I was an early-decision applicant who visited the College twice before enrolling, thrilled to arrive, even at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Having been a tour guide since my first year, I have a curated response to the question all tour guides are told to end their tours with — “Why Williams?” And on every tour, I have said that I chose the College because it was the place I could best see myself calling home. Now, in the moments before I graduate, I have become ambivalent, wanting to hold onto that sense of home that I have attached to the College while understanding that my belonging here is entangled with the imperial violence perpetuated by the College’s rhetorical and financial strategies.
Reflecting on my relationship with the College, I reckon with the privilege that I had to find a home here in the first place, and I question whether that trust is misplaced. In my final months at the College, I chose to remove myself from all tour guide schedules. Even though I had once been a strong advocate for the College, I find myself unable to stand by it as I watch it choose institutional silence while Israel commits genocide, as reported to the UN Human Rights Council, and settler colonial violence, regarded as such by a report to the UN General Assembly in Gaza. It has been about six months since President Maud S. Mandel sent her first campus-wide email addressing Gaza, in which she adopted a policy “not to send out campus-wide messages about domestic or international events or even natural disasters, no matter how tragic or painful.” As the number of Palestinian martyrs has now risen to over 34,000, the College must confront how its silence and suggested neutrality is in fact not a harmless stance.
Inaction in the face of oppression from a position of academic elitism and financial privilege is to permit an oppressor’s uncontested dominance over any possibilities of liberation. The College has consistently refused to act — from campaigns for divestment from South African apartheid to campaigns for Palestinian liberation in the present day.
After the encampment on Columbia’s campus escalated to the arrests and suspensions of student protestors, there has been increased attention on the ethical responsibility of higher education institutions. Activists across the nation have begun encampments, demanding action items in solidarity with Palestine; among them, for their universities to call for a permanent ceasefire as well as to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s military action in Gaza. Alongside pro-Palestinian student organizers across the country, I call for the College to end its silence; I call for the College to act with its wealth; and I call for all eyes to be turned to Gaza.
In response to this contestation of the university’s role, institutions have invoked freedom of expression to justify this supposedly neutral stance — invoked also by Mandel in her email on April 26 titled “Regarding last night’s disruptive incident,” voicing “regret” over the incident during which a group of students disrupted the final roundtable discussion of the “War in Gaza” lecture series. While the sharing of knowledge is vital to academia, the notion of free expression is misleading in that it implies discourse to be balanced when it is not.
The College should be wary when its unyielding commitment to free expression is, in reality, a complacency towards rhetoric that produces harm — such as what Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) wrote were “racist generalizations” of Arab people and the Middle East broadly in a statement on social media. When the College initially adopted the phrasing of the “Israel-Hamas War” for the roundtable series or, after renaming, the “war in Gaza,” it conceded to a narrative of “war” that suggests an even two sides and obscures the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, oppression of the Palestinian people, and struggle for Palestinian liberation. Discourse and its historical records have consistently erased the narratives of the oppressed from the historical canon by privileging those with economic and political power who have upheld the global structuring of imperialism.
Though the principle of freedom of expression is supposedly intended “for the continued functioning of the College,” as Mandel wrote in her all-campus email, how can we, as a community, be satisfied with the current “functioning” of the College if it necessitates the comfort and privileges of the status quo to be time after time prioritized over the lives of the most vulnerable?
Thus, protests like the one at the roundtable on Thursday may be called a violation of free expression by some. I reject this accusation on the grounds that these protests constitute reclamations of the academic space by and for historically silenced voices. Criticisms of the nature of this protest minimize the harm inflicted by rhetorical power — for one, in the homogenization and othering of racialized peoples — and neglect the necessity for disruption in order to overturn existing power differentials as they are reiterated in spaces of discourse. Given the fraughtness of discourse, especially in the institution of academia, the College’s leveraging of “free expression” in this critical moment is yet another excuse to maintain a neutrality that simply isn’t possible.
One must also remember that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is not an isolated moment in history, and the College’s perpetuation of settler-colonial violence and displacement was present even during the process of its founding, with the forceful removal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, who are Indigenous to the lands on which the College stands. If the College is to truly contend with that history beyond only a land acknowledgment, then it must stand against all forms of imperialism and settler colonialism — including through material actions like committing to ethical investment and divesting from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel.
However, the College’s supposed neutrality and emphasis on open discourse emerges again in the conversation around financial practices. Opposing Jews for Justice (J4J) and SJP’s demands for divestment from the manufacture of weapons supplied to Israel, Professor Steven Gerrard submitted a request to the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, which were made public in an April 24 Daily Message. He claimed that divestment is an institutional statement that “tells the students what to think rather than empowering them to think for themselves,” concluding that this would “[leave] our students less prepared to fight inequality and injustice.”
I disagree. To claim that “it would be unethical for the College to divest” closes a channel of student activism that questions the College’s profiteering from violence and genocide, which stifles both our learning and its application. We as students do not exist only in the academic institution. Our fight against inequality and injustice should not start only when we graduate, and our learning should not occur solely within the classroom until that time.
I am privileged to attend the College and to have considered it my home these last four years. But that does not contradict my anger over the College’s continued complicity in the genocide in Gaza through its investment in weapons manufacturing — an amount which the College’s administrators have said “is not zero,” according to accounts from a J4J meeting with Mandel and Chief Investment Officer Abigail Wattley ’05. We can get lost in conversations about exactly how large that amount is, but any Palestinian life lost in the exertion of imperial power is blood on our hands as members of this institution. Our education and livelihood here at the College should not be at the expense of Palestinian lives.
Further, if the College’s first and foremost commitment is to the process of learning under the purported ethical responsibility “to teach students how to think,” as Mandel wrote in her Oct. 12 all-campus email, then must we not also grapple with to what ends we are pursuing our education? In this moment of history, we bear witness to what some have termed “scholasticide,” as universities in Gaza have been systematically targeted by Israel. If the College’s investment in weapons manufacturing contributes to this destruction, is it truly aligned with this value of unconstrained learning and thought? Is the College’s commitment to education isolated to those privileged enough to enroll?
I do still hold love for the College that I call home. From this place of love, I also hold grief; I hold anger. I urge the College to take accountability, for its neutrality and inaction is itself complicity in this genocide. I urge the College to listen to student demands for increased financial transparency and ethical investment practices. And I urge us all to reckon with the fact that a true space for community and learning cannot be sustained through oppression and violence.
Hannah Bae ’24 is a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and political economy major from Buffalo Grove, Ill.
