The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
It’s been a year and a half since the American University student body voted 83 percent in favor of a referendum telling the University to implement a Green New Deal. The referendum was based on the Green New Deal for AU Policy Platform, published by Sunrise Movement American University several months earlier. The overwhelming support for the policy clearly expressed to the AU administration and its decision-makers that its students want a campus learning environment in which students, faculty and staff are cared for. It demonstrated that students want our university to sever its ties with the fossil fuel industry and become a true climate leader, instead of just another institution that commits to climate action in name but lacks follow-through when it comes to making any significant changes.
AU students similarly demonstrated that they want a university that prioritizes justice and values life when the American University’s Student Government Undergraduate Senate passed a resolution calling for AU to cut all ties with the Israeli government and end its complicity in the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine. The resolution, much like the Green New Deal Referendum, passed overwhelmingly with a final vote of 21-0-2. The passage of the resolution was the result of a joint effort by a broad and diverse coalition of students, including AU’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Dissenters and at least 30 other student organizations that form the AU Palestine Solidarity Coalition.
Despite the sweeping support for both of these student-led policy efforts and the urgent need for campus action on both Palestinian liberation and climate justice, the University has realized neither. This is part of a pattern of AU ignoring student voices and refusing to implement policy that would advance justice and safety for communities around the world.
When it comes to the Green New Deal for AU, the university has indicated it prefers to claim the banner of ‘sustainability’ while refusing to implement meaningful change. The AU Green New Deal framework, which was developed through a series of visioning sessions with AU students, includes demands for complete decarbonization, anti-racist education that is responsive to the BIPOC students on campus and dissociation with an industry that puts its own profits above our lives. Confronted with this framework, the University has met few of the key demands in the proposed policy. It has taken a few steps in the right direction, allocating more resources to the AU Market Food Pantry and showing willingness to implement policies that would increase university funding transparency and reject funds from organizations involved in climate denial. But, students have asked for much more, and there is much more to be done.
In response to students protesting in solidarity with Palestine, the University’s total disregard for student voices has been even more blatant. Not even 30 minutes after the resolution divest from Israeli occupation was passed, former President Sylvia Burwell sent an email stating that the resolution threatened American University’s “values of inclusion and belonging” and “will not be implemented.” The quick reply came as a surprise to students like myself who had tried to contact the president about actions the University could take to live up to its stated values of inclusivity, changemaking and climate leadership. Combined with a pattern of ignoring student voices, what this message made clear was that the American University administration values “inclusivity” until inclusivity means including student input in its decision-making.
This most recent semester, I especially wanted AU to take a stand and show solidarity with the people of Palestine. Instead of listening to students calling for it to take action, I saw my university punish students for speaking out against genocide. It disciplined and censured student organizations that dared to express outward support for a free Palestine and then preemptively warned students against engaging in disruptive protest. That’s not to say that this is new behavior from this university; it’s just to say that as students were being brutalized on campuses across the country, almost 40,000 people had been killed in Gaza, many of them with U.S. bombs, the least the University could have done was listen to its students and respond to us with care and compassion.
As someone who spends most of my free time organizing for climate action and a livable future, I know that climate justice and Palestinian liberation are inextricably linked, as occupied Palestine is facing crises of climate and environmental injustice inflicted by the Israeli government. Israel’s assault on Palestinian life is antithetical to the world we are fighting for — a world where everyone has access to clean water, can breathe clean air and is protected from disaster. Israel is systematically weaponizing access to water in Gaza, using it as a weapon of war. Its incessant bombing is releasing toxins into the air en masse, destroying homes and killing civilians, including entire families. This is why any true fight for climate justice must include justice for Palestine and a permanent ceasefire — and why students and people around the world will never stop speaking out and disrupting business as usual until our intertwined goals of Palestinian liberation and climate justice are realized.
I am at a point where I feel a complicated mix of emotions. I am frustrated and sad, but despite everything, I am hopeful. I am inspired by students and professors I see refusing to be silent in the face of injustice, as I am simultaneously disappointed in the university administrators who refuse to hear them.
I can’t cover all of the complicated feelings I have about being at a university that has both done so much for me yet also used its power time and time again to maintain the status quo. As this university has connected me to a community of passionate people who care about shifting structures of power and oppression, it has simultaneously upheld those structures and selectively implemented what it claims are its values of academic freedom, free speech and inclusivity. I can only again call on the University to listen to its students, its faculty and its staff: on a Green New Deal, on the freedom to protest and on Palestine.
Maddie Young is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
This piece was edited by Alana Parker, Rebeca Samano Arellano and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks and Charlie Mennuti.
