 Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, resigned from her position following a concerted right wing campaign against her. This right wing campaign was allegedly attacking her on the basis of accusations of plagiarism, but comes a month after a controversial hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were called before Congress to testify about pro-Palestine organizing that had been happening on their college campuses. In particular, chance that students had been using, including From the River to the Sea and Globalized the Intifada, were framed as calling for the genocide of Jewish people. And the presidents were interrogated about whether or not they would punish their students who used these chance with disciplinary action. Claudine Gay herself refused to say if these students would face disciplinary action, but she did not dispute the framing that these chance were calling for the genocide of Jewish people and called them hateful, reckless, and offensive speech. To talk about what Claudine Gay's resignation means for student organizers on campus, People's Dispatch spoke to Prince Williams, an undergraduate Harvard organizer who has been active in the Palestine Solidarity Movement about the censorship and attacks that students have faced from the right wing, from rich alums, and from the Harvard administration. Could you talk about any censorship that you've faced as a student organizer? Since I've been on campus, a lot of the tactics of the university have always been to ignore us. That's been their sort of number one tactic. Since I've been on campus, I've noticed is that the university usually settles for just ignoring our demands, ignoring our calls for action, change, and just, yeah, kind of pertaining that we don't exist. But over the last few months, they haven't been able to do that because our organizing around Palestine has got national and international attention. And that's caused university leadership and the corporation to actually pay attention to us. And the response to that is how can we repress these student organizers and get the heat off the university and the corporation because of the backlash that has came from our organizing for Palestine. And so we had a proctor, a first year proctor at Harvard Defired, Ellum. We've had several students, including myself, be aborted, which is Harvard's disciplinary process that basically cases of potential violations of Harvard Code of Conduct go through the administrative board. So around a dozen or so Harvard students, policy organizers have been aborted. And we've also had situations where our days of action or our rallies and stuff has been, basically they'll close the gates to the yard or find ways to restrict our direct actions on campus. And again, all of these repression tactics have ramped up and they're actually, they're cracking down on us because of that national and international attention that we've brought to the Palestine issue. What do you make of Claudine Gay's behavior at the infamous university president's hearing? I think the hearing itself, one was crafted by congressional members in the far right to basically trap and gotcha these university presidents and accept their false premises about our intentions as organizers. And ultimately that resulted in Claudine Gay being effectively fired as university president. She couldn't say flat out that I don't, my students are not calling for the genocide of the Jewish people, for instance, when they say from the river to the sea, our anti-father. She didn't wanna open that bottle and maybe she doesn't even believe that. But she actively accepted the premises of the far right and saying that we were calling for those, for the genocide of the Jewish people, when we're not, when we say from the river to the sea, our anti-father, we're calling for Palestinian liberation and into apartheid and occupation. But because these university presidents won't even go that far into defend us, just that semblance of saying we're not calling for genocide of people, they embarrassed themselves and put their own jobs in jeopardy and they lost their jobs, at least two of them to the university presidents because they weren't willing to be in good faith about what we're actually saying, what we're actually calling for. And I think that's ultimately why the hearing went the way it did because the presidents weren't willing to actually be in good faith and say what the students on their campus are actually advocating for. What do you think about Claudine Gay's resignation and the right-wing campaign against her? Us as student organizers have heard out of the mountains of administrators that the donors don't run the university and then this happens and then they're ousted because of angry billionaire donors who don't like how administrators didn't crack down hard enough on student organizers. So I think ultimately Claudine's resignation is one, a sign that yes, these billionaire donors have tremendous influence over our universities and if they can use one, they use extremely racist attacks on Claudine since she was appointed president. It was announced that she was appointed but it's also true that the attacks on her were in response to her not being Zionist enough on campus and taking stronger action against pro-Palestinian organizers. So I think both those things can be true and that they are true, that Claudine was like a victim of extreme anti-blackness ever since she entered her role as president but at the same time, because she didn't wanna play ball with the Zionists in such of an aggressive way that they wanted her to, she was punished for that and if she can be effectively removed from her position for not taking that extremist position, then the future of academic freedom, the future of what they can do to faculty, what they can do to our courses, like how can they influence the university if they have enough power to dictate who's the president basically at this point, that's a bleak future in how our universities will run and operate moving forward using Trojan horses of plagiarism to attack curricula, to attack DEI and all these other things. When it was never about her intellectual credentials, it never was. It was all about the agenda behind it and they use her plagiarism case as a pretext for everything that they're actually going after, which they're admitting right now in public. During the university hearing in Congress, none of the presidents mentioned pro-Palestine and Arab students being targeted in the US, including three Palestinian students shot last month. What is your reaction to this? This is something that we consistently bring up in our organizing. We had a week of action after the weekend, those three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont and we explicitly said the type of language, for instance, saying from the river to the sea is anti-Semitic and the ways that administrators in university leadership talk about pro-Palestinian organizers contributes to Islamophobia, to anti-Palestinian sentiment that ultimately feeds violence like here at home on us as organizers. Plenty of organizers that I know have been getting death threats on top of the doxing and exposing people's addresses, pieces, identification, things like that. And from day one, President Gay wouldn't even say the word Palestine at times, let alone actively naming the legitimate attacks that have been going on against Muslim and Arab students on and off campus. We've had someone on Harvard's campus be chased with a knife. We've had the wife of a faculty member harass a student, econ professor's wife harass a student on video. All of these things, we keep getting the accusation of anti-Semitism, but there's material Islamophobia that cannot be denied, that just keep popping up, that they keep denying, which is just evidence of the hypocrisy of this idea that they care about students' safety and protection when there's clearly students under attack in this moment, that they're completely ignoring, that they're not valuing the safety of these students. Why do you think that the student movement for Palestine is under such intense scrutiny? I think just like those who are attacking us, we understand as student organizers our historical tradition. Even just looking at the United States, although this is a global phenomenon, young people have always been a very focal part of social movements going back decades and decades. A lot of us are students and just admirers of the young people of the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the various social movements that came after the McCarthy era and those who were pushing back against American imperialism, against Jim Crow and apartheid here and all these systems that still exist and that are cropping up in various places around the world and have these global implications. So young people have always been a powerful demographic in leading social movements and pushing for change and pushing beyond the boundaries of what they see because we are the future, we have to inherit this world, these systems, our society and we want better. Young people are always gonna want better than what they see and clearly right now in a moment where not just the genocide happening in Gaza, young people are making the connections of, for instance, why is billions and billions of dollars continually pumped into the war machine but not our futures, not our education, not our care, not our housing and making those connections of why our futures look so bleak yet there's so much investment in human suffering that's completely unnecessary. And so I think our enemies recognize that, our enemies recognize the power of young people and the historical power that young people have always possessed and trying to be historical agents for social change and that's no different now. 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