A Pro-Palestinian Student Activist Tries to Build Bridges

Behind the barricades and bullhorns, it was easy to feel that they were all on the same side.

Anguished over the mounting death toll in Gaza, where many of the University of Michigan students had relatives and friends, Mario Thaqi and Alifa Chowdhury were part of an impassioned pro-Palestinian movement that was channeling its frustration into demands for action.

They couldn’t have predicted that, within a year, their strategies for achieving those goals would diverge so sharply that they would become rivals. One would be elected president of the student government, only to be impeached and replaced by the other.

The story of how Thaqi, a senior, became president of the Ann Arbor flagship’s Central Student Government in December says a lot about how messy and complicated student activism can be when students mobilizing around shared goals disagree about the best ways to achieve them.

Meanwhile, the challenges Thaqi confronts in bringing together a fractured student body echo struggles playing out nationwide on campuses that are more politicized and polarized than ever.

Thaqi’s activism comes from a deep-rooted connection with his Arab-American heritage and his empathy for students who, like himself, come from limited means. His mother is a waitress and his father worked as a cook and as a truck driver before being injured on the job. His maternal grandparents were born in Palestine and then moved to Jordan, where his mother was born.

Growing up in a working-class suburb of Detroit, he was fascinated by other parts of the world, eager to learn more about Yugoslavia, which his father left before getting political asylum here, and Jordan, where Thaqi eventually studied abroad.

“I was kind of a nerdy kid,” he said with a laugh during a 90-minute conversation in a student-government meeting room on the third floor of the Michigan Union. “I memorized all of the countries and capitals and was really interested in American government.” He said he’d watch YouTube videos about far-flung places and try to make sense of his place in the world.

No one in his family had gone to college, but he knew that getting there would give him a better life than the one his parents had led. More than half of the kids in his school, including himself, received free or reduced-price lunches. Most went on to a local community college, if they went to college at all. Thaqi was one of a handful that made it to Michigan.

“I worked my ass off to get here and thought early on I was going to go to law school because my mom told me I was good at arguing,” he said.

He ended up majoring in philosophy, politics, and economics with a minor in Arabic. Arguing, it turned out, wasn’t his only skill. He was also pretty good at smoothing over differences. He learned that the hard way during his stint as speaker of the student government. Frustrated activists had begun splintering amid tough new restrictions on campus protests imposed by Michigan, as by colleges nationwide.

Both he and Chowdhury were angered by the campus police’s forceful crackdown in May on an encampment students had erected to try to pressure regents into divesting from companies with economic ties to Israel. The university’s president, Santa J. Ono, said that the open flames and overloaded power sources at the encampment had made it a safety threat.

But even as the two aspiring student leaders showed up at some of the same campus demonstrations, their strategies for increasing the pressure were miles apart. Thaqi and Chowdhury ran last spring on competing platforms for positions in the student government. Chowdhury, running for president, and Elias Atkinson, for vice president, won on a platform called Shut It Down, which promised to halt student-government activity and funding for other student groups until the regents agreed to divest from any holdings connected to Israel.

About two dozen representatives — nearly half the student government — were elected on the Shut It Down ticket in an election that drew about 20 percent of students.

When Thaqi learned of Chowdhury’s unorthodox tactics, he said he felt conflicted. “I was like, “‘I kind of support what you’re saying but student-org funding though? How is that going to change anything?’” The idea that a board that oversees an $18-billion endowment would change course based on activists’ holding about $1 million in annual student-activity fees hostage seemed, to him, far-fetched. “The only thing you’re giving up,” he thought, “is student sovereignty” over how the money collected from student fees is allocated among hundreds of student clubs and activities.

University regents issued a public statement last spring saying that the university’s investments related to Israel were minuscule and that they weren’t going to divest. Five months later, Chowdhury and Atkinson followed through on their threats. With Chowdhury’s veto of the assembly’s fall budget, the funds that would have gone to programs and services like an engineering competition, an Ultimate Frisbee team, free graduation gowns, and LSAT and MCAT prep materials, were held up.

Thaqi, who led Central Student Government meetings as speaker of the assembly, was among the government leaders who approached campus administrators to arrange stop-gap funding through the dean of students’ office. That frustrated the Shut It Down leaders, who had counted on everyone feeling the sting of budget cuts.

The Shut It Down strategy, Thaqi said, “wasn’t having any effect on administrators or their investment decisions, and it was hurting students on our campus. I thought it was a lose-lose.”

Tensions came to a head on October 8, when the student government voted to restore funding that Chowdhury had blocked with her vetoes. In a second vote, it rejected a Shut It Down proposal to steer $440,000 from student fees to help rebuild universities destroyed in Gaza.

Protesters who had packed the meeting shouted at student-government representatives, followed some out of the meeting, and reportedly shoved one student. Chowdhury reportedly changed the password on the student government’s Instagram page to lock others out while she posted a statement criticizing members for their votes and calling them Zionists.

In the ensuing days, “I was called a whole bunch of things — race traitor, boot licker, a Zionist,” Thaqi said. “The words don’t really affect me but it’s counterproductive for someone who’s so closely invested in this [pro-Palestinian] ideology to be ostracized just because I don’t think attacking student government is the best way to get anything done.”

