Simmering tensions boiled over Tuesday evening during a student-government meeting at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as several members described being harassed and intimidated by pro-Palestinian activists angry over the assembly’s vote to restore funding to student groups.
Some of those activists offered guarded apologies in response to the backlash, but there was no indication that the student government’s president and vice president, who are at the heart of the dispute, would submit to calls that they resign.
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Simmering tensions boiled over Tuesday evening during a student-government meeting at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as several members described being harassed and intimidated by pro-Palestinian activists angry over the assembly’s vote to restore funding to student groups.
Some of those activists offered guarded apologies for their heated reaction to that vote, but there was no indication that the student government’s president and vice president, who are at the heart of the dispute, would submit to calls that they resign.
The vote to restore funding, on October 8, had been a direct rebuke to the president of the Central Student Government, Alifa Chowdhury, who had carried through on an unusual campaign promise. She and the vice president, Elias Atkinson, were elected along with two dozen other representatives, on a platform called “Shut It Down.” It promised to deny funding to student groups unless and until regents agreed to their demands that they divest the university’s endowment from companies with economic ties to Israel. Similar demands have been at the center of nationwide campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war since last spring.
But divestment was not going to happen, UM regents made clear in a statement last spring. They’ll “continue to shield the endowment from political pressures and base our investment decisions on financial factors such as risk and return,” they said.
Chowdhury went through with her threat to block funding for student groups, which the student government usually distributes from student fees that are collected each year. The university stepped in and provided stopgap funding to groups, but the tensions surrounding the issue at the Ann Arbor campus continued to grow.
On October 8, the student government voted 21-15 in favor of a student petition to resume funding to student organizations after Chowdhury vetoed “multiple proposed budgets.” The petition restored $385,000 to students organizations and immediately made more than $80,000 available to services including a campus food pantry, a sexual-assault prevention program, MCAT and LSAT prep services, and an airport-transportation service.
The university’s flagship campus has more than 1,700 registered student groups, many of which apply for and receive awards averaging around $500 to $700 from student government.
During the October 8 meeting, a second petition that would have allocated $440,000 in student fees to help rebuild Birzeit University in the West Bank failed by a vote of 22 to 16. The money would have gone toward Rebuilding Hope, a Birzeit effort to help restore higher-education efforts that have been destroyed by the war.
After the meeting, protesters who had crowded in to the packed session shouted expletives at student-government representatives over the two votes. Campus security officers escorted a few of the representatives home. The student government’s Instagram account was apparently taken over, blasting a message that called its members “Zionists” and the body “an institutional puppet.” Chowdhury has never directly accepted responsibility for taking over the account, but during Tuesday’s meeting, she apologized for what she called “the Instagram incident” and acknowledged it was “unprofessional.”
More than 40 current and former student-government members signed on to an opinion piece that appeared last week in the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, calling on Chowdhury and Atkinson to resign. Neither responded to several requests for comment from The Chronicle.
Margaret Peterman, a sophomore who serves in student government, was the lead writer on the opinion piece. In an interview last week, she said she decided after the October 8 meeting she could no longer stay silent. “I was concerned about the backlash, but the second that this happened, I wrote the statement and I was like, ‘I’m going to put it out there. I don’t care what happens. I have a voice and I should use it.’” Peterman said she was angry that the administration hadn’t condemned the threats she and others were receiving.
“After the meeting concluded, community members verbally assaulted CSG members as they walked to their vehicles, claiming that representatives would ‘be seeing them after class’ and that they ‘knew where [representatives] lived,’ the piece she co-authored stated. “They also made thinly veiled death threats toward the Assembly members, claiming that their ‘day of atonement [was] near.’ One representative was spat on.”
The opinion piece lays much of the blame at the feet of the student government’s top leaders. “We are disgusted by Chowdhury and Vice President Elias Atkinson’s tacit endorsement of these actions, and we unequivocally condemn their complicity in the violence, intimidation and assault against our peers,” they wrote. “Their inability to protect student representatives, their endorsement of violence and harassment and their misuse of official platforms to spread misinformation are direct violations of their duties and unbecoming of the office of the presidency.”
