Columbia Faculty Host “People’s Graduation” for Punished Pro-Palestine College Protest Students

I hope that CUNY Law reinstates our students’ speaker, that CUNY administration drop the charges on all the students that were arrested at the CCNY encampment who are being charged with felonies for the same things that Columbia students are being charged with misdemeanors. I demand divestment from CUNY in the corporations that send weapons off to Israel and support this genocide. For me, I want the institutions to show up, and I demand that they listen to the students because they’re not — we’re not — going to stop.

Sofia Ongele, Barnard, Class of 2024

Sofia Ongele is the director of digital strategy at Gen-Z for Change.

The only thing that’s kept us together is what this is a testament to, which is community within the encampment, within different spaces that were created on campus as the bombardments were increasing in October. That is what has kept everyone sane and everyone able to continue onward in their lives.

This event, in particular having so many remarkable speakers, being surrounded by folks who had been suspended, had been arrested and weren’t allowed in the encampment, but are now back in community with us… it’s just been such an insane, remarkable time.

This ceremony — especially given the fact that campus was shut down, all of our graduation ceremonies were somewhere else off-campus just because they didn’t want any prospect of interruption — this was a community-centered event, it was a community-built event. It was the people, and there’s nothing that’s more powerful than that, nothing more remarkable than that. That’s the reason that we educate; we educate to liberate.

It’s really sad because I feel like in all of my previous ceremonies I went to, it didn’t really solidify that I’m actually leaving and I’m not coming back. But this was so wholesome and true to our values that it really does feel like this is the cap to my undergraduate career.

On the note of the solidarity encampments, at this point, it’s so much bigger than ourselves. It’s something that folks have chosen to malign so they don’t have to actively or critically engage with the true reasons that folks have become so engaged, empowered, and distraught with what we’re seeing on our screens, basically 24/7, of this onslaught. It’s really important for us to continually center Palestinians and colonized peoples throughout all of this. I do genuinely believe the chant that we hear in protest of “Palestine will free us all”: It’s a through-line through which we can understand so many other issues.

As we are actively within these institutions of higher learning, it’s incredibly imperative that we use our scholastic endeavors to elevate the scholasticide that we’re seeing happening in Palestine, specifically the fact there’s no universities left, and that central archives are being destroyed so that the memory of Palestinians, the scholarship, their wisdom, is something that is basically wiped off the face of the earth. We must use our position to stand in solidarity with our peers, our professors, our scholars, and Palestine as well.

Editor’s note: Teen Vogue reached out to NYU and CUNY for comment.

In response to a request for comment, a representative for CUNY Law School stated: “In alignment with University policy, The City University of New York School of Law does not comment on pending complaints or litigation. We stand firm in our commitment to combat discrimination in all of its forms — in the work that we do and within our law school community.”

Time quoted an NYU spokesman on the People’s Graduation as saying: “The number of graduating seniors not able to participate in Commencement because of disciplinary sanctions resulting from recent incidents was very small — fewer than a handful…. Even among that very small number of students, not being able to participate in the graduation ceremony does not mean they will not receive their degrees.”

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