During my undergraduate years at Swarthmore College, I was taught lessons from Arabic literature that have since become foundational to my graduate research. It is fitting, then, that I start with a lesson this literature can now teach Swarthmore. There is a centuries-old aphorism in Arabic that holds a bit of undying wisdom: al-nās ʿalā dīn mulūkihim, “people follow the faith of their kings.” Religion is here a provocative symbol, standing in for our most cherished collective norms and values, our deliberations of right and wrong, and our common responsibilities towards one another. All this, the basic architecture of community, will bend its knee and break its spine with shocking ease at the behest of its king.
Of course, protest at Swarthmore is nothing new. The activities organized by students advocating for justice in Palestine over the last several years, like the printing and distribution of zines for which eight students are currently facing possible major misconduct charges, are the very same activities that student protestors have been organizing for decades. Student zines, rallies, petitions, sit-ins, vigils, marches, and other political actions have, in fact, been vital to achieving Swarthmore’s most courageous political reforms. I won’t prove this point here, only because it has already been proven ad nauseam. The incredible successes of the college’s 196os Black student protest movement, the 1980s push to divest from apartheid, the 1993 establishment of the Intercultural Center, and the 2010s organizing against sexual violence all came to life by the pulse of student action. Protest is an indispensable part of democratic decisionmaking, and it is an indispensable part of the Swarthmore community’s DNA. Or, at least, it was.
I organized with several student groups while attending Swarthmore, and I graduated in the summer of ’23 — six months before October 7. During my years, the groups in which I was involved continued the time-honored practice of balancing administrative dialogue with student organizing in pursuit of institutional changes. Even by the end of my time, however, our actions were increasingly met with hostility, and our requests for an audience with the administration were consistently denied. After October 7, all reason fell out. Genocide has no real reason, no excuse or justification. Its perpetrators do not deliberate right and wrong in good faith. Its circular doctrine is the violence of the powerful maintaining the violence of the powerful, and, indeed, we have certainly since seen just how U.S. institutions have come to oblige this royal decree.
In the last few years, Swarthmore has swiftly dismantled the robust democratic norms through which petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, and op-eds had real teeth, and through which it might have been persuaded to divest from Palestinian apartheid. In its communications about protests, the college often admonishes that escalatory student actions threaten the security of civil discourse and open dialogue on its campus.
Let us set aside, for a moment, our earlier observation that protest and organizing have long been a crucial supplement to open dialogue, both within the history of the college and the history of our country at large. A most crucial aspect about the open dialogue of democratic deliberation — one left out of these administrative communications — is that its collective outcome must materialize as concrete policy and shared action. When the campus community’s dialogue on justice in Palestine culminated in the Swarthmore Student Government Organization’s 2019 resolution calling on the institution to divest from Palestinian apartheid, respect for the process of civil discourse would have meant, in that moment, divestment. Seven years later, we are still waiting, and the college has become only more adrift from its mission as a liberal arts institution and only more repressive of student organizing in the meantime. All this has led us and our academic community to a point of absurdity, a point where zines might mean expulsion. The disciplinary charges recently issued to eight students for the distribution of political zines have been rightly condemned by student groups and faculty alike. Is Swarthmore listening to these voices? Do they even want to?
Even if I have lost some hope in the college’s ability to engage in authentic community with its student population, I refuse to lose it all. We have no other choice but to expect it can still listen and act as if it might — to sign petitions, email the administration, and organize — because without its foundation of collectively deliberated norms and values, Swarthmore has lost itself entirely. Its current direction — antidemocratic, hard on protests, prone to bad faith negotiation — undoubtedly shifts toward closer alignment with the dogma of our newest king. This king, the king of “No Kings Day” infamy, is also famously hostile to the values of higher education that are fundamental to our institution. Make no mistake: the political winds that the college is riding are dead set on blowing its own house down. Lest Swarthmore cease to be Swarthmore, there is no other option but a change of course, no other option but resistance and resilience.
I am choosing to interpret “people follow the faith of their kings” as a warning and not a rule. I am choosing to keep the old faith, to believe that all of us can still be moved to listen, to act. I hope I am not the only one.
