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divestment
Solidarity Lessons: Western MA Stands With Smith College Students for Justice in Palestine
We hope that communities and non-academic organizations across the country find ways to stand with all college and university students on the vanguard of the movement for a free Palestine and an end to the ongoing genocide.
Mar 06, 2025
Even before the extraordinary activism for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the liberation of the Palestinian people at Columbia University last spring, the students of Smith Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, set a high bar for the coming wave of campus unrest across the U.S. with their 11-day occupation of College Hall, Smith’s administration building.
For us as residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, it was awe-inspiring to watch Smith students’ activism as those first days passing sleeping bags through the windows of College Hall turned into weeks and months of creative actions demanding the school’s administration end its complicity in genocide.
Outdoor student and faculty teach-ins in the snow and mud of early spring set the stage for ongoing pro-Palestine cultural and political education events as the lush grounds of the college responded to the lengthening days and warming temperatures. Local media covered the occupation of College Hall, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted the intense dedication of Smith SJP’s occupation.
You claim to be a school that encourages activism, and yet, when it comes to opposing genocide, not only do you not celebrate your courageous students, you seek to silence, question, and condemn them.
During a memorial service for Gaza martyrs in front of College Hall, in somber silence amid flowers and flickering votive candles, we gazed up at the uppermost tower of the hall, to see that the flag of Smith College had been replaced by students with a flag bearing the Palestinian colors that read, “Smith Divest Now.” The tall, ornate, iron gates in front of College Hall were decorated with small Palestinian flags; flowers; and red, black, green, and white streamers. Despite increasing animosity from Smith’s administration, campus activism to end the genocide in Gaza continued through graduation, only fading as students dispersed for the summer months.
As on so many campuses across the U.S., students returning to Smith last fall were met with a new set of policies hammered out by the administration over the summer in an effort to prevent further activism for Palestine. Only after the new policy was leaked to the college community did Smith College President Sarah Willie-LeBreton concede that there was a new set of rules governing, in minute detail, the “time, place, and manner of expressive activity” on campus.
In a College-wide message, Willie-LeBreton claimed that her new policy was simply a response to urging by the U.S. Department of Education and national organizations (and unlikely bedfellows) such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Zionist organization at the forefront of efforts to suppress anti-genocide activism and speech by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism; the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); and Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), that campus protest policies be revisited. (For those familiar with the Palestine Exception, it was crystal clear that the new policy was designed to quell continued pro-Palestine activism.)
On October 24, Smith students walked out of classes to protest the new policy, which states, “Speech is not protected when it is libelous, slanderous, threatens violence, incites riot, intends to cause personal injury, infringes upon the rights of others, or is otherwise unlawful.” The policy included a time frame within which students are allowed to make noise while protesting, banned face coverings to conceal identity, forbade protestors from “interrupting academic life,” and more.
As fall deepened into winter, community advocates for an end to the genocide concluded that Smith’s administration needed to hear from us in support of Smith SJP. Shortly after a discussion with a community organization called “Northampton Neighbors” in which President Willie-LeBreton emphasized the importance of ties and communication between “town and gown,” organizers with Demilitarize Western Massachusetts and 16 other local and state-wide groups called for a rally and press conference—Western Mass Stands with Smith SJP—for February 27, on a public sidewalk on Route 9 in the heart of the campus.
As the rally began, in cold showers between snow banks, we made the two statements provided below in describing the three demands of the rally—that Smith College must:
- Divest from Israel’s genocide,
- Issue a public statement condemning genocide and scholasticide in Gaza and throughout Palestine, and
- Rescind the draconian “expressive activity” policy clearly targeting pro-Palestine student, faculty, and staff activism.
After our description of the community demands, a slew of speakers from community organizations supportive of Smith SJP, including Smith Alumnae for Justice in Palestine (AJP), spoke to the press and assembled community members and students.
A college spokesperson responded to a reporter with the Daily Hampshire Gazette with the following statement: “Smith is a strong supporter of free speech and the right to assemble. However, it is important to note that this gathering was held on Northampton city property and was not a Smith-sponsored event.” The reporter noted, “Officials did not address the demands made at the protest.”
In addition to faculty and student groups from UMass-Amherst and Hampshire College and many community anti-genocide organizations, we were gratified to secure public endorsement of the rally by the Peace & Justice Committee of First Churches of Northampton, by Interlink Publishing (the only Palestinian-owned publishing company in the U.S., located in Northampton), and two state-wide organizations—Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) and Pax Christi MA.
