Letter to the Editor: Reed SJP Statement on Recent Communications from Admin

On October 2nd, admin sent out an email titled “Connection and Community During Times of Tension” via the Presidential Council on Campus Climate. There were many objectionable aspects to this email, such as the use of passive voice in the phrase “Palestinian lives have been lost in Gaza,” and the rewriting of history in the claim that President Bilger has “continued to articulate [her horror] that innocent people and their families are being killed.” (When pushed to condemn the genocide of Palestinians, President Bilger told SJP members that she would “not issue an additional statement about the violence in Gaza and Israel”). However, we would specifically like to highlight our objections to the section of this email where admin referenced programs that they are facilitating around “dialogue and free speech.” 

For context, administration first came up with the idea of “free speech” programming in response to a protest on April 19th of last year, in which Reed students marched around campus

and encouraged their peers to walk out of classes to protest for divestment. Admin swiftly threatened anyone who participated in this protest with disciplinary action, falsely suggested that protesters were targeting specific classes based on the identity of students in those classes, and encouraged faculty and students to engage in McCarthyism-style reporting of student protesters to the vice president and dean for institutional diversity. Finally, they ironically put forth a plan to offer “structured, ongoing, and facilitated opportunities to engage in dialoguing across difference” and a “lecture series on free speech” in Fall 2024, while demonizing student dissent. 

Through this “free speech” programming, admin hopes to reposition themselves as both proponents of dialogue on campus and the ultimate authority on free speech, in order to delegitimize the ways that students have been modeling free speech and dialogue for an entire year of accelerated genocide, through public teach-ins, movie screenings, protests, and vigils.

They will likely use these talks to continue characterizing the student body as “well-intentioned but misguided.” Admin has employed this tactic of feigning sympathy for student activism, while tone-policing any attempts that students make at pushing for progress, in the past. Two years ago, admin hosted a "community conversation" on professor Paul Currie's outrageous display of racism and xenophobia, and positioned their single, institutionally-sanctioned event as the official platform for discussing the topic, despite over a month of student-led organizing and conversations on xenophobia and racism at Reed that they had refused to engage with. Predictably, they tiptoed around the issues at this event and didn’t take any sort of responsibility for their failures. 

Admin’s “free speech” talks have already been pushed back until Fall 2025, when many of us will have graduated. These talks are simply a box to check off, which provides them with cover for all the ways that they’ve violated students’ rights to dissent on our campus over the past year. 

As evidence of the anticipated tone of these “free speech” talks, one of the speakers named in the series is Danielle Allen. Allen has previously equated the use of popular Palestinian slogans to “chanting ‘White power,’” completely denying Palestinians any agency in politically expressing themselves or articulating their own historical narrative. She has argued that it is necessary to “protect the classroom from protest” and “correct” the pro-Palestinian views that she personally disagrees with, similarly to how “[professors] correct students’ math.” Clearly, Allen is interested in containing and defanging student movements. This begs the obvious question: why does Reed admin see her alarming vision of censorship and repression as the ideal approach for sparking productive dialogue, which is their purported goal with these lectures? Finally, Allen has asserted that anti-racism frameworks are the underlying problem causing

current tensions on college campuses around Israel’s genocide because they lead to a “shaming culture,” which is “focused on accusation.” Essentially, Danielle Allen shares Reed College admin’s views that directly naming structural oppression is inflammatory because it requires placing blame. 

The Presidential Council on Campus Climate sent out their second email titled “Reminder of Our Community Values” on October 11th. This email was prompted by the October 5th destruction of our memorial, honoring Palestinian and Lebanese martyrs killed in a year of US/Israel genocide, as well as our subsequent bias reports about this act of hate. For those who are not aware of this incident, at around 3pm the day after our vigil, we discovered that a zionist on this campus had thrown our entire memorial, including flowers, candles, donation QR codes, zines, and a solidarity banner, in the trash. We were unable to recover one artifact– a handwritten copy of Rasha’s will. Rasha was a young girl in Gaza who was killed alongside her brother Ahmad by the Israeli Occupation Forces. She was forced to write a will in anticipation of her own death at only 10 years old. This is not the first or even the second time that zionists have destroyed our memorials on campus, consistently robbing Palestinian and Lebanese students of the ability to grieve. The PCCC’s email omits all of these crucial details. It fails to mention what “posters and artifacts” were destroyed and why these items were significant, neglects to acknowledge a history of our memorials being defaced, and even entirely erases the Lebanese people we were honoring and fundraising for at this vigil. Despicably, the PCCC’s email contextualizes this destruction within “an ongoing pattern of poster vandalization and removal,” rather than a pattern of rampant Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism on this campus and in our world. Grouping an act of hate in with “poster removal” effectively waters down the impact of this incident. Posters are constantly taken down on campus for a variety of

reasons. That is distinctly different from the intimidation of denying a group of people the ability to grieve, a deeply personal process that is inherently connected to their lived experiences and identities. 

In conclusion, we encourage the student body to continue loudly expressing their dissent against Reed’s financial investments in atrocities and to not fall for admin’s silencing tactics! The racism and Islamophobia on this campus, and the injustices in our world at large, demand action. To learn more about our demands for the college, visit the QR code or link below. 

Sincerely, 

Reed Students for Justice in Palestine