Op-ed: Student activism in uncertain times

Lafayette has a history of student activism. In the 1970s, students protested the Vietnam War. In 2016, students sat-in at Fisher field during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. In the wake of Parkland, students walked out of class. 

What all this student activism has in common is the commitment of small groups of students to use their voices to speak out against injustice, no matter the distance. Resistance against colonial oppression is what our nation was built on, and resistance to injustice is what has shaped it. 

Policing and slander accompanied these protests. You can dissent, but “not like that.” 

While Lafayette might feel like it is a million miles away from cities where power is wielded, even small student protests are important. 

Recent online and in-person comments regarding Pards4Palestine’s efforts demonstrate a key misunderstanding about the purpose of student activism.

President Hurd and the Lafayette administration will not pass a ceasefire amidst the ongoing genocide and famine plaguing Palestinians. Nor, perhaps, will news of a few dozen students disrupting (minimally, might I add) campus activities make it up the chain to the White House. 

So what is the point? 

Firstly, we call upon Lafayette to disclose funding amounts, investments and divest from mutual funds that may be invested in Palestinian genocide. 

Further, we hope that after college, you will move and bring what you have learned at Lafayette with you. We hope you have learned to question how things operate and imagine a better world. We show our community members whose loved ones are impacted by Israel’s war on Palestine that they are not alone. We demonstrate our righteous responsibility to question our government’s funding of human suffering. We spend weeks in city council, write letters to our representatives, organize educational events, and organize the uncommitted vote. 

While I wish I could go to D.C. and New York every week to protest, I have papers to write. So we make do here. 

Vietnam antiwar and South African Apartheid Protests were centered on college campuses, where young people refused to be silent amidst the complicity of their administrations and government. The phrase “climate justice” gained popularity through student strikes that were started by one person and were instrumental in passing today’s climate legislation. 

These movements were not celebrated while they took place. That is the nature of change. 

I encourage folks to look at college campuses around the world where students at institutions of every size are standing in solidarity with Gaza. If the student organizers at each small institution like ours bended to the policing of imperfect student activism and sacrificed the tremendous impact small voices in unison have had on the history of struggles for justice, we would all be far worse off. 

This school lists as its corporate donors, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, manufacturers that have supplied the weapons to murder 34,000+ Palestinians. Lafayette in its endowment likely also invests directly in Israeli bonds; without disclosure, we can’t be sure. (For the climate justice folks, Chevron and ExxonMobil are also corporate donors.) 

So, Lafayette: Disclose where our money goes, and divest from any mutual funds and bonds that fund Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.

Note: If you have any criticism, please feel free to email me directly.

Azalea Danes ’24 is an organizer and a member of the Pards 4 Palestine coalition.