Swarthmore Faculty/Staff Response to April 23rd Letter from Acting Co-Presidents Sakomura & Goldberg

Dear Members of the Swarthmore Community,

We write to express our strong support for the right of our students to engage in peaceful protest. We were alarmed by the letter sent by Acting Co-Presidents Sakomura and Goldberg on April 23rd – “Protest Activity on Campus” – regarding the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Parrish lawn. Written one day after the encampment began, the letter preemptively seeks to depict it as threatening and unsafe, in the absence of any evidence to support this characterization. By manufacturing a climate of hostility, the College promotes an interpretation of student activism as intrinsically violent and anti-educational, distracting from and distorting our students’ serious efforts to think through the most pressing issue of our time. It is particularly poignant that the letter creates this false sense of danger on campus when hostility toward the empowering potential of education has led to Israel’s destruction of every single university in Gaza, as well as most of its other schools, libraries, and bookstores. The letter rightly states that “our ability to understand and engage with diverse views is critical to Swarthmore’s educational experience.” Yet the letter itself ultimately undermines this aspect of our mission.

If, as Acting Co-Presidents Sakomura and Goldberg write, “we expect that students and their allies will protest peacefully,” why do they also find the encampment “deeply concerning” and promise that it “will be included in our ongoing investigations into possible policy violations related to activism throughout the past several months”? The point of the disciplinary process is to investigate specific incidents of potential misconduct. In the absence of naming what policies the encampment might violate, we are left to conclude that the administration is willfully hunting for “possible policy violations,” rather than responding to actual infractions of the code of conduct, and misusing the disciplinary process to chill student activism.

To that end, the letter frames the encampment’s solidarity with Gaza as antisemitic, proposing that the “rising tensions on many campuses” “may be exacerbated by the fact that these national protests come at the start of Passover and as antisemitism across the country and around the world is on the rise.” But none of the students’ demands, which we strongly encourage members of the campus community to read for themselves, antagonize members of any religious or racial group. Equating solidarity with Gaza and antisemitism distorts the meaning of antisemitism. In doing so, it erases the many Jews, at Swarthmore and elsewhere, raising their voices against the genocide in Gaza and for Palestinian liberation. On our campus, such solidarity is evidenced at the encampment itself, which will host a Passover seder on Sunday.

The letter also states that the protest “may cause some students, faculty, and staff members to feel uncomfortable or even intimidated” and recommends they avail themselves of counseling resources CAPS and Carebridge. With these directives, Acting Co-Presidents Sakomura and Goldberg jump to depict the protest as intimidating and even traumatizing when there have been no reported incidents of intimidation, much less trauma. Nonetheless, the Acting Co-Presidents announce they will be “increasing Public Safety’s presence on campus.” We wonder which of these actions – pitching tents on the lawn or surveilling students – members of campus are more likely to find uncomfortable or intimidating, especially given students’ recent reports of harassment by a Public Safety officer. This is to say nothing of the terrifying scenes of police aggression brought to bear on pro-Palestine and anti-war protestors at Columbia, NYU, Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Texas-Austin, Emory University, and elsewhere over the past week. We urge Swarthmore College to hold itself to the standard of intellectual and moral integrity it claims, and to resist the weaponization of “comfort” and “safety” that has taken hold at so many institutions around the country.

We are currently witnessing the largest wave of campus repression in the United States since the 1960s. We expect Swarthmore College, with its Quaker heritage and its stated commitment to social justice, to have the courage not to fall in line and instead to act on its values. Union Theological Seminary President Serene Jones’s own recent letter to her community offers a model of how to do this. So, too, do the actions of our students, who have worked for months to respond to the scale of suffering and destruction in Gaza when the U.S. government and institutions of higher education refuse to do so. Their encampment is a continuation of their education, as the reading, study, and discussion taking place there indicate. It is they who are demonstrating how to do precisely what Acting Co-Presidents Sakomura and Goldberg urge us to do: “to hold in the light all of those suffering through this horrific situation.” We should not be shutting down, distorting, or demonizing their efforts to do so; we should be honoring their example.

Signed (alphabetical by last name, list in formation):