Tallulah Hawley ‘25 and Zoe Cushing ‘25

A Palestinian flag stands before the Westlands building, which was occupied by the SJP and its members on November 21, 2024. Photo by Tallulah Hawley ‘25.

On the morning of Nov. 21, during the hours of 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., student protestors occupied Westlands. This was done in response to the College’s Investment Committee’s rejection of the divestment proposal presented by Sarah Lawrence College Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in mid-November. Occupying students have unfurled a banner renaming Westlands “Dar al-Fayoumi.” The building’s new name is in memory of Wadea al-Fayoumi, a six-year-old boy stabbed to death by his landlord on Oct. 14, 2023, in Plainfield Township, Illinois. SJP had given a proposed deadline for divestment and disclosure to the administrators, which was then passed on to the Board of Trustees, who failed to act on either request.

All students in this piece will be anonymous, whether it is their words or their actions being described. This is done in order to protect Sarah Lawrence’s students from administrative action, which SLC’s SJP have outlined in a recent Instagram post. The SJP posted on their Instagram account, stating in the caption, “SLC admin has threatened the actionists who liberated ‘Westlands’ or DAR AL FAYOUMI, with police brutality, jail time and disciplinary action (revoking scholarships for working class students who can't pay to attend one of the most expensive colleges in the country!)”.

On The Ground

Although rain has continued to coat Sarah Lawrence’s North and South Lawns in mud and muck, the group of SJP protestors stands tall on the concrete deck of Dar al-Fayoumi. For the past 17 hours (as of the publication of this piece), students have been occupying the central administrative building.

At 12:30 p.m., a ring of students surrounded the large wooden doors of the back and front of the building, clad in masks for anonymity as well as preservation of the students that stood inside the building. At North Lawn, within earshot of a small group of students guarding the back door of Dar al-Fayoumi, a student member of SJP announced the group’s demands to the crowd of protestors. The student said that the SJP “have agreed to take down the barricade with written consent from Dave and Campus Security that no Campus Safety officers or administrators will enter the building. We are creating a student space for Palestine and we intend on maintaining it.”

At 1:30 p.m., students entered the building and remained for the next five hours, joining the handful that had been stationed inside since the early morning. Once the crowds entered Dar al-Fayoumi, the Campus Safety officers only allowed a certain number of students within the building at once. Each student was instructed to swipe their ID card upon entry. I had to leave the building to get something from the library, and the guard told me that I may not be able to get back in. His defense was that the building was almost at capacity—he would only be taking 17 more students, bringing the total up to 90. I asked what the building’s maximum occupancy was and he responded that he did not know, that it was only what the “bosses told me.”

Two SLC Campus Safety officers were seen recording the protest outside Dar al-Fayoumi. A student standing behind them noticed that one officer, equipped with a GoPro camera, was zooming into student faces.

Students prepare to enter the Westlands building. Photo: Tallulah Hawley ‘25

Student protesters communicated via text message stating that Campus Safety was not allowing residents of the building to enter from the times of 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. At 12:15 p.m., a student reported that a Campus Safety officer threatened to shove them if they did not get out of their way.

Discussions of various other threats made to student protestors by campus safety officers were overheard in the crowd. These claims included further threats of physical intimidation and a refusal to allow entry to the building’s residents, despite explicit actions taken by SJP organizers in order to ensure that residents are able to enter the building freely without disrupting the protest. Nevertheless, SLC’s Dean of Students Dave Stanfield, was in conversation with student protestors “to ensure that everyone’s rights, responsibilities, and safety are respected,” according to an e-mail sent out by President Judd to all students. At this point in time, administrators have agreed not to re-enter Westlands and allow a student takeover on the condition that the outside barricade be removed. Stanfield has not responded to a request for comment, as of the publication of this piece.

“You see how nice we are to everybody!” one Campus Safety officer was heard telling their partner, laughing. The other officer, in response, laughed so hard that he had to blow his nose.

The seizure of the campus building, which contains the offices of the major college administrators, continued throughout the day. At 5:30 p.m., SJP organizers led the group outside, where they will be spending the night in tents on the North Lawn.

Eyal Yakoby, a non-SLC graduate student with 56.1k followers, posted on X at 10:48 a.m., attaching photos of the occupation during its setup that had previously been posted on the platform by an SLC student. The caption of the post reads, “They [SLC student protesters] are still occupying the building and are barricading the doors and windows with plywood, zip ties, and barbed wire. Demand that they are arrested and expelled.”

Neither zip ties nor barbed wire were used in the occupation. “Arrested and expelled” for what reason? For exercising their First Amendment rights, it appears, just as Yakoby does in his guest appearances on Fox News and interviews for articles by CNN and the Washington Post.

Two members of the community show their support. Photo by Tallulah Hawley ‘25

Meaning in Action

In October, SJP sent the College’s Board of Trustees’ Investment Committee a proposal about divesting from companies that fund the genocide in Gaza. The Board has yet to disclose its full portfolio. In response to the proposal, President Judd sent out an email on November 18th, announcing the creation of a new page on the SLC website that answers questions about the college’s endowment (and essentially rejecting the proposal).

According to the United Nations, peaceful protests include “the right to hold meetings, sit-ins, strikes, rallies, events or protests, both offline and online.” Peaceful protests do not incite violence among participants, nor do they require violent responses. Assemblies like the one currently occurring in Dar al-Fayoumi are protected by human rights organizations, like the U.N. These protests offer alternative avenues for promoting solidarity with and awareness for an ongoing issue, such as the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, especially when those calls for awareness and solidarity (disclosure and divestment) are disregarded by state or university administrations.

