Opinion – UGA6: We won’t stop calling out UGA for condoning genocide in Palestine

On the morning of April 29, about 30 students, alumni, and community members gathered on the Old College Front Lawn at the University of Georgia (UGA). We were there to stand in solidarity with those fighting for Palestinian liberation and to call on UGA to disclose its investments in and divest from Israeli apartheid and genocide. At that time, the death toll – which conservative estimates now place above 186,000 – had already surpassed 34,000. To this day, Israel continues to deliberately block humanitarian aid and engage in indiscriminate mass slaughter, recently bombing Palestinians sheltered in so-called humanitarian zones and deploying white phosphorous overpopulated areas in Lebanon. 

On Jan. 17, 2024, the last university left standing in Gaza was leveled by Israel. Eleven days before our demonstration, the United Nations expressed grave concern that Israel was committing scholasticide in Gaza. Scholasticide is the intentional and comprehensive destruction of educational infrastructure. The total number of students and faculty killed by that time translates to roughly one-third of UGA’s undergraduate students and faculty. 

Despite this, UGA administrators have remained silent on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, preferring instead to admonish us for our use of amplified sound and an unrestricted outdoor area of campus, both of which are protected under the First Amendment and the Forum Act of the Georgia Constitution. The standard of disruption UGA used to justify its violent dispersal of our demonstration was lower than that required by the Forum Act to enforce time, manner and place restrictions, rendering the university’s actions unlawful.  

We presented this argument among others in a formal hearing on July 30, which resulted in the two most severe charges against us being dropped. Despite this, the Office of Student Conduct’s panel issued harsher sanctions than we would have received had we pled guilty to all seven of the original charges, amounting to a trial tax. We subsequently appealed the panel’s decision and were denied at three levels of administration within the University System of Georgia (USG): UGA Vice President of Student Affairs Michelle Garfield Cook, UGA President Jere Morehead, and the Board of Regents Office of Legal Affairs. 

But this disregard for due process and freedom of speech should come as no surprise, not when UGA remains undisturbed by its complicity in the massacre of Palestinians with American-made bombs dropped from F-35 fighter jets — jets Lockheed Martin, UGA’s corporate partner, manufactures. As students at UGA, the first state-funded public university in the United States, we believe we not only have the right but also the responsibility to advocate for all those who do not have the same educational privileges as we do, even those thousands of miles away. 

Since suspending and barring us from campus without notice, UGA administrators have repeatedly maligned us in public statements, presuming our guilt and claiming that we “chose to be arrested,” as if we left them with no other choice. But they did have a choice, and they chose violence — just as the institution chose violence when it displaced the Black neighborhood of Linnentown and, decades later, the remains of the formerly enslaved people buried beneath Baldwin Hall. And with the recent success of UGA football, the onslaught of student housing developments and short-term rentals is fueling a housing crisis for longtime locals, especially in the historically Black neighborhoods near Sanford Stadium. While Coach Kirby Smart makes $13.28 million a year, over a quarter of Athens-Clarke County residents continue to live in poverty.  

Additionally, the university has acted to shield the Atlanta Police Foundation, the architect of Cop City, from public scrutiny. Not only is Cop City reminiscent of Israel’s “Little Gaza” — a replica of a Palestinian village used to rehearse genocide — but Georgia police train with Israeli Occupation Forces through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE). Daniel Silk, current Associate Vice President for Public Safety at UGA and former UGA police chief, participated in GILEE as recently as 2015. Sonny Perdue, the current chancellor of the USG, is an ardent supporter. 

UGA’s refusal to disclose and divest should come as no surprise; clearly, the institution continues to benefit from the very same systems of oppression operable in Israel’s decades-long siege on Palestine. Yet, administrators at every level have condescended to us about the need to “face the consequences” of our actions, failing to recognize the obvious: that disruption and resistance against occupation, genocide and oppression in all its many forms is a moral imperative. 

To UGA, we ask: What about facing the consequences of discrimination and differential treatment, of First Amendment and due process violations; of land theft and the desecration of human remains; of ongoing gentrification, displacement and neglect; of complicity in apartheid and genocide? On each of these counts, UGA remains cowardly and shamefully silent. 

The Title VI complaint filed against UGA on Sept. 9 is but a first step towards forcing the university to take accountability, and it will certainly not be the last. The differential treatment we faced at the hands of UGA administrators demonstrates a disturbing pattern of selective enforcement intended to quell pro-Palestinian activism on campus, coercing students into silence and resulting in its designation as an “institution of particular concern” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Yet, for all its attempts at intimidation, repression and retaliation, the university will not have the final word. No one is free until Palestine is free, until oppressed and colonized people the world over are liberated.