Tuesday’s emotionally fraught meeting was held on Zoom because of safety concerns. Chowdhury had asked the government body to reconsider its vote to restore funding to student groups, which it did by voting again in favor of it.
The student-government body’s speaker, Mario Thaqi, was among several students who said at Tuesday’s meeting that they had been harassed over their votes by students whom they said Chowdhury and Atkinson had urged to attend the meeting. A post on the “Shut It Down” Instagram page had urged students to pack the October 8 meeting.
“The people Alifa and Eli have more or less invited to the meeting — I’m not really bothered by the profanity and insults they yell at me, since I run the meetings and am the face of the assembly,” Thaqi said. “But it crosses the line when I’m going about my day on campus and people are yelling at me and trying to intimidate me.”
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Thaqi, whose mother is Jordanian and whose grandparents were born in Palestine, said he’s been called “a Zionist, a race traitor, and a bootlicker.” He said he supports the pro-Palestinian cause and participated in campus protests in the spring. “What I disagree with is their methodology of trying to inspire change,” which he said has impeded the work of the student government and antagonized others who might be sympathetic to their cause. In addition to vetoing budgets, Chowdhury, he said, has refused to sign legislation advancing other student priorities.
“I personally think the president and vice president have neglected almost all of their duties of their office and ought to resign to best serve the student body,” he said.
Thaqi said he has met with university administrators connected with the Title IX office who are investigating what led to the confrontations after the October 8 meeting.
We had a chance to do something meaningful and yet we didn’t.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Chowdhury said she had no control over what other student activists did. “It’s important to remember that while CSG normally deals with routine matters like student clubs and student organizations, we are at a moment where what we do here in CSG can ripple far beyond our immediate concerns,” she said.
The morning after the vote, Chowdhury said she received a message from a Birzeit professor asking whether the petition to help fund the rebuilding of his university had passed.
“It was heartbreaking to tell him that it hadn’t. In that moment, acknowledging that we privileged young people chose not to send funds for rebuilding education felt incredibly unjust,” Chowdhury said. “Out of grief, I shared this news online because we had a chance to do something meaningful and yet we didn’t.”
Students, Chowdhury said, are taught that the system works a certain way and there’s nothing they can do to change it. She said her organization, Shut It Down, was formed to challenge “such entrenched beliefs.”
Another representative, Danah Owaida, urged students to consider the context of what happened after the last meeting. “Alifa taking over the Instagram was wrong — 100 percent — and I’ve told them to apologize,” she said. “But we also need to understand that something like that was the result of grief. People make mistakes. They mess up. As long as they apologize” and take steps to make amends, that should be the end of it, she added. The students who lashed out at representatives felt they’d tried every possible method to achieve their goals, Owaida said.
I hope we can find a way despite our differences to work together and not against each other.
Kay Jarvis, a campus spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement that the events surrounding the October 8 vote are “under review.”
“While the university honors student governance and leadership, various administrators are available to provide guidance and support to our student leaders,” she wrote. “Outreach and support has been provided to students who have expressed concerns about what happened and to address ongoing concerns they may have.”
Ira Anjali, a member of one of the pro-Palestinian groups on campus, apologized to the student government for behavior she said was “rude and possibly disrespectful.” She said the meeting on October 8 when the two votes were held was “difficult and hurtful.”
Although she wasn’t able to attend the meeting herself, she said “it was deeply saddening to see the university community being torn apart because of this really important and difficult issue our world is faced with today.”
After reiterating some of the goals of the campus’s pro-Palestinian movement, she said, “I hope we can find a way despite our differences to work together and not against each other.” She urged students to consider why universities like Michigan “exploit students with exorbitant tuition fees all while sitting on endowments that help fund the oppression and ethnic cleansing of people abroad.”
Critics of the student government president are left with a dilemma. Some are quietly urging that they consider impeachment proceedings against Chowdhury and Atkinson, but “that would not be well received on campus,” said one student government member who asked not to be identified.
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“It would make our organization a lot more volatile and we’re already at a boiling point.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, student success, and job training, as well as free speech and other topics in daily news. Follow her @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.