On Thursday, April 24th, Bard SJP met with administrators Taun Toay, Malia DuMont, Deidre d’Albertis, Dumaine Williams, and Hannah Zipple. We had the simple, ethically self-evident request that, given the heightened likelihood that students will be refused re-entery to the country, thus losing their access to education at Bard, the school would waive or reduce the current nightly fee for non-citizen students to stay on campus over summer break.
We do not want students to be financially unable to continue their education and stay in America. The lack of food, accessibility, and work opportunities on campus over summer puts many students in a position where it is extremely difficult to meet their basic needs. Our concern is that if students can’t afford to stay on campus, they will be forced to return home and risk losing re-entry. For this reason, reducing or eliminating the housing fee over summer was our only requestcoming into this meeting.
We did not ask Bard to to pay any money. We merely asked them to put aside housing that they already have, and stop charging an egregious rate of $20 per night from students who often struggle to pay for both food and shelter on campus over the summer. We asked them to sacrifice profit in order to protect their students.
They flatly refused. They gave up their opportunity to protect Bard students during this crucial moment. They failed us as students, and as people.
Bard’s administration proved again today that they do not care about international students. That they see us as dollar signs before they see as human beings. Bard students deserve better.
Welcome to Shaima’s Hall.
Bard Students have reclaimed what was previously known as “Ludlow” in honor of Shaima Refaat Alareer, daughter of the poet Refaat Alareer, who was murdered in December. On April 26th, Shaima was martyred by the Zionist regime alongside her husband and 2 month old son. As students continue to occupy Shaima’s Hall, we would like to reflect on Bard’s Popular University for Gaza. For 12 days we have created a space for political education and a community rooted in solidarity. It has served as a place of continual political protest and a reminder that, as students, we have a duty to learn about Palestine and resist injustice.
Students will remain in Shaima’s Hall until the college has committed itself to the following:
1. Bard College commits to abide by a set of ethical investment guidelines that will govern the entirety of the endowment and determine what types of investments Bard will not participate in—for example; arms manufacturers, fossil fuel industries, and private prisons.
2. Bard College constructs a democratically elected, representative and accountable body made up of students, faculty, staff, and admin that give content to the ethical guidelines, issue annual reports on whether they believe the investments are in compliance with those guidelines, and update the guidelines as they deem necessary.
In addition, the college must put out a full written statement committing to these demands and the agreements reached in Monday's negotiations. The statement must be signed by Taun Toay, Jonathan Becker, Dumaine Williams, and Leon Botstein.
The college has evaded attempts at further negotiations by proposing to meet a week after the original negotiations at which point the semester will have ended and students will have departed. To put it in the words of Bard College’s President, to deal with a nonviolent occupation, college administrators should, “Let them stay there, and eventually they will leave of their own accord”1.
223 days into this genocide, Bard College students refuse this rhetoric and will make the 40 000 people murdered in Gaza impossible to ignore. We have liberated this building to honor Shaima and three generations of the Alareer family wiped out in these seven months of genocide. We will not forget Shaima, her father, her husband, her infant son.
Until Liberation,
Bard Students for Justice in Palestine
1 Relations, Bard Public. “In Debut Episode of For Love of the World (Amor Mundi): Conversations with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, Host Roger Berkowitz Interviews Leon Botstein.” Bard College,
www.bard.edu/news/for-love-of-the-world-amor-mundi-with-host-roger-berkowitz-features-leon-botstein-2 024-05-01. Accessed 17 May 2024.
Dear Bard Community,
Today, May 6th, Bard Students for Justice in Palestine announces the launch of the Popular University for Gaza. We have set up a Liberated Zone on the open space in front of Hegeman and we plan on being there for the next coming weeks.
Many of you are probably aware that Gaza Solidarity Encampments and Liberated Zones have been sprouting across the country and the world since April 2024. As of today, there are more than 150 encampments on Turtle Island (so-called United States and Canada). SJP chapters and other Palestine Solidarity groups have been taking over physical spaces on their campuses as a means to pressure universities into divesting from Israeli products and companies.
Here at Bard, The Popular University for Gaza is being launched first and foremost to stand in unwavering solidarity with the people of Gaza and amplify their calls for liberation from the genocidal Zionist regime. We as students at Bard College also stand in solidarity with our brave peers within the student movement across the globe facing unprecedented police violence and academic repression for calling to an end to the Zionist occupation and the genocide. We understand that as students at a liberal arts institution that foregrounds social justice, the college nevertheless continues to function as an arm of imperialism through liberal education and other means of soft power. We have the responsibility to remain disciplined with our organizing and to create a radical space where we learn from each other's struggles and experiences and stand together in the face of the oppressor.
The Popular University for Gaza will serve as a space that is committed to building a community grounded in radical political education by hosting teach-ins, workshops and screenings taught by our own student body as well as community members and experienced organizers. Bard SJP invites the Bard community to come and learn with us about Palestinian liberation and our collective and shared struggles against imperialism, racism and settler colonialism. With that in mind, please make sure to follow our community guidelines when you come to the space which will be posted at the entrance of the Liberated Zone.
Finally, we will be making demands of the institution as a tangible way to positively impact all struggles for liberation from within our position as members of the Bard community. The Popular University for Gaza will remain active until our demands are met.
