Editors’ Note: Author Clara Ximena Villalba is writing on behalf of ENLACE.
ENLACE condemns Swarthmore College’s decision to pursue major misconduct charges, with the threat of expulsion, against eight students for their alleged involvement in producing and distributing political zines. These charges are not a misunderstanding. They are an assertion of power meant to discipline dissent and shut down political expression that directly challenges the institution.
The zines in question examine the authority of the Board of Managers and reflect on a year of organizing under increasingly restrictive conditions. They explicitly name Swarthmore’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This includes financial entanglements with systems tied to arms manufacturing and militarized violence. The administration has not responded to these claims. Instead, it has constructed a narrative of threat, alleging that the distribution of these materials constitutes danger. This is not an interpretation. It is suppression.
What is unfolding here is not simply a disciplinary case. It is a deliberate effort to redefine political critique as misconduct. If naming genocide, analyzing institutional investments, and distributing written materials can be escalated into charges carrying the possibility of expulsion, then the administration’s intent is clear. The issue is not safety. It is control.
There are concrete reasons this demands a response.
To begin, what is being established here will not remain limited to this case. When an institution shows it is willing to escalate to its most severe punishments in response to organizing, it creates a model that can be applied broadly. The target may be eight students today, but the precedent reaches much further. Any student who organizes, speaks, or distributes material that meaningfully challenges the college risks being folded into the same framework.
At the same time, the methods being used are expansive and invasive. During the misconduct process, it became clear that the college relied on a coordinated system of surveillance and data gathering. Students were tracked through ID card records, monitored through CCTV systems, and mapped across both on- and off-campus spaces. Residential information was accessed and shared. Internal reports were produced and treated as evidence. This is not a narrow investigation. It is an infrastructure of monitoring that extends into the conditions of students’ daily lives.
These systems also do not operate evenly. Within this broader surveillance apparatus, two Black student activists were singled out, tracked across locations, and subjected to heightened scrutiny, including beyond campus property. They were identified through institutional data and observation in ways that reflect a longer history of racialized suspicion and targeting. This is not incidental. It demonstrates how surveillance intensifies around those already marked as threats, even as it remains available to be deployed against others.
The conduct described in this process further reveals how far the administration is willing to go. Accounts indicate that student’s private information was accessed and shared without meaningful safeguards, that unverified or false claims were circulated as credible, and that off-campus spaces were monitored or entered in ways that raise serious concerns about consent and abuse of authority. These are not minor oversteps. They show an institution testing the limits of its power over students’ lives.
The punishment being pursued makes the administration’s intentions clear. They are threatening possible expulsion in response to the circulation of political ideas and the organization of dissent. Characterizing pamphleteering as endangerment is not only excessive. It is meant to deter. It signals that engaging critically with the institution, especially on questions as urgent as genocide and material complicity, will carry consequences severe enough to silence others.
Swarthmore continues to present itself as a space committed to free expression, to dissent, and to the interrogation of power. But these commitments collapse the moment they are taken seriously. When students apply these principles to the institution itself, they are met not with engagement, but with surveillance and punishment. What is permitted in theory is prohibited in practice.
This moment is also part of a broader political landscape. Across Latin America, solidarity with Palestinian liberation has taken clear and material form. In Colombia, mass demonstrations have filled public squares under calls to end the genocide in Gaza. In Venezuela and Cuba, governments and student movements alike have aligned themselves with Palestine, with Cuba maintaining decades of political support and students continuing to mobilize in that tradition. Across the region, solidarity is not rhetorical. It is enacted through protest, policy, and collective action.
Students at Swarthmore are part of this same global tradition. The attempt to isolate and punish them is an attempt to sever that connection, to contain political awareness within acceptable limits, and to prevent solidarity from becoming action on campus.
This process also depends on silence. It assumes that the broader community will look away, that these actions will be accepted as procedural, and that those targeted will remain isolated. That assumption is part of how repression sustains itself. It requires disengagement.
ENLACE rejects that entirely.
We stand in full solidarity with the students facing these charges. Their actions reflect an understanding that education cannot be separated from political reality, and that confronting genocide, institutional complicity, and structures of power is not optional. It is necessary.
We call for the immediate dismissal of all charges. We call for full transparency regarding surveillance practices and the use of student data. We call for accountability where racialized targeting has occurred, and for the dismantling of systems that enable it. We call for the protection of students’ rights to organize, distribute materials, and speak openly about institutional complicity without fear of retaliation. We call for a fundamental restructuring of governance systems that concentrate power while remaining unaccountable to the broader community.
This moment makes the stakes unmistakable. When critique is treated as misconduct and surveillance becomes routine, the space for thought, dissent, and collective life begins to close. What is being disciplined here is not just a group of students. It is the possibility of acting on what we know.
As the Zapatistas have long said, “Otro mundo es posible”: another world is possible. That possibility depends on whether people are allowed to name injustice, to organize against it, and to refuse the conditions imposed on them. Defending these students is part of that struggle.