We hope that communities and non-academic organizations across the country find ways to stand with all college and university students on the vanguard of the movement for a free Palestine and an end to the ongoing genocide—until Liberation and Return. We echo Smith SJP’s chant: “Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest.”
Community Demand No. 1: Divest from Genocide
We residents of Northampton, western Massachusetts and beyond are here today to demonstrate our support for the courageous Smith College Students for Justice in Palestine who are demanding that their school join the global struggle to stop the hideous, unchecked genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people.
What can Smith do?
Smith SJP has been pleading with Smith President Sarah Wille-LeBreton and the Smith Board of Trustees for more than a year to DIVEST, to sell every single penny of stock that the school owns in so-called defense corporations, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon, General Dynamics, Hexcel, and Northrup Grumman. Also on the list is L3 Technologies, which has a plant in Northampton, less than a mile from here.
The students selected these stocks because all of these corporations are profiting tremendously by providing a wide array of weapons and military services that the Israeli government is using right now, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, year by year to kill, maim, and terrorize Palestinian people and to drive them from their land.
Smith President Willie-LeBreton says Smith will not sell these stocks because Smith has such a small investment in genocide, about $67,000 worth.
If the amount is so small, why not sell the stock?
Is it because if Smith, seen as one of the prestigious “Seven Sisters,”, divests, it will put a stink on these blood-soaked genocide stocks that might hurt their value on Wall Street? Would selling these stocks cast shadows over the careers of members of the Smith Board of Trustees who are in the investment business?
We implore Smith College to lift itself out of the vile quagmire of genocide and honor SJP’s call to DIVEST.
Community Demand No. 2: Condemn Genocide and Scholasticide in Gaza and Throughout Palestine
United Nations experts and many others have expressed urgent concern over Israel’s scholasticide in Palestine. Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian scholar and emeritus fellow in politics at Oxford, coined the term in 2009. Nabulsi has described scholasticide as the systematic destruction of educational institutions and points out that Israel has a long history of attacking education in Palestine dating back to 1948. The transnational organization Scholars Against War has since built on Nabulsi’s definition, listing 18 acts as scholasticide, including killing students, teachers, and other school-related personnel; destroying educational institutions; blocking the construction of new schools; and “preventing scholarly exchange in all of its forms.”
In addition to the injury and deaths of tens of thousands of students, teachers, and university professors and the destruction of all 12 university campuses and the majority of schools in Gaza, Israel has deliberately targeted mosques, churches, libraries, the Central Archives of Gaza, cultural heritage sites, and UNRWA. A U.N. report states: “These attacks present a systemic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society. They have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future. When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams.”
As with all other activities conducted by Israel with impunity, indeed with the full partnership of the United States, scholasticide throughout Palestine is being normalized, in part through the silence of educational systems in the West.
Smith College? Silent on scholasticide. The trustees of Smith and President Willie-LeBreton have such a mutilated and truncated understanding of ethics that they apparently believe their silence on Israeli scholasticide is some sort of elegant neutrality. We call it what it is. Complicity. Partnership in destruction of education, of culture, of history, of a people. A component of full-scale genocide. President Willie-LeBreton and Smith College Trustees, we DEMAND that you issue a public statement categorically condemning Israel’s scholasticide and work actively to support, in consultation with your students and faculty and following the leadership of the Palestinian people, the rebuilding of Palestine’s educational system.
Community Demand No. 3: Protect Free Speech on Campus
The third demand of this community rally in support of Smith SJP is that President Willie-LeBreton immediately rescind her new “Policy Governing Time, Place, and Manner of Expressive Activity.” Did Smith College actually believe that we as a community would see the beautiful, vigorous, anti-genocide advocacy for Palestinian liberation on this campus last year, and not notice the muting of that advocacy this year? We know, in fact, that like so many other U.S. colleges and universities, Smith used the summer months to devise ways to shut down the activism that was so vibrant at Smith last year.
We see you, Smith College. We see you, Palestine Exception. We know it is no coincidence that a new “Expressive Activity” policy has been imposed on students the semester immediately following the brilliant activism the preceding spring. You claim to be a school that encourages activism, and yet, when it comes to opposing genocide, not only do you not celebrate your courageous students, you seek to silence, question, and condemn them. We see you, Smith College. We see that you comfortably fit in with those institutions of higher learning that say, to quote Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in her apt paraphrasing of so many university administrators, “We want ALL students on campus to feel safe. The pro-genocide and the anti-genocide ones.”