Our demands are as follows:
Challenge Executive Order 157
DISCLOSE. Transparency of Bard’s investment and commitment to BDS endowment building (compliance with an inter campus board of students, staff and faculty in the creation of an endowment in 2026, as well as full transparency, e.g. updating the Bard community as soon as decisions are made)
Sign on to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Full year-round housing and jobs for all current and incoming displaced students.
The creation of a scholarship, relief fund and safe havens for Palestinian victims of genocide, scholasticide, apartheid and displacement for both students and scholars.
Campus BDS – full disclosure surrounding where food, educational materials and office products are purchased and a commitment to not purchase from Israeli companies and defense companies as well as companies on the BDS list.
We demand that Bard College work to make a stronger connection between Bard Annandale and Al-Quds Bard through regular communication with the student bodies of both Bard Annandale and AQB about student life and campus events, as well as funding for programming that brings the campuses together, creating shared libraries and events, and fostering an academic bridge between our campuses.
We look forward to the next few weeks and we hope that you will come to the Liberated Zone and partake in the different actions and teach-ins we will be hosting at the Popular University for Gaza.
Free Palestine and long live the Student Intifada,
Bard Students for Justice in Palestine.
Bard SJP Statement for Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Friday October 20, 2023
As members of Students for Justice in Palestine, we are committed to our mission of both educating and mobilizing the campus community in support of the Palestinian people, and we emphasize the importance of being responsible for our actions in pursuit of this objective. On October 9, 2023, we released and then retracted an initial statement in response to developments in Gaza and across historic Palestine. We did so because, upon review, we felt we were not as principled and articulate about our politics and the current moment as we wanted to be or should have been. We take responsibility for the carelessness of that statement, and apologize for any confusion or harm it may have caused to any student, staff, or faculty member. We are grateful to our community members who have held us accountable, expected the best from us, and provided us with the benefit of the doubt to grow and live up to the principles we hold and responsibilities before us.
It is in this vein that we also clarify our position of solidarity with the Palestinian people. As a solidarity group, SJP’s role is to oppose the system of rule that the Israeli government has imposed on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the diaspora—a system that has been recognized by Palestine human rights organizations, the leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as constituting the international crime of apartheid. As a US-based community we also oppose the role of the US government in enabling and supporting this apartheid system through diplomatic, military, and economic aid. We seek to amplify Palestinian voices, create learning opportunities for ourselves and the broader community of students, staff, and faculty of Bard College, and activate that community in conjunction with both the specificities of our campus and the US national Palestine solidarity movement.
As a student group rooted on the Bard campus, we are committed to conducting ourselves in a manner consistent with the right of all community members to hold and express views free of violence, intimidation, and harassment. Our solidarity with the Palestinian people comes from the same place as our commitment to naming and challenging all forms of discrimination including anti-Blackness, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. It is also our role to stand in active solidarity with Indigenous movements across Turtle Island, in particular the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians who were expelled to Wisconsin from the land Bard now stands on.
To this end, we invite the entire Bard community to join us today on October 20, 2023, as we participate in the General Global Strike Day in Solidarity with Palestine. We will be tabling at the Campus Center from 10am to 6pm, and invite everyone to come and learn more about the history of Palestine and the current moment, show their support for Palestine, and familiarize themselves with SJP.
In solidarity until liberation,
The SJP co-heads
On October 7th, 2024 at 1:15 pm in front of Kline Commons, Bard’s Students for Justice in Palestine are holding a demonstration in honor of the historic Palestinian reclamation of ancestral homelands that took place one year ago today. We are here to pay tribute to the estimated 200,000 Palestinians martyred by the IOF in Gaza, and the additional millions currently enduring trauma, famine, disease, forced displacement and incomprehensible grief. This estimate does not include the thousands martyred in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen at the hands of the IOF and US military.
This demonstration aims to refocus our attention towards Palestine, Lebanon, and all peoples under siege by the zionist entity and capitalist American conquest. The liberation of Palestine, the global south, and all oppressed peoples is urgent and demands our attention. We are demanding yours.
While Bard lauds itself for being the only American college with a campus in Palestine, an average of 50 students in Al-Quds get arrested every year and 260 students are summoned for interrogation.
James Cox Chambers, the chair of Bard’s board of trustees, sends millions to fund Atlanta’s “Cop City,” in order to further brutalize Black and Brown people and destroy the Weelaunee Forest. These cops, like all cops around the U.S., train with the Israeli Occupation Forces.
Bard College exploits the existence of Al Quds and the Bard Prison Initiative to shield themselves from criticism and to neuter any political speech on campus, in order to deny accountability for upholding the systems of oppression in which they participate.
Bard college is complacent in, and benefits from, these contradictions. After the encampment and occupation of Ludlow, renamed Shaima’s Hall last spring, Bard’s administration changed the student handbook to ban any form of protest, interruption, or obstruction on school property. They want to silence us. But we refuse. Silence in the face of death is unacceptable. We have more political clarity and moral resolve than ever before: for Palestine, for humanity, and for justice. By building community, solidarity, and collective power, we anchor ourselves in the ultimate goal of liberation. The student intifada will continue to fight and we will continue to win.