Sarah Lawrence’s occupation takes place amid a global shift in how universities treat on-campus, peaceful student protests. UN Rapporteur Gina Romero reports that from 2023-2024, pro-Palestine student protests across the world have faced protest bans, restrictions on rights to assembly and arbitrary arrests. She urges universities to refrain from falsely citing hate speech as a reason for restricting and villainizing peaceful protests.

The actions taken next by the Sarah Lawrence administration will have an impact on international precedents for institutional responses to on-campus peaceful protests. If punitive action is taken against participating student protestors (revocation of financial aid, scholarships and potential expulsion), then Sarah Lawrence will be adding to a global climate that has made peaceful protesting increasingly dangerous to those involved. Making it more difficult to organize peacefully without punishment is a form of censorship.

Whether disapproval of the protestors’ message or concern for campus operations is at the heart of restricting student protests is a moot point. The fact is that the actions that the administrators take to punish and prevent sit-ins silence student voices. For a student body that already does not feel heard by the administration, the next step could mean everything for admin-student relations.

SJP’s divestment proposal can be read here.

Find SJP’s statement on the occupation below:

Gaza Solidarity Protestors Occupy Westlands After Sarah Lawrence Investment Committee Rejects Divestment Proposal

YONKERS, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 21, 2024 - On the 411th day of Israel’s genocidal war on the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen, members of Sarah Lawrence College’s community occupied Westlands and reclaimed it as Dar al-Fayoumi in memory of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoumi, a Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed to death by his landlord in Plainfield Township, Illinois on October 14, 2023.

On October 15, 2024, Sarah Lawrence’s Divestment Coalition of Student Groups submitted a revised version of their February 27, 2024 Proposal for Divestment from Israeli State Violence to the Board of Trustees. The Proposal outlined a timeline for divestment with a November 20th deadline for disclosure of the College’s investment portfolio. On November 18, 2024, President Cristle Collins Judd announced over email that the Board's Investment Committee had "reviewed the proposal and the additional appeal letter submitted on November 16th and affirmed the College’s investment strategy along with its previous conclusion regarding divestment, [sic] and [had] made no recommendations for change." Without consulting the rest of the Board, the students, or anyone who is consistently engaged in our campus community, the Investment Committee chose not to disclose or divest.

By refusing to disclose the contents of their investment portfolio, Sarah Lawrence's leadership has signaled their intention to wait out the will of the student movement and the global solidarity network that steers it. They assume that their complacency is a universal tendency rather than a moral aberration. We know that community members of good conscience cannot accept the Investment Committee's indifference while watching their tax dollars pay for genocide and scholasticide in this American war. The American government is forcing American workers to fund Israel’s campaign of mass murder, manufactured famine, and environmental catastrophe because American companies including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Ford, General Electric, Caterpillar, and Northrop Grumman are profiting from it. We call on the Board to use their power as fiduciaries to do what the average taxpayer cannot. They must ensure that neither the size of our endowment nor the sustainability of our institution is dependent on the profitability of corporations whose very business models necessitate death. The brutality of the Israeli apartheid state has not changed and neither have our demands.

In 1985, the Board of Trustees understood that an institution of progressive learning cannot promote a "framework of humanistic values and concern for community” while financially supporting apartheid. They responded to campus pressure by voting to divest from all companies doing business in South Africa, describing their decision as “a clear and public statement of the College’s opposition to apartheid.” In 2024, the Board of Trustees is choosing willful ignorance about our institutional responsibility to align our investment practices with the values inscribed in our mission statement and taught in our classrooms. The Board has a unique opportunity to continue Sarah Lawrence’s legacy of collaborating with the student body to uphold its core values by privileging solidarity, humanism, and dignity over ignorance, greed, and apathy. We must collaborate to set a precedent for our peer institutions by divesting and, in so doing, collectively signaling to firms like Commonfund that corporate war profiteers are high-risk investments.

The solidarity protestors intend to remain inside Dar al-Fayoumi until Sarah Lawrence's leadership 1) provides tangible evidence of communication with Commonfund and establishes an urgent timeline for disclosure, 2) pledges to protect Arab and Muslim students against harassment, 3) commits to amnesty for all those involved in the occupation, and 4) takes concrete steps to expand student and faculty input into decisions that impact the entire campus. To that end, we assert that this is a conversation between members of the Sarah Lawrence community, and we have chosen not to engage with the media in order to prioritize negotiation and open conversation between students, faculty, staff, and leadership. We will not be making statements to the press apart from this one. Any additional comments made on our behalf do not represent the intentions or views of the solidarity protestors.

This is a family conversation and a student-led movement born of love for the living, grief for the hundreds of thousands dead, and solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon. The gift of their moral clarity and resistance amid the waking nightmare of occupation will never be repaid. Rather than fixating on our minor disruption of day-to-day life on a small campus, we encourage the press to dedicate their time and resources toward reporting on the Israeli campaign to disrupt and end the lives of the men, women, and children of Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran and pressuring U.S. legislators to support an end to the siege on Gaza and an arms embargo now.

Ensuring Student Rights to Protest: SJP’s International Walkout for Divestment and Arms Embargo