In Charging SJP Students, College Escalates Long-standing Suppression of Protest

As former Editors-in-Chief of the Phoenix and Voices during the successful 2019 sit-in to end fraternities on campus, we are dismayed at the college’s obfuscation of its own history in order to justify its current retribution against student protestors. 

Unlike many of its peer institutions, which have dropped misconduct charges against pro-Palestine students, Swat’s administration has thrown itself into prosecuting organizers, of whom 80% are students of color, with gusto. In fact, the college is pursuing protest-related disciplinary charges against a higher percentage of its student body than many of its peer institutions. Over the concerns of alumni and faculty, the administration is wielding legal might, racially targeted surveillance, and its ever-changing student code of conduct to control students and punish resistance. 

The college’s current crackdown on student organizers is a clear escalation of its repression of dissent that we observed as student journalists in 2019. That year, student organizers held a sit-in inside the Phi Psi fraternity house to push the administration to abolish fraternities on campus. The sit-in was the culmination of years of organizing against gender-based violence in the fraternities imminently spurred by Voices and The Phoenix publishing leaked internal documents, exposing a disturbing history of sexual violence, racism, homophobia, and misogyny in Phi Psi. After pressure from student organizers and inaction from the administration, both fraternities chose to permanently disband. During this process, the college administration welcomed police to campus, brandishing the threat of arrest against students (including those with DACA status) and abandoning its self-proclaimed status as a “sanctuary campus”; allowed Public Safety officers to physically assault students with impunity; and hired an external investigator to say on paper that the actions of fraternity members did not warrant potential conduct violations, but those of protestors did. However, the external investigator determined that it was not in the college’s best interest to formally punish student protestors. In this way, the investigation functioned as both an evasion of responsibility and a threat. Instead of accounting for its protection of fraternity violence, now on the record, the college chose to send a subliminal message to student protestors in abstract legalese: There is more we could have done to you. 

At the time, the fraternity protests were metabolized into a narrative that served an image of the college as a liberal institution — if it did not celebrate student dissent as much as it claimed to, at least it stopped short of formal punishment. Publicly, the college praised “student critique and dissent.” In closed conversations with faculty and students, including ourselves, administrators routinely expressed sympathy for fraternity members and villainized the dissenting students.

Now, it seems that the college has abandoned its 2019 strategy of liberal mythologizing. In an email from the time, then-Vice President for Student Affairs Jim Terhune claimed specifically that in the future, Swarthmore would enforce “the prohibitions on disorderly conduct, false representation, unauthorized entry, bullying and intimidation, and assault, endangerment, or infliction of physical harm.” Current VP for Student Affairs Stephanie Ives has since invoked Terhune’s sentiment, claiming that the present push to discipline is an attempt to rectify past unevenness in the college’s disciplinary practices. But Swarthmore’s actions show that it is in fact more committed to that unevenness than ever — though this time, its actions are not so easily metabolized.

The college has escalated its tactics of suppressing student protest to a level that would shock most alums. Might this be because, as the Council on American-Islamic Relations recently noted in their Title VI complaint, “unlike other colleges and universities, the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] at Swarthmore is mostly composed of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black, and other students of color and does not have a large White student membership”? The college has used OneCard data to identify students’ locations on campus at particular times in order to issue misconduct charges. It has handed over video footage to the law firm issuing charges and to the Swarthmore Police. Public Safety targeted a student of color for looking “suspicious” and asked an Arab faculty member to identify themselves in the dining hall. Swarthmore has repeatedly failed to investigate bias reports filed by Arab and Muslim students, then rushed to charge those same students with disciplinary violations for protesting the college’s investment in genocide.    

The charges, prepared by a lawyer privy to all that footage, are not “bullying” or “endangerment,” like Terhune and Ives have suggested. Rather, they are a set of retaliatory allegations generated and investigated by the college’s own legal counsel. Meanwhile, Swarthmore has barred students’ legal counsel from participating in the hearings at all. So hasty to turn student discipline into legal proceedings, Swarthmore is denying students basic due process protections to which they would be entitled in a court of law. The 25 students facing charges have weathered excessive delays in issuing and communicating about charges. Students have been charged for events that took place almost a year ago, and when they have asked Senior Associate Dean of Student Life Nathan Miller about those charges, he has evaded the students for months. The college has withheld evidence from students, denied them relevant witnesses, shifted procedures mid-process, and levied charges — some of which stretch credulity — for which there are no corresponding rules in the student code of conduct. At every turn, the college has exploited its unilateral power to make, enforce, and rewrite the rules in order to quash SJP’s broad support on campus. 

In 2019, after months of investigating student protestors and years of overlooking fraternity violence, Dean Terhune’s characterization of Swarthmore as “building a better, more inclusive, caring, and just world” rang hollow. Now, the college has abandoned even that cynical posturing. Perhaps this is a sign that the students are winning the rhetorical war. It is not possible to fold the college’s investment in genocide into a narrative idealizing “a community built around the life of the mind and exploration of ideas.” Apparently, when those ideas include Palestinian freedom and dignity, exploration looks a lot like repression.