By the spring of 2025, many had declared the student Palestine solidarity movement dead. Since Donald Trump’s election, the crackdown had been swift and merciless: Mahmoud Khalil, who had become the face of Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment, was detained by ICE agents in March and held for 104 days in a Louisiana detention center. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, was grabbed off a Somerville street by masked federal agents for cowriting an op-ed calling for divestment. At NYU, eleven students received year-long suspensions after a nonviolent library sit-in. At the University of Minnesota, seven students faced up to two and a half years of suspension and $5,000 in alleged damages.
Trump’s Department of Education has launched investigations into sixty universities, ostensibly for the purpose of “combating antisemitism” but widely understood as aiming to silence support for Palestine. Campus after campus adopted policies of “institutional neutrality,” a euphemism for shutting down dissent. The message was clear: speak out for Palestine, and your education — your future — would be forfeit.
But at my college graduation ceremony in May of this year, my classmates and I weren’t ready to give up. As Chris Canavan, Oberlin College’s Chair of the Board of Trustees, moved to the podium, hundreds of my peers and I stood up from our seats, turned our backs, and chanted “Free Palestine.” The majority of my graduating class participated in this act of protest.
Student activists have used graduation ceremonies as platforms for dissent at schools across the country. Despite the profound repression of Palestine solidarity activism on American campuses, many of us continue to demand that our institutions stop investing in companies that profit from Israel’s genocidal campaign of retaliatory violence in Gaza.
As the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Chris Canavan plays a central role in overseeing how the…
Auteur: Nikki Keating
