A Letter to My Students

Dear students,

I am writing to you from an uncertain moment. Over the course of the last few weeks, in response to a brutal crackdown of a Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia, student protestors have set up hundreds of encampments on college campuses across the country and around the world. They rally for what they have been demanding since Israel began its assault on Gaza: institutional accountability and divestment from companies that profit from war. They refuse complicity in genocide. Yours have been among their voices.

The encampments you built began at the University Center, the heart of our campus, then spread across the street to the Parsons building. Picketing students circled in front of both sites. Inside and out, the mood was joyful. Drums, a cello performance, chanting, dancing. Seder services, a kosher table illuminated with a tiny battery-operated candle, prayer mats. Students doing homework, snacking, attending teach-ins, screen printing T-shirts, knitting. When I visited, I saw a group of children making posters; their artwork was roundly praised and given pride of place above the welcome desk.

I have been teaching at The New School for over a decade, and every year I hear students express the desire for more community on campus, more spaces and opportunities to gather. The encampments realized this vision. You made it possible. You made room for everyone, even those who may not have agreed with your demands. You invited people to stay and to learn. You also kept the walkways clear to let people simply pass through. You were intentional about all of this.

Like many encampments, yours was met with a stunning display of violence and force. Early last Friday morning, at 7:30 a.m., Interim President Donna Shalala called in the NYPD, who arrested forty-three students when most were still asleep. One student who was crossing the street was grabbed and locked in a police van. The pretense for the raid was the claim that students were blocking an entrance to a dorm—they were not. But in the name of access, the administration locked every building, leaving many students, faculty, and staff stranded outside, unable to retrieve their belongings. More were allegedly trapped inside. As I write, there is still a police presence on campus. The encampments, meanwhile, are completely swept. Your belongings are sorted on tables in a single classroom, and those of you who were arrested have had to suffer the indignity of requiring an escort to collect your things.

I feel especially betrayed by our university. The New School prides itself on its commitment to social justice, its history as a haven for radical thought and dissent, but this moment has exposed how flimsy those principles have become. As it turns out, The New School’s leadership is no different from the university presidents who have, with very little hesitation, invited cops in riot gear onto campus, set up snipers on rooftops, and stood aside when armed counterprotestors show up to harass students in the encampments. You, students, are bearing the full brunt of an emerging authoritarian university system.

I see so much hostility and condescension in corporate media and online: the student protestors are organizing in solidarity with Palestine because they are bored, because they’re doing performative wokeness, because they’re naive and easily influenced by “outside agitators,” because they’re not having enough sex. One person suggested that the protests were a refuge set up for unattractive students otherwise shunned by society. (“They hate Beauty,” she concluded.) Boomers that had been a part of the 1968 student protests have turned their experience into an occasion to chastise yours, wagging their fingers at tactics, as if there is a right way to respond to genocide. These people hurtle the words “terrorist,” “antisemite,” and worse at you. You, students, are being accused of acting for any reason other than principle and integrity. You are being punished for these falsifications. It is deeply shameful.

Amid the setbacks, there have been successes. A small but growing number of institutions have agreed to cut ties with Israeli corporations, including Evergreen State College, Sacramento State, Trinity College Dublin, and Union Theological Seminary. Many more have achieved overwhelming faculty support for divestment.1 This is all to your credit: your unwavering conviction, your moral clarity. You have been inventive and remarkably disciplined. You have acted in spontaneous cooperation with one another, in a solidarity that reaches around the world. You created a space dedicated to freedom and peace, and in doing so, you’ve proven that such a world is possible. It can survive a police raid. It can survive hundreds of them. And it can always be remade.

In solidarity,

Genevieve Yue