He said the angry opposition to their vote rattled many of the student-government representatives. “A lot of people aren’t used to people coming in their face and yelling profanities at them, following them around and saying ‘shame on you,’” he said.

The vitriol unleashed by the vote drove a deeper wedge into a campus that was already bitterly divided, Thaqi said. “There are a lot of people on campus — I’d say the silent majority — who support Palestine and a two-state solution or Palestinian liberation or a complete divestment from Israel, but they are immediately ostracized when that support doesn’t come in the same flavor that Shut It Down has been perpetuating,” Thaqi said. “It prevents these people who genuinely care about the Palestinian cause from being able to contribute in a meaningful way.”

Thaqi, who as speaker led student government’s weekly meetings, saw members becoming demoralized. Representatives who came with great ideas, eager to make change, were feeling defeated and dreading meetings, he said. “It’d be like, ‘It’s Tuesday night and we get to hear everyone fight for three hours and we don’t get anything done.’”

The meetings The Chronicle observed, both online and in person, were surprisingly civil, in part because Thaqi insisted that students follow proper protocol in introducing and voting on motions, firmly cutting them off when their time was up. He frequently diffused tension by laughing and joking, appearing relaxed even when tension in the room was palpable.

At one point in discussing the outbursts after the October 8 meeting, Chowdhury, who’d been absent from several other meetings, repeatedly tried to speak out of turn. “This isn’t open-mic night,” Thaqi said before threatening to have the president removed from the meeting if the interruptions continued.

After Chowdhury and Atkinson refused calls to resign, the assembly voted in November to impeach them. After more than 20 hours of testimony in a judicial trial that stretched over four weeks, the two were found guilty of dereliction of duty and removed from office. They were found not guilty of inciting violence — a charge that related to an Instagram post urging activists to “pack” the October 8 meeting.

Chowdhury declined numerous requests for interviews. Atkinson sat down with a reporter in a campus sandwich shop to talk about how the pair had never intended to conduct business as usual. Shutting things down until the university divested was the whole point, he said.

“I understand why people in student government were upset, because this whole time we’d been such a headache for them doing what we were elected to do,” he said. “They wanted to preserve what was essentially a club. I felt like the articles of impeachment were revenge for that.”

The assembly, Atkinson said, “really wanted us out. They got us on the smallest technical rules, but they had to make a big show of it and embarrass us publicly.” (The dereliction-of-duty charge Atkinson was found guilty of stemmed from his failure to hold required meetings.)

“I wish there was more we could have done,” Atkinson said. “We didn’t accomplish what we set out to do, which was divestment, but we expanded the conversation in a creative way.”

In December, with Chowdhury and Atkinson out, the presidency went to Thaqi. “I’m going to be real,” he said. “When I realized I was going to become president, I was scared.”

Over the winter break, he hurriedly began pulling together a cabinet to present to the student-government members for confirmation. Asked whether he felt the weight of responsibility to bring people together, Thaqi answered, “I’ve been telling my CSG colleagues that it’s more than a responsibility. I think it’s our No. 1 priority.” Building camaraderie, he said, is especially challenging on a campus like Ann Arbor, with large numbers of Jewish students, as well as Arab and Muslim students, most with deeply held convictions about the war.

Thaqi is keeping that bigger picture in mind as he contemplates what comes after he graduates in May. He said he hopes to eventually work in diplomacy in some way, possibly in the Middle East.

The consulting gigs and fellowships he’s held during college have given him a head start. He’s also served on the University of Michigan’s President’s Council, acting as a liaison between students and the president.

The best preparation for a diplomatic career, though, may be Thaqi’s tenure in student government, with its minefield of clashing demands and intense political rivalries.

His priorities there, he said, will also include alleviating the financial pressures many Michigan students are facing, by expanding a food pantry and subsidized transportation to help make up for a lack of affordable grocery options near campus. During his first address as president to the Board of Regents in February, Thaqi said students deserved a non-voting seat on the board, which he called the first step in healing.

“This past year has been an undeniably contentious one,” he told the regents. “Despite 2025 being labeled as the university’s year of democracy, civic empowerment, and global engagement, community members have been silenced, peaceful protesters beaten by police, and students, faculty, and administrators targeted by violent, hate-driven attacks. Such hatred and suppression have no place at the University of Michigan, especially on a campus that prides itself on a rich history of student activism.”

Several regents, some of whom had had their houses vandalized or otherwise targeted by protesters angry about the divestment issue, spoke up to thank Thaqi for working with the administration, calling him a “zealous advocate for your constituents” and praising him “for all your hard work and courage in a difficult year.”

Thaqi said he hopes that, in the short time he has as president before graduating, he can set the tone for an assembly that puts the needs of Michigan’s 53,000 undergraduate and graduate students first. Some of the people he works with might be strongly pro-Israel or still resent the role he played in opposing the tactics of the previous president, he said, but they and he “aren’t drawing the lines of Israel-Palestine right now.

“We’re just determining how we can improve the campus climate and make people feel heard.”