. “So we thought that taking over the administration building and kind of crippling the process of the graduation before graduation actually happened was the way to go. We cared less about the spectacle and more about getting the demands met. And we knew that having that pressure point would be the way to do that.”
Sometimes fortune smiles on rebels.
“We knew that the administration was going to need the building to, like, function as a college in general,” said the grad student, “but we didn’t know that the diplomas were in there. They slipped up when the first day we were there. One of the administration came up to us while we were barricading and was like, Can we just go inside and get the diplomas? And we were like, Oh, shit. We did not even know that that was in there.”
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie was able to traverse an even less tumultuous path to resolution with its protesting students. Led by local members of the SJP, they set up their own tent encampment on April 30. After five days, that college’s administration had agreed to pursuing a plan for divestment from weapons and surveillance manufacturers, “including those that supply Israel with the materials that carry out the genocide of the Palestinian people.” The encampment came down.
Plans for next semester
With graduation ceremonies formally marking the end of the spring semester and with college students returning home, it remains to be seen what sort of momentum if any can be maintained in the protest movements on the campuses of higher learning across the country.
Traditionally dedicated to recharging depleted interest in academic pursuits by doing anything but studying, the summer months for the academic are generally accompanied by aimlessness and desultory dreaming.
For an activist, though, there will never be any shortage of injustice to rail against.
“As for the summer,” said the grad student, “I mean, students lead the movement and have been leading movements throughout history. And so they’re going to be participating in different things in the areas that they are going to go back to for the summer. There’s also two meetings a month where we’re all going to be online talking and discussing about what plans we have for the next year.
“What’s next is that the SJP is forming like a different structure so that they maintain the community that was built throughout the past two weeks. We’re going to come back next semester, and we have more things that we need of the college, and more work to be done in terms of education for the larger Bard community. So that’s basically the next plan for now.”
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