Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

The past few weeks have been a reckoning for college campuses all across the United States. On April 17, Columbia University students set up the first-ever Gaza Solidarity Encampment, demanding that the university divest from Israel and arms manufacturers that have perpetuated the ongoing genocide in Palestine, as well as other conflicts and humanitarian crises around the world.

Since then, student encampments have been set up at more than 120 colleges, including Syracuse University on April 29. Despite 99% of protests being peaceful, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, protests have often resulted in brutality and violence with police and pro-Israel protestors. It has also caused many administrations to change or cancel their commencements altogether. It has made it impossible for students to transfer their advocacy from the college environment into the real world without repercussions.

And still, thousands keep returning and showing up to fight for innocent Palestinian lives, including Palestinian college students who can no longer attend school, defend their theses or graduate, because the Israel Defense Forces bombed all universities in Gaza.

As I witness these encampments, I can’t help but think about how often students have protested against a controversial issue that has torn apart the nation. How often they were met with police and military resistance. How, every time, they ended up being right. Protesting genocide in Palestine shouldn’t surprise or scare people when protest has historically been a crucial aspect of student advocacy against segregation, apartheid, educational inequality, the Vietnam War, the War in Afghanistan, police brutality and gun violence, just to name a few.

Then and now, we as students have become this country’s moral compass. Maybe it’s because of our age and our inherent idealization, motivation and ability to organize. Maybe it’s because we are the least likely to be afraid and stay silent when we see something wrong and know, without a doubt, what it means to be on the right side of history.

Over the years, I’ve realized that it’s easy to remain this hopeful when we’re young and in solidarity with like-minded people who are also pursuing a path of knowledge. We don’t yet believe that we know everything because we’re always learning something new, expanding on what we already know and holding each other accountable every day in class. We do, however, believe wholeheartedly that we can change the world.

But, I’m learning that what’s hard is not necessarily changing the world we live in. Rather, it’s holding on to that spirit of advocacy and social responsibility post-graduation and bringing it into our workplaces, homes and communities. However, there are a whole host of problems we will face as working adults such as inadequate pay, lack of benefits, union busting, rising student debt and more.

Cole Ross | Digital Design Director

Unfortunately, we don’t have to look far to see how some of us lose that as we age. My father, for example, was a passionate student activist in the 1990s, attending protests and organizing with his peers both before and after he immigrated to the U.S. After years of being undocumented and without money or work, he’s managed to stay generous, remembering what it’s like to have nothing. Nonetheless, he has adopted a capitalist mindset that has all but reduced his activism to donations without other actionable steps.

Even celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson, who once held Martin Luther King Jr.’s father hostage during his time at Morehouse College, have become no more than endorsements for banks and symbols of excess wealth and privilege.

When we lose our college community, it’s easy to get caught up in what we’re supposed to attain in adulthood, like a house, mortgage, money and children. It’s even easier to separate ourselves from outside problems that don’t seem to affect us, both domestic and global, and settle for the world just as it is, but somehow worse than the one we initially inherited. But all we will manage to do is mistake stability for complacency.

Of course, this doesn’t happen to everyone. There are plenty of adults and elders who have made advocacy and activism their life’s work and who we can continue to learn from. But, what is it worth to carry values of ethicality and morality as students if we don’t also bring those into the next chapter of our lives, even in a small way? If we don’t create a better world for the next generation than the one our parents left behind for us?

It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to give up fighting or reserve our social justice activism to the college campus just because we’re graduating.

Especially with the development of social media, we know, arguably better than any other generation before us, how to organize a community, how to protect one another, how to form a blockade. We know how to heal injuries from police-inflicted tear gas and rubber bullets, how to share resources, how to disrupt a system and how to speak to the media. We know how to lead and participate in an open discussion of ideas, disagree respectfully and call one another in. We know how to advocate for what we want.

We alone are responsible for bringing the skills we’ve learned at SU into the future and taking our college education off-campus. Let graduation not be the end of our advocacy but rather only the beginning.

Sofia Aguilar is a first-year grad student in the Library and Information Science program. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at saguil07@syr.edu.

Published on May 9, 2024 at 1:45 am