Editor’s Note: This article is published using a pseudonym for the author, writing on behalf of Organizing for Survivors. Under normal circumstances, The Phoenix does not allow individuals or groups to submit articles anonymously. However, we have decided to make an exception to this policy due to concerns about the safety of individual members of Organizing for Survivors, including this article’s author, who have been individually targeted and doxxed. We are a community newspaper and take our responsibility to protect community members seriously.
We write this letter as former leaders of the organizing group “Organizing for Survivors,” which was active at Swarthmore College from 2017-2019. We are disturbed by the news that Swarthmore has suspended a student for alleged harm caused by the use of a bullhorn indoors, and we find this to be arbitrary and out of line with past disciplinary precedent, which may also render Swarthmore College’s decision unlawful. Swarthmore prides itself as an institution devoted to intellectual curiosity and progressive values. And yet, for the use of a sound amplification device, Swarthmore has put its own students at risk of homelessness, unemployment, and complete uncertainty about future job and academic prospects. As an institution that flaunts its commitment to high enrollment of low-income and first-generation students, depriving a student of fundamental necessities is an obscene and disproportionate punishment. Attending school, particularly one in a place outside of major cities, and likely away from home, makes students depend entirely on Swarthmore for their livelihood and safety. If Swarthmore is indeed not just a school but a community and a home, what can be more severe than compelling a student to leave that home?
In the spring of 2019, O4S took over the Phi Psi fraternity building for three weeks and then staged a sit-in in President Val Smith’s office. In order to take over the fraternity house, we deceived a Public Safety officer and then forcibly established ourselves there, refusing to leave even after the police threatened us with arrest. Throughout all our protests, we used sound amplification devices. Yet, we were never arrested and were not subjected to disciplinary proceedings. There is no context we are aware of, legal or disciplinary or otherwise, in which the traditional use of sound amplification devices is considered a form of assault. O4S endorses the actions the student took, which were noble, just, and proportionate responses to the Zionist genocide in Gaza and Swarthmore’s complicity in it. Further, we fully oppose the sanctions imposed: the uneven and unprecedented response to student protest as it relates to Palestine reveals that the college is purely motivated by its reputation, image, and financial interests. It backed down from disciplining student protestors in the past when it would have faced reputational damage from sympathetic media and alumni, but it targets students today with vicious and discriminatory repression because doing so is expected by an endowment, board, and national governance in lock-step with the most brutal machinations of Zionism and American imperialism.
The movement we were part of six years ago cannot be disentangled from the actions SJP has taken today. Sexual violence against Palestinian people is an integral part of Zionism’s state-making and has been described by the UN as a “method of war” for the Zionist state. To organize for survivors, as we once did on Swarthmore’s campus, has always necessitated an end to Zionism and liberation for Palestine. Two months before our sit-in, students passed a successful Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) vote through Swarthmore’s student government. As organizers, we understood that our two movements corresponded to two manifestations of Swarthmore and universities’ role in protecting their own financial interests and reproducing the ideology and professional class of American imperialism. Yet the media ignored the explicit links we drew, and we remained sympathetic victims on the #MeToo national stage. We have always understood that there can be no liberation from systemic sexual violence in a world of American imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism. Swarthmore has no right to celebrate the safety our organizing now offers to students while disciplining the students fighting for Palestine today.
When we attended Swarthmore, as students between 18 and 22 years old, we were vulnerable to forms of harm that Swarthmore did not protect us from. Today, we are lawyers, organizers, writers, teachers, and graduate students, no longer at the whim of Swarthmore’s administrators’ callous bigotry. We will take all necessary steps to protect the students facing penalties today.
We demand that Swarthmore reinstate the suspended student, that it publicly reaffirm its commitment to protecting students’ rights to protest without fear of retaliation, and that it rejects the Trump administration’s threats and refuse to align with any tactics that criminalize dissent, reaffirming its commitment to freedom of speech.
