In the same week near the end of my first-year of college, I lost two elections and was rejected from a fellowship. Moping around soon after, I saw a campus-wide email from the Barnard Student Government Association inviting us to “Join SGA!!!” and wanting to avoid what was threatening to be an uneventful sophomore year, I passively applied for the Policy Committee, was swiftly accepted, and from fall onwards, I worked on everything from sexual assualt procedures to trying to get free laundry on campus.
I loved the Vice-President of Policy who chaired my committee, was responsible for student government policies, and worked within the Executive Board alongside the SGA President and Vice Presidents of finance, campus life, and communications. As I increasingly learned of the power and access held by SGA, I became frustrated with the fact that my beloved VP Policy was the only Black person out of almost thirty people, and at the end of year, she told me to run for her position. I told her I would do it but only for a year. She nodded. I won.
Being on SGA was fun firstly because I am a Virgo and I got to plan events and sit in meetings for hours. The Executive Board that year was actually pretty diverse – two White women, two Black, and one Asian American – and we all shared a passion for the work and a commitment to making time to laugh and gossip. I became similarly enamoured by many of the other passionate, argumentative, and incredibly fun SGA representatives as we sat through our moderately uneventful meetings every Monday. Until a presentation one night in the spring from the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace on their joint project, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Student activism has always played an invaluably central role in the development of social issues and the political and economic ramifications that follow. Institutions of higher education and their students often tend to form the nexus of movements, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sit-ins at segregated counters in the American South in the 1960s, to the hunger strikes organised by students around China in the 1980s leading up to the eventual Tiananmen Square demonstrations, to the anti-colonial protests of “Rhodes Must Fall” by university students in South Africa in the 2010s.
However, despite the proven historical successes of such movements, college students continue to be underestimated and spoken down to, by certain spaces of mainstream media, as well as their own family members. When I started at Barnard in 2015, it sometimes felt like I could not escape both handwringing and derision towards “safe spaces” and being “woke” in editorial pieces and my parents’ friends when home from breaks. College students had gone too far in their sensitivities and their activism, went the narrative, as it went decades earlier towards anti-war activists and anti-Apartheid activists and so on and so forth.
In the face of constant criticisms, young people are unfaltering consistent in their commitments to the issues that not only affect them, but others around the world. Subsequently, a large part of an education is concerned with activism, defined here as activities that are engaged in to further a social, political and/or economic cause. Why do the debates led by young people leave such a lasting impact on the world for years to come? How do they play out and what do they reveal about how far society has moved and how much further it can go? And how does this all add to the education students are tasked with receiving as they balance midterms and roommates and injustice and inequality all at the same time?
In the months leading up to March 2018, SGA meetings all followed in the same way — an administrator or student group would email the Executive Board and ask to present. We would pick one of the Monday meetings where we met as an entire student council and the morning of the meeting, we would send an email to the student body with the guest and agenda for the night. The first half of the meeting would be public and live-streamed and we would ask questions and groups would make asks, and the second half was internal for us to figure out our next steps.
The presentation from the Columbia University Apartheid Divest presentation began with an explanation of what they viewed was a system of racial separation and systemic violence carried out against Palestinian Arabs in Israel. They ended by asking SGA to write a letter calling for the divestment of any funds of the Barnard endowment that were invested in companies that were specifically involved in what they described as the mistreatment of Palestinians. The responses from the more than 100 people who had showed up in the dining hall where we held our meetings ranged from queries as to why there was a call to divest from Israel and not other countries involved in human rights violations, to the flat out denials against the mistreatment of Palestinians in Israel with calls for evidence.
Overwhelmingly though, the most common criticism argued that the conflict in the Middle East was a complex one, and both sides needed to be heard. I called the meeting to an end, we debated internally, similarly inflamed, and in the end, we voted to pose the question to the student body. We voted to have a vote and when it passed, we announced an April referendum on divesting from those companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” Then it all exploded.
If you want to know where the world is going to be five years from now, visit a college campus. The idealism of young people excited to independently enter the world without already being scarred by it generates a liberatory framework of thinking of climate change and freedom of speech, that to the old guard, looks so far-fetched that it is scary. Campus activism changes the world because it dares to imagine a better one. Isn’t that what we want from education, for our students? To use the tools of reasoning and research that they learn from schools to help chart themselves forward? And in the concentrated sites of learning that are colleges and universities, that is often what you are finding all around.
Moreover, if you ask a college student about their experiences, a counter emerges to the picture that these teenagers and recent teenagers are inoculating themselves to different opinions by hiding out in their own bubbles. What you might actually hear is that classrooms are often filled with devils looking to do advocacy work through Progressive Bros and Girl Bosses stereotypically, but very many others too who just happen to think differently. Debates emerging from campus advocacy play out with contention and disagreements and accusations, all of which remind us that the Overton window even on college campuses remains a range and not a fixed point, and people, even young people, exist on political spectrums. Education exposes, and contrary to popular belief, even in the days of “cancel culture,” that exposure to contrary beliefs is still being undertaken by quality educators who can be trusted to do so.
Finally, as much as campus activism enriches the educational experiences of the college students engaged in it, it does take its toll. Injustices, to poorly paraphrase Morrison, are distractions, not because the work is trivial, but because it takes those doing the work away from their other concerns. And in the case of young students fighting the good fight, it can look like overwork or underwork, that can either shape them to become disciplined leaders or can wear them out before they even get started, either way, molding their education.
We got emails telling us that we were anti-Semitic and that we wouldn’t even be able to use our phones as women if we were in any other country in the Middle East. A group of students within SGA flat-out refused to communicate with me and would instead communicate directly with the White SGA President instead. My friend was having lunch in the cafeteria one day when he noticed that the TV right next to him was playing a local news story about the referendum.
A few days before the vote, we were told that donors were asking about he referendum. Hours after the results came out, the President of the College sent an open letter addressed to us but sent to students, staff, and alumni that dismissed the results and the vote itself. The referendum had passed with 64.3% in favour of writing a letter to divest and almost 50% of the Barnard student body voting. We wrote the letter and immediately received another public response from the President, reiterating the “complexities of the Mideast.” By then, I already knew I was done with SGA. The referendum vote was part of a larger election cycle where I declined to run, as I had said from the start, but where the new SGA was made up with more Black students and students of color than had been seen before.
My time on SGA and specifically this experience enlightened me to the fact that on college campuses all over the world, there are young people fighting for what’s right in the midst of dismissals by the adults responsible to listen to and guide their growth, and often in the face of negative campaigns and contentious conflicts between their peers. What might it look like to give student activists the platform and respect they deserve, years before we realise they are right and give them their flowers? How might we encourage students’ idealism as a part of their education? And how do we stand alongside the young people pushing for a better campus and a better world, staying out of their way and reminding them constantly how much their work matters and how much we all really need it, not just for our world right now, but for the worlds to come?
Love this line, so simple and true: “Campus activism changes the world because it dares to imagine a better one.”