On Sunday, April 28, 2024, as light showers turned to heavy rain, 30-some-odd University of Connecticut students departed a teach-in given by faculty to throw tarps over food and various equipment. Neighboring Dove Tower — that confounding structure between the Student Recreation Center and School of Business that we’ve affectionately been calling the “Leaning Tower of Business” — students, faculty and community members donning raincoats and ponchos arranged themselves under tents and canopies at breakneck speed. Huddling to escape the rain, members of the gathering discussed esoteric memes, political theory, event logistics and the crushing stress of finals week. Despite the dreary weather conditions, the gathering was gregarious and calm.
So why were two cop cars flashing their lights just a few hundred feet away?
As of writing this, students and faculty adjoined under the name “UConnDivest” are on their fourth night of a solidarity encampment with the people of Gaza, who themselves are enduring the seventh month of an ongoing genocide. Since October, the State of Israel, with billions of dollars in U.S. backing, has killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza under the fragile pretenses of eliminating Hamas militants.
The Gaza solidarity encampment, nicknamed “the UCommune,” follows the example of other extended protests at Columbia, Yale and countless other universities that are attempting to apply pressure on their universities to divest their endowments from the State of Israel or weapons manufacturers arming its genocide. UConn’s expanding connections with weapons manufacturers have been meticulously documented by activists in the community. However, information about the companies in which the UConn Foundation invests the university’s $600 million endowment remains invisible due to the Foundation’s private non-profit status.
Currently, the Foundation has no incentive to disclose nor divest its holdings in Israeli companies or weapons manufacturers; however, this is an imperative. With Israel remaining steadfast in its contingency plan to invade Rafah, a border city containing over 1.7 million displaced Palestinians, the stakes for cutting off Israel’s funding streams internationally could not be higher. That is why The UCommune exists.
Similarly to its Ivy League counterparts, The UCommune was immediately met with repression by police doing the work of an administration with vested interests in genocide. Minutes after activists threw up tents by the Leaning Tower of Business, the UConn Police Department broke into an encirclement of protesters and started ripping up tents with no basis in the law or prior established university policy. Students who attempted to hold their ground were threatened with arrest. Others were not so lucky as to just be threatened. According to reports, two students were arrested and subsequently subjected to a local media circus that highlighted them over the cause for which they were arrested — a convenient cop-out from substantially platforming progressive, anti-war demands. Unfortunately, this publication also perpetuated this sensationalism, either due to the pressures of expediency or the spectacle of students being violently repressed by police.
Since the first instance of UCPD’s repression of The UCommune, the university has been in damage control mode, crafting new policies on the fly with the clear intention of suppressing peaceful encampments and protests — two things that should be completely permissible on public property. Additionally, police have been given more license to surveil and intimidate members of the encampment, using methods such as strolling through the site in the early mornings and afternoon to record students’ identities — often while sleeping. Campers resisting these unreasonable searches by locking arms around the camp were accused by police of violating university policies for supposedly impeding law enforcement in public spaces. This is, to put it respectfully, bullshit.
The Daily Campus Graduate Edition has historically been a space for outgoing writers, editors and production employees to reflect on their careers at a paper that shaped their college life — a final sendoff before moving on to greener pastures. However, there can be no greener pastures when the university we attend monetarily and intellectually contributes to a genocide while cracking down on those who oppose it. I have not seen this university’s ethical and moral standing crumble faster in my four years here than in my four days of observing this encampment in which students and faculty commit incredible acts of kindness to each other and show audacious support for Palestinian life and freedom, yet are met with idling police cruisers in return.
My time at UConn has been nothing short of a partner dance between beauty and disgust. Though I could list off all the people for whom I owe all that I am today, I’m sure they would be satisfied if I sign off by writing that Palestine will be free, and may all empires fall.
” 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza under the fragile pretenses of eliminating Hamas militants. ”
slow down, cowboy. Those figures come via Hamas and repeated by the UN–both clearly unfriendly sources.In addition at least 3 data scientists have challenged those figures.
A fragile pretense? Nah. It was clearly proclaimed by the PM of Israel when the massacre in Oct took place.
ps: 30 thou killed? Do you know that over 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo in ten days of fire bombing, and we are not even talking about the A Bombs used on Japan. But that was ok because it was the US and not some other nation doing it, right?