After 13 days of sitting in at College Hall, 50 members of Smith College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine announced Tuesday they will leave the building and move their sit-in to the nearby Seelye Lawn, where they said they will be intensifying their activism.
“Seelye Lawn will become a site that nurtures the same crackling energy as our College Hall sit-in,” the group said in a press conference where several speakers declined to give their names. “This sit-in has ignited a fire in the community, but a single building is too insular, too inaccessible, and not visible enough to hold the passion that we saw spreading through the community around us.”
As the 50 students remain in active negotiation with the Smith College administration, they have relied heavily on close friends and the generosity of the community, who have sustained a presence outside the building 24 hours a day for nearly two weeks.
Beginning on March 27, after the college’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility rejected a proposal SJP delivered to the Board of Trustees in December demanding divestment from war-profiteering and weapons-manufacturing companies, 300 students walked out of their classes and the sit-in was born.
On the spur of the moment, many of the occupants decided to remain. In the nearly two weeks since, they have met for negotiations with Smith College President Sarah Willie-LeBreton, the Board of Trustees, and the board’s ACIR.
According to ACIR, “the endowment’s investment in military contractors and weapons manufacturers is negligible.” In a later campus-wide email, Willie-LeBreton said less than 1% of Smith’s endowment is invested in weapons manufacturers — a figure which could refer to up to $27 million of the college’s $2.5 billion endowment. In 1986, Smith committed to divest $39 million connected to apartheid in South Africa in two years, which at the time made up approximately 17% of their total endowment.
“It felt like the right time,” junior history major Sophia Haydon-Khan told The Shoestring, standing on a chair to speak through a dingy basement window. “I’m overwhelmed and inspired,” she said, of the community’s passion for their demands. “This sit-in has completely changed everything.”
Smith SJP’s divestment petition has gathered more than 2,143 signatures since April 1, and calls for “complete divestment from aerospace and defense companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L3Harris, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Hexcel, and Northrop Grumman.”
“The current system of power is untethered to the majority of the Smith community and misrepresents the student body’s evolving values,” SJP said in an April 2 email to the Board of Trustees published on Instagram. “We call on you to uphold these values at the institutional level.”
According to multiple SJP sources, on the first day of the sit-in, a college official closed College Hall ahead of schedule and physically confronted a student, accompanied by two campus security officers. In the following days, Smith administration hired private security personnel from Green Mountain Concert Services to patrol and surveil the students, and five legal observers with the National Lawyers Guild, like NLG lawyer Elliot Oberholtzer, set up their own patrols.
On Sunday, April 7, Smith SJP met with members of the Board of Trustees and the ACIR. Organizers have said that while legal consequences remain possible, they seem increasingly unlikely; the administration is now taking the students and their demands seriously, they said, and the group is optimistic.
In addition to total divestment from war profiteers on a clear timeline, Smith SJP’s demands include an “emergency town hall-style meeting” with three trustees and a panel of professors, students, and alumni. They have also called for a disciplinary process for the occupants that includes decision-making power for students and professors, guarantees equal application of consequences, acknowledges racial and socioeconomic disparity, and does not “prohibit access to educational knowledge.”
Community support
Reminiscent of the Occupy Movement, the yard of College Hall has been the site of an impressive production of events and activities facilitated by community members, students, faculty, and alumni. Each day opens with a rally at 11:45 a.m., followed by activities such as lessons in the traditional Palestinian dance Dabke, open mics, concerts and art workshops, alongside other events.
Events have included a two-day teach-in with 11 university professors, “Classrooms on the Pavement,” including author, journalist and historian Vijay Prashad; Jewish-American activist Dori Midnight’s amulet-making workshop rooted in “Jewish traditions of community care;” a cardboard workshop led by activist Eli Nixon, who canceled a scheduled event at Smith to instead join the protest;, and a “Vigil for the Martyrs” that filled the yard with over 200 people from across the Connecticut River Valley.
Priya Dalal-Whelan, a junior computer science student and College Hall occupant, said the community attendance and organizing efforts behind the events, rallies, and teach-ins have been restoring her faith in others.
“Even when the weather sucks, even under threat of arrest, people are still there,” she said. “People are willing to sacrifice.”
Several Smith students pitched tents around College Hall, where they’ve been sleeping for days in freezing temperatures.
On April 2, in the sleeting rain, a local resident appeared unexpectedly with a bag full of brand-new blankets and a dozen rechargeable hand-warmers. The gifts were added to the growing collection of snacks, COVID tests, hygiene products, noise makers, megaphones, and various other donations, stacked underneath the tarp-walled canopy, where several SJP members and supporters huddled on their “shifts.”
A professor from Bard College recorded a message from 2024 presidential Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the occupants of College Hall, which trickled to the “insiders” through various Signal channels.
“It’s incumbent on all of us to do whatever we can to shut down this genocide,” Stein said. “Thank you for being the best of us.”
Code Pink and Demilitarize Western Mass came together to purchase 20 pizzas, and Pizza Amore refused to accept a tip, to support the students.
A glimpse inside College Hall
For the past 12 days, the occupants of College Hall have not been idle. Meeting for six hours a day on top of their coursework, students have worked on administrative negotiations, community updates via Instagram, and the immense logistics of their encampment.
Living inside an administration building with 50 people for two weeks is no small feat. Delal-Whelan said she was motivated to sit-in because “what’s happening in Palestine is beyond what we can allow . . . We can’t sit around and go about our regular lives.”
Despite navigating a new reality of air mattresses crammed into nooks and crannies, limited privacy and cooking noodles in water kettles, occupants have made it work. Original political art and poetry line the walls, alongside a collectively curated set of community guidelines and a table overflowing with food donations. The group donated extra food to the Manna Soup Kitchen and Touch The Sky community hub in Northampton.
“Mutual aid has been essential to our occupation at College Hall,” students said at the April 9 press conference. “To us, any amount of money or material resources that could contribute to the safety, security, and prosperity of human life will never be negligible.”
“I feel really deeply connected with every person in here,” Haydon-Khan said of the cohort inside College Hall. “It’s given me a real life example of what’s possible . . . when people come together to really genuinely care about each other.”
Smith SJP has a non-hierarchical leadership structure, a heavy reliance on working groups, and dedication to full consensus. Meetings run long, but “we have all collectively decided that it’s worth it,” Haydon-Khan said. She noted a big energetic shift by day seven, from a “go-go-go” urgency to a more intentional, human needs-centered approach.
Haydon-Khan said the group has worked hard to develop strong communication and conflict management strategies. Recognizing the need for movement in the cramped space, the group also said they are carving out time for art, relaxation, and pre-meeting somatic movement and yoga.
Several occupants said they have witnessed a surge in the community’s capacity to learn about and care for one another, and said that the movement to free Palestine offers everyone an opportunity to learn new ways to liberate themselves and each other.
“We have the power to shape the institutions that are guiding our lives,” Delal-Whelan said. “We can and should disrupt things when they’re wrong. We all have a stake in this.”
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Story Young is an independent reporter, florist, and gardener based in western Massachusetts, studying journalism and social thought & political economy at UMass Amherst. They can be reached at stoyoung@umass.edu
