Honoring Student Solidarity with Palestine

The Trinity Faculty Coalition for Justice in Palestine

Everyone at Trinity knows that the protest policy is currently being debated (and, perhaps, revised). What most people don’t know is that while these debates proceed, some of our most conscientious and principled students have been navigating ever-shifting and exhausting administrative obstacles to their expression of solidarity with Palestine. That they have not given up is testament to their determination to call on the campus community to examine its complicity in genocide.

Since the beginning of the academic year, the Faculty Coalition for Justice in Palestine has borne witness to the tactics of repression targeting our students. We have accompanied students to meetings as they solicited pre-approval and negotiated the terms of “appropriately nondisruptive” protest (itself a damning contradiction in terms). We have also supported students facing disciplinary proceedings and sanctions as a result of arbitrary and bizarre interpretations of college policies not limited to the new protest policy, including the social code and the policy on nondiscrimination. This punitive process sends a clear message: the Trinity College administration would rather bog students down in endless meetings than consider divestment from genocide.

In the 1970s, sociologist of law Malcolm Feeley undertook a study of so-called “justice” in New Haven lower courts adjudicating misdemeanors and minor felonies. His seminal 1979 study, The Process is the Punishment, argues that the costs to those accused of these minor violations inhere in the process itself, both materially–as wasted time, lost wages, missed work or school, and endless court appearances–and psychologically, in the form of harassment, disrespect, suspicion, and the stigma associated with being accused of violating the law. Because of the costs associated with merely being accused of a crime, judges and prosecutors in Feely’s study often asserted that the process itself “taught a lesson” to defendants, making additional punishment unnecessary.

On Trinity’s campus today, “the process is the punishment.” Regardless of whether any sanction is ultimately imposed, dragging students into protracted, humiliating and overwrought meetings is intended to wear down and ultimately silence pro-Palestine voices on Trinity’s campus; to mark out pro-Palestine organizing for surveillance, scrutiny, and potential punishment; and to subject pro-Palestine students to suspicion, disrespect, and mistreatment. We can only conclude that it is the current administration’s strategy to undermine pro-Palestine student activism not through draconian punishment — at least not yet — but instead through the weaponization of college policy, such that the subjects of solidarity with Palestine and Palestinian liberation become unspeakable and invisible on Trinity’s campus.

While we respect the ongoing faculty, staff and student efforts to craft a policy that protects students’ right to protest, we are concerned that abstract discussions obscure the material conditions in which specific students have been, and continue to be, targeted for making specific demands. The alleged need for a “protest policy” on Trinity’s campus did not arise in a vacuum. Since 2023 (and before), students on campuses nationwide, predominantly from already marginalized groups, have been calling for an end to US complicity in the occupation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza. They have been met by extreme hostility from the most powerful representatives of their institutions, as well as municipal, state, and federal governments, at devastating cost, from doxxing to suspension to expulsion to arrest to bodily and psychic harm. For example, a comprehensive 2024 Palestine Legal report documented over 3,000 arrests of students, professors, and community members on more than 80 college campuses as well as a four-fold increase in requests for legal support, “reflecting an exponential rise in anti-Palestinian repression across the US.”

We wish a policy could fix that, but evidence suggests otherwise. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, colleges and universities across the US spent the year after the student encampment movement enacting policies, using the now-common refrain of “content-neutral” “time, place, and manner” regulations to impose new restrictions on student protest. While administrations feign content neutrality, we know better. The policies enacted across US campuses in the wake of the 2023-2024 academic year have resulted in new and more pervasive forms of repression, the stifling of protest, and more tools for college administrators to punish students calling for justice in Palestine. Unfortunately, Trinity is guilty of this as well.

We were heartened when, in the wake of President Lugo’s chilling Nov. 7 email, so many faculty responded not just by condemning his language but also by highlighting the urgency of examining Trinity’s complicity in genocide. Students do not protest merely to express political views, but to change their communities. We best honor students’ sacrifices — on Trinity’s campus and beyond — by moving their demands forward. We urge the whole campus community to commit to divestment and call on Trinity’s administration to stop attacking students standing in solidarity with Palestine.