President Willie-LeBreton: Rescind your draconian “Expressive Activity” policy. Celebrate your anti-genocide students. Learn from their humanity. Protect them from external attack, arrest, deportation. We community members implore you: Wash clean your blood-soaked Ivory Towers by following your students’ lead in opposing a historic genocide.
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Hear Me Out: In 2025, Climate Activists Should Spend Less Time on Climate
If you’re a climate activist who doesn’t know what to do for the next four years, the answer is remarkably simple: Join other movements.
Jan 09, 2025
Ever since my first foray into climate activism in 2019, I have dreaded the year 2025. In my mind, it’s always been the Big Deadline.
The 2015 Paris agreement concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 if we have any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
And yet, now that we’re standing at the precipice of this once-far off deadline, we are still so far from the meaningful climate action necessary to fend off unstoppable climate catastrophe. Indeed, we’ve just worsened our chances at a survivable future.
We need to build a strong left to fight fascism during Trump’s presidency and to build a just green future in its aftermath.
The U.S. became the largest oil producer in 2018 and continues to expand domestic fossil fuel production. American citizens just elected a fascist president who has promised to gut the EPA and establish U.S. “energy dominance,” but the Democrat who supposedly could have saved us from Donald Trump refused to ban fracking and praised U.S. oil production.
Technically, I should be panicking. I certainly was when my college graduation last May was preceded by some headlines announcing the 1.5°C limit had already been reached. But now, as a climate activist in New York City, I find myself surprisingly calm.
This calm isn’t simply due to local climate wins, though I have celebrated those. Gov. Kathy Hochul just signed the Climate Change Superfund Act into law, which will require fossil fuel companies to pay billions into a fund to help New Yorkers recover from climate disasters. In other words, New York will force polluters to pay to clean up their own messes. This is a huge step in holding fossil fuel companies accountable.
Yet my optimism arises out of a different trend in the climate movement: Climate activists are (finally) showing up for other movements.
Historically, the climate movement has attempted to isolate itself from other political and social issues, arguing that climate policy is “just science.” This majority-white movement has failed to see that fossil fuel emissions are part of a larger history of the Global North colonizing and exploiting both people and the planet for decades. The climate crisis is a symptom of a broader exploitative system. To change that system, we need a united left that will fight for all people—not just those who identify as environmentalists.
In 2020, climate activists were rightfully berated for not showing up enough for the Black Lives Matter movement. Thankfully, I think many climate activists heard that message because today, they have come out in droves for Palestine.
Many of the college students who organized campus encampments last spring to urge their school administrators to divest from Israel and the U.S. imperial war machine were students who had previously organized for climate justice. I witnessed this firsthand at the Claremont Colleges when I was a senior: The student organizations demanding fossil fuel divestment fell to the wayside as the crisis in Gaza intensified. Globally, many climate organizations chose to speak out and take direct action to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.
But none of these climate activists had stopped caring about the climate. In fact, they often pointed out that Israel’s actions were not just genocide, but ecocide as well. The onslaught of bombs dropped on Gaza will contaminate the soil and groundwater in the region for decades. And the destruction has produced at least 54.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, equal to the annual emissions of 16 coal-fired power plants.
Climate activists cannot claim to fight for a just future and stay silent about genocide. “If we, as climate activists, aren’t able to see and speak up against the current marginalization and oppression and killing of people today, then I don’t think we should be able to call ourselves climate justice [activists],” climate champion Greta Thunberg told Al Jazeera in early December 2024.
As Trump prepares to enter the White House, we will undoubtedly see more people oppressed and killed. Among the many groups who are vulnerable under his administration are undocumented immigrants, whom Trump has vowed to round up and deport.
Migrant justice has long been intertwined with climate justice. As climate change makes many areas around the world uninhabitable, climate refugees have no choice but to leave their home.
In response to Trump’s election, climate organizers Jeff Ordower and Ahmed Gaya called on their fellow activists to bring their experiences of shutting down pipelines and coal plants to fight the incarceration and deportation we can expect under Trump. Climate activists should answer this call: The struggles for migrant justice and climate justice are intertwined, and we must meet the needs of the current moment.
“[Climate is] not more urgent than kids being ripped away from their families and dying in the desert—anyone who tries to win that argument is monstrous themselves. We either merge, join forces, or we lose,” writer and activist Naomi Klein said in 2019.
With Trump as president, things will undoubtedly get worse before they get better. We need to build a strong left to fight fascism during Trump’s presidency and to build a just green future in its aftermath. To do so, climate activists must put their words into action when they say they fight for every living being.
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Student Researchers Expose Fossil Fuel Ties at US Universities
"It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said one organizer, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
Sep 19, 2024
Students at universities and colleges across the U.S. have long demanded that their schools cut ties with the fossil fuel industry as planetary heating has increasingly been linked to extreme weather and pollution-causing emissions have continued.
New findings released by student researchers with the Campus Climate Network on Wednesday, said the organization, "add more detail and evidence to what these students have already been campaigning for—fossil fuel funding has no place in universities' climate research."
The students spoke at a virtual press conference titled "Big Oil's Stain on Our Universities," presenting research compiled in six reports regarding fossil fuel industry ties at Columbia University, Princeton University, Cornell University, American University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California San Diego.
The six institutions have collectively received more than $108 million in direct funding to the fossil fuel industry, published more than 1,500 academic articles and papers funded by oil giants, and count 10 people affiliated with the industry among the members of their university governance boards, according to the research—which follows the first-ever literature review of investigations into Big Oil's links to higher education, published in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change earlier this month.
Columbia and Princeton were by far the biggest recipients of fossil fuel money, accepting more than $43 million each from companies and their foundations.
Sunrise Columbia, the Sunrise Movement's chapter at the university, published a report presented at Wednesday's press conference, detailing how Hess Corporation—an oil and gas company acquired by Chevron—was the largest fossil fuel donor to the prestigious university. The company contributed more than $15 million to Columbia from 2005-24.
Koch Family Foundations, "which have spent hundreds of millions to finance groups promoting climate denial," and liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm Cheniere Energy were also major contributors.
Fossil fuel money at Columbia has gone toward funding the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), the School of International and Public Affairs, and the university's Climate School—which "powers innovative research in the science, consequences, and human dimensions of climate change."
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions. Many of our findings directly contradict these missions."
The Climate School has received $741,967 from fossil fuel giants since it was established in 2020.
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions," reads the report. "Many of our findings directly contradict these missions—from Columbia being named explicitly by a BP [vice president] as essential for their outreach and influence to being specifically mentioned as a producer of biased research, Columbia has fallen short," said Sunrise Columbia.
At Princeton, student researchers wrote that the university "legitimizes and financially supports the fossil fuel industry," continuing to invest "approximately $700 million in privately held fossil fuel companies without justification," even after divesting its endowment of fossil fuel holdings worth $1 billion.
The report notes that the school's New Jersey campus "has not been spared" from extreme weather that's growing more frequent as the planet gets hotter and scientists warn that limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is getting less likely.
"Last summer, our campus was shrouded by smoke from incinerated Quebecois pine trees, smoke that turned the sky a burning orange. Outdoor workers on and off campus were hit hardest," wrote the students. "Floods nearby destroyed transport infrastructure and made it harder for our community members to come to campus to work or to learn. Scorching temperatures at the start of each fall semester make it difficult to think."
But while students, faculty, and staff have suffered the effects of fossil fuel extraction, major fossil fuel companies including BP, Exxon, Shell, and TotalEnergies have spent more than $43 million on research at Princeton, funding papers containing "explicit applications for continued or expanded fossil fuel use."
At the virtual press conference on Wednesday, Campus Climate Network research manager Maddie Young said the articles detailed in the six reports focus primarily on methods for fossil fuel extraction, methods and "benefits" of "false solutions" like carbon capture, and extending and upholding "the social license of the fossil fuel industry to operate."
"So these might be articles that are connected to healthcare or health research and promote the image of corporate social responsibility connected to the fossil fuel industry," said Young, "and allow them to continue to leverage these relationships to universities and to greenwash their own image and present themselves as socially responsible."
The student researchers recommended that Princeton prohibit all research funding from the industry and complete divestment from all oil, gas, and coal companies, as well as cut ties with Petrotiger, a fossil fuel company that Princeton "appears to own," having earned nearly $140 million in the last 10 years in investment income and direct contributions.
"These recommendations are all within Princeton's power to achieve," said the student researchers. "The university must act upon these items with the urgency the climate crisis demands."
Young, who is also a student organizer at American University, said the student-authored reports are "only the beginning—we have a strong, national student movement that will continue to expose and cut the ties with Big Oil."
“It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said Young, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
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