During the Minority Coalition (MinCo) Leadership Retreat held on Sunday, representatives from each MinCo group voted on a list of demands, created collaboratively by members of the Native and Indigenous Students Association (NISA), the Gargoyle Society, the Asian American Studies (AAS) Student Committee, Jews for Justice (J4J), and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The College is complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, in which, as of this writing of this article, at least 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. The College grows its endowment through some investment in weapons manufacturing, which the administration said “is not zero.” It also fails to reckon with the ongoing genocide by the United States against Indigenous peoples, as it refuses to create a long-overdue Indigenous studies program. The College perpetuates a culture hostile to faculty and students of color, demonstrated by a persistently low retention rate for faculty of color and lack of adequate financial and resource-based support for ethnic studies programs.
Before the vote, several MinCo members reminded those present of the intentions behind MinCo’s founding: to stand against structural forms of oppression and to elevate marginalized students’ voices in advocating for social justice. A simple majority of MinCo groups voted in favor of signing the following demands:
We demand the College to act upon the recommendations drafted by students of the independent study, “Mohican Nation: Past, Present, and Future” in fall 2021, including reparations of land and cash back to the Mohican nation, immediate and permanent cost-free housing for Stockbridge-Munsee Community members in Williamstown, visual representation of Mohican territories, histories, present and futures throughout the College and Williamstown, removal of monuments and plaques on campus that reference settler colonialism, such as the Haystack monument, a commitment to decolonizing education at all levels including through building an Indigenous Studies program, and honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a standalone holiday.
We demand the College to improve faculty of color retention by committing to the following: surveying and respecting the priorities of community members of color and hiring more faculty of color from a range of backgrounds, especially for tenure-track lines. These demands correspond with the December 2023 open letter written by the Gargoyle Society, which was co-signed by 27 student organizations. The College claims that it is “committed to building and sustaining a community of students, staff, and faculty that is broadly diverse and respectful of all social identities,” but few actions have been taken to best support students, staff, and faculty of color in their particular experiences at a predominantly white institution. Low faculty and staff of color retention has been an issue at the College for years, and the lack of remedy to this issue has been acutely felt by communities of color across all levels of the College.
We demand that the College commit to increased transparency regarding academic departmental budget allocation by compiling and producing publicly available information specifying the differences across academic departments’ budget on a fiscal year basis for increased accountability regarding equity in budgets for ethnic studies programs. We demand greater funding to ethnic studies programs as an indicator of the College’s academic priorities. The burden placed on faculty and staff of color also deeply impacts the robustness of the College’s ethnic studies programs, necessitating more intentional resourcing and support for those academic offerings.
We demand the College to hire more faculty specializing in AAS and increase the budget for AAS in line with demonstrated high interest. The AAS program is in its inaugural year, approved in December 2022 after over three decades of student-led activism. Though we celebrate the formalization of AAS as a concentration, the College needs to commit to maintaining and strengthening the program intentionally and urgently.
We demand that the College develop ethical investment practices. This must be accompanied with increased transparency of endowment investment to ensure divestment from weapons manufacturing, with the belief that financial transparency is incredibly important to building trust and accountability. In November, J4J submitted a request for the convening of the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR). The ACSR is a non-standing committee with the power to submit advice to the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees on non-financial aspects of the College’s investment portfolio. The ACSR convened in January, and in February, J4J presented to ACSR the request for divestment from weapons manufacturing and that the ACSR commit to not supporting the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The ACSR says they plan to release a recommendation by the end of the semester, though they have denied requests for mechanisms of transparency on this process, such as open meetings and the publication of meeting minutes. Regarding the structure and formal processes of the ACSR, we demand that the College make the ACSR a standing committee so that information about the endowment is more accessible, call for ACSR meetings to be made open and for meeting minutes to be made accessible, and set and publicize Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards.
We demand the College divest all shares in weapons manufacturing. We believe that the genocide of Palestinians constitutes a harm grave enough that the College has a duty to act accordingly with their investments. Similar committees at peer institutions, such as Brown University, have developed criteria in line with international law to review companies that directly enable violence. We believe that the ACSR should develop a set of screening questions in order to review companies for divestment, including whether the company maintain contracts selling weapons (such as guns, explosives, white phosphorus) or vehicles (such as tanks) to the IDF, whether the company sells reconnaissance tools used by IDF (such as drones, surveillance software), and whether the company sells weapons or vehicles used by Military Police Corps of the IDF.
In all, we call upon the College to act according to its purported principles of creating an equitable and inclusive space for all, and to move forward with decisions that prioritize those communities who have been historically marginalized and underserved by it.
[Editor’s note: Palvasha Khan, a managing editor for the Record and chair of MinCo steering, was not involved in the writing or editing of this op-ed.]
