'Being the students Bowdoin wants us to be': Organizers reflect on Palestine encampment
Feb. 18—A five-day pro-Palestine encampment at Bowdoin College in Brunswick concluded when student organizers reached an "understanding" with the administration.
Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine didn't get exactly what they wanted: for the college to take action on a popular student referendum calling on the school to condemn Israel's actions in Gaza and not make future investments in weapons manufacturers.
But organizers say administrators did suggest they would go easy on students in disciplinary proceedings (a spokesperson for Bowdoin has not responded to emails asking to confirm this). Eight students were suspended when the protest ended Feb. 10 after the administration had increasingly warned that the protest was disruptive to normal activities and that the students broke community guidelines.
Since then, many organizers, faculty and alumni have agreed that the students who engaged in the protest used the values Bowdoin gave them to speak out for a cause they care about — even amid worries about retaliation from the new presidential administration. And on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., students organized a walkout in a show of support for the eight students still facing suspension.
'THE COMMON GOOD'
Olivia Kenney, 22, a senior from Upstate New York studying religion and Arabic, said she chose Bowdoin because of its advertised values, including a commitment to "The Common Good." That's the idea, presented in 1802 by Bowdoin President Joseph McKeen, that graduates are obligated to use their knowledge for the benefit of society.
Kenney is one of eight students indefinitely suspended from campus. She cannot attend classes or access her dorm.
"It is the courses I have taken at Bowdoin which have given me the political and moral grounding that has revealed to me the hypocrisy of the college," Kenney said. "And those are the same classes that I am barred from attending now."
Asher Nathaniel Feiles, a 19-year-old biology student from Los Angeles who is also suspended, cited another seminal Bowdoin document as a guiding value of protestors: the 1906 poem "The Offer of the College."
"To gain a standard for the appreciation of others' work, and the criticism of your own," Feiles read from the poem. "Being able to admit that something is wrong and then work to change that, I think, is the core value of a Bowdoin student. And I think that our actions in the camp did. I think we were being students that Bowdoin wants us to be, even if they didn't react that way."
Kenney described the encampment and protest as a last-resort approach. About 70% of students voted to pass the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum last spring with four demands, including an institutional statement, and calls for trustees to disclose investments in arms manufacturers and not make investments in specific weapons makers moving forward.
The referendum came eight months after the start of Israel's war in Gaza in October 2023 that has resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 Israelis and 46,000 Palestinians, and is currently in a fragile ceasefire.
In response, Bowdoin President Safa Zaki said the college would not make an institutional statement about Gaza and suggested that the board of trustees could hear from students about potential divestment options.
Feiles said they got involved in SJP in response to the bombing of schools and hospitals in Gaza.
"I've always been of the mind that if a group says that it represents you, and then acts in a way that is not representative of you, you have not just a right but a responsibility to question them and criticize them on that," said Feiles, who is Jewish and whose family is from Israel. "The only way to love a place and be able to support it is by questioning the wrongdoings. I think that's also true of Bowdoin."
Students launched the encampment about nine months after the referendum passed, coinciding with a trustee meeting and recent comments from President Donald Trump about plans to "take over" Gaza. By the end of the first night, college security were collecting student ID numbers and threatening disciplinary action, according to reporting from Bowdoin's student newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient.
College officials declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement following the protest, a spokesperson said "the demonstration repeatedly violated policies within Bowdoin's Code of Community Standards," although they did not point to specifics.
The letters of suspension cited a college policy on "Temporary Administrative Measures," which allows the dean for student affairs to implement suspensions if they believe that the "continued presence of a student is contrary to the best interests of the campus environment, or if the suspected behavior of a student seriously jeopardizes the safety and/or welfare of the campus environment."
Kenney doesn't believe the protestors broke any rules with their initial action; she said Smith Union is a building with 24/7 access and an open flow of students and outside community members. It was college security staff who locked the doors, making the building inaccessible to other students, she said, and the goalposts seemed to change as the college became more set on discipline.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
A group called Bowdoin Alumni for Justice In Palestine is supporting student protestors by withholding donations from the college and boycotting college events, like reunions.
The group also circulated a petition which invokes the college's history of protest actions around the Vietnam War and divestment from Apartheid South Africa, and the values of "The Common Good." The petition had over 550 signatures as of Tuesday. Many signatories are recent alums, although signers date back as early as the class of 1965.
Cecily Upton graduated from Bowdoin in 2003, and said her education plays a major role in her own way of thinking about justice around the world.
"This phrase, 'the Common Good,' is a huge part of being a student at Bowdoin," Upton said. "And that phrase, I think, in light of what's happened recently, felt ignored by the administration. What the student activists were engaging with on campus was, in my mind, such a beautiful and very poignant and very real example of working for the common good."
Upton said she has a high regard for the college and has found it to be a thoughtful institution when it comes to politics, inclusion and identity. But she was saddened by the school's response to student protestors.
"It's a challenging situation for sure, but to see that when the rubber hits the road, those values were not necessarily at the forefront of decision making when it came to the administration, felt bad," she said.
More than 80 Bowdoin faculty members signed on to a letter last year in support of the referendum, and in a statement Friday, three professors defended the encampment on behalf of the group Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
The statement backs students for acting in "principled conviction," rejects the administration's assertions that protestors broke community guidelines and calls for disciplinary amnesty for those students.
"We reject the notion that the students created an environment that was "intimidating," "hostile" or "unsafe." These are unfounded allegations," they wrote and again called on the college to take action on the referendum.
FEDERAL PRESSURE
Bowdoin students billed their encampment as the first of the new Trump era. The president issued dozens of executive orders in his first weeks in office, including one that targets campus protestors. The order asks colleges to monitor and report on non-citizen student protestors, and threatens to deport pro-Palestine student protestors with foreign visas.
"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you," a White House statement on the order reads. "I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before."
Many private