Solidarity with Palestine: Small-Scale Organizing in Built Environments
By: The Nightly Crew
“The heaviest part has been the silence. There’s all these atrocities against Palestinian people and our university is complacent. We haven’t even felt supported, it’s just business as usual.” - a student with CBE for Palestine told the Nightly.
Throughout the last few months, the University of Washington has remained complacent in the escalation of the 75 year long Zionist occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people. To counter the University, a united front for Palestine is growing stronger around their demands. They demand materially divesting from Israel, ending the repression of pro-Palestinian students and faculty, and cutting ties with weapons manufacturer Boeing. The student uprising culminated in a historic sit-in at the end of Fall quarter and continues to escalate this quarter. Despite overwhelming student outrage, the university continues to profess support for the genocide.
We wanted to follow the student movement on a localized level to see how students are fighting back within their colleges. So we went to the College of the Built Environment (CBE) and sat down with CBE for Palestine as well as other students to learn more.
Built Environment's Complacent Administration
On October 14th, Dean of the College of Built Environments, Renée Cheng sent the first of a string of major-wide emails affirming President Cauce’s previous endangering statement. These emails, described by students as ‘milquetoast,’ affirmed Cauce’s statements using broader appeal and meaningless platitudes. Since then, Cheng has sent follow up emails, sticking with many of the mediocrities of the first and with notably more platitudes and ‘social justice language’ than the first.
According to Ash, a student in CBE for Palestine, this second email was likely sent to “preempt student efforts to promote a stronger statement.” Ash continued, "We don't need platitudes. We are instead calling on Dean Cheng to protect students from repression for their support of Palestine.”
Ash is referring to the increased harassment of pro-Palestinian students nation-wide. This harassment has had serious impacts on students and their lives with several examples of students being physically attacked, doxed, or killed. Instead of protection and support for students amid this increased harassment, UW and CBE administration remain complacent and unwilling to take a side.
It should be noted that an unwillingness to take a side in the face of genocide, settler colonialism, and imperialism is itself a form of supporting genocide, settler colonialism, and imperialism. This is why the ‘I see both sides’ stance that UW is taking is inherently harmful.
A Professor’s Harmful Rant
Dean Cheng’s statements have given space for further complacency and misconduct throughout the college. An anonymous student came to The Nightly with concerns about the misconduct of a CBE professor on December 8th, the day after students took Gerberding Hall. The professor, Christopher Campbell, went on a harmful rant towards a class of students in the Community, Environment, and Planning major. This was sparked after the student-run major’s Instagram allegedly reposted a SUPER UW post the day before.
Campbell’s rant included familiar neoliberal talking points and rhetorical strategies. The unnamed student recalled Campbell saying that “the history of Jews in the Middle East is longer than the history of Muslims in the Middle East,” then using that point to justify comparing the popular chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” to antisemitism. When a student pushed back asking why Campbell had only brought up one side and why he didn’t bring up the Muslim and Arab students who are facing a rise in hate, he changed the topic. ‘UW does not choose a side and does not condone any of this,’ Campbell reiterated.
Perhaps the most insulting part was the multiple demeaning remarks about the students’ intelligence and intentionality. “He was talking down on us like we didn’t understand anything,” the unnamed student told The Nightly.
When asked what accountability for Campbell could look like, the student closed: “I know a lot of students that felt uncomfortable during that whole thing and probably wanted to speak up and voice their opposition to what he was saying. But Campbell is such a dominant figure in our program, to even say something like that to him is very hard. Because he has a lot of clout, it doesn’t feel equal. Accountability would be a space or time where it doesn’t feel like there’s repercussions for voicing our opinions, if that is even possible.”
To students, Campbell’s rant echoed the college’s complacency. “It was giving, ‘I’m not choosing a side.’ But you so are!” the unnamed student told us at the end of our interview.
The Nightly has confirmed that multiple similar instances with other professors and individuals within the College of the Built Environment have occurred. However, due to privacy concerns, we will not dive deeper into them.
Building Student Power in an Open Letter
Over the last three months, students in the college have been building pressure against the administration and working to fight back against the culture of complacency. “We’re trying to challenge what the dean sees as her responsibility. We believe it is the responsibility of those in positions of power to take a stand against injustices and that it would be very powerful if our college condemned the university’s endangering statements” - Ash from CBE For Palestine told The Nightly.”
As a part of this, CBE for Palestine wrote an open letter to the dean. A combination of over a hundred CBE students, staff, faculty, and alumni signed on to the letter, in an overwhelming show of solidarity.
“[We] do not support Dean Cheng’s claim that our college stands behind President Cauce’s October 9th statement, which sent the message that our University of Washington community supports Israel’s war crimes and is opposed to the Palestinian people’s liberation and just demand for an end to over 75 years of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide,” CBE for Palestine wrote in the open letter.
The letter went on to condemn Dean Cheng’s neutrality and lack of action to support the CBE community, demanded that the dean hold the university accountable for its complicity in genocide and amplify direct action.
Political Education and the Future
A substantial part of CBE For Palestine’s efforts and values have centered around political education. “We are working towards cultivating a political consensus within the college,” Ash told the Nightly. Ash asserted that students see “value in raising awareness around how the discipline of the built environment connects to environmental injustice and apartheid, which are clearly on display in Palestine.”
From our interview with members of CBE For Palestine, we gathered that there was an emphasis on political education with the express purpose of supporting the larger campus-wide united front. Ash described it as a “balance between being engaged at the college versus the university level.”
For now, the prolonged future of CBE For Palestine remains a mystery. However, the students in CBE that we talked to made it clear that the community will continue the fight and build political consciousness among their peers.
Takeaways and Parallels
We started this article because what is going on in the College of Built Environment is not unique. Similar struggles are occurring all over campus in every department, building, and classroom. These struggles echo the reality of the university’s place in the imperial core and the dissidence that comes with that. Here, students and workers find the systems around them funneling their labor into the war machine to build the computers, drones, and tanks being used by colonial forces.
As long as colonial occupations continue to exist, it will be incredibly potent to identify and fight back against the complacency around us. As students, workers, and faculty at UW, we should bring the fight to our individual colleges and workplaces, organize to cultivate political consciousness, and support the people around us in rising up.
We thought we’d end this article with a few quotes from members of the built environment community.
“The continuing silence and lack of support for students who are grieving is the most clear indicator that justice is placed on hold when it is not ‘popular.’" - Current CBE Staff
"I am angry, depressed, and at a loss at the lack of support and action from CBE, the dean, and the world. I will always be Free Palestine. It is difficult to function as a student and as a person with genocide happening in the world while being surrounded by complicity." - Current CBE Student
“The actions of Israel do not represent the Jewish people or my Jewish family. Call for a ceasefire! This is harming present and future generations, locking us into cycles of violence, land theft, and ecocide. CBE should be able to see this and act accordingly. This is about justice, equity, sustainability, resilience, complex systems, and decolonization: words I now realize have been too flippantly used by the CBE (for self gain rather than actual conviction?). Act now, don’t just stand by and passively advocate death because it’s most convenient. That’s not who should be designing our future.” - CBE Alumnus and Continued Community Member
Quotes provided by CBE For Palestine.
Published 1-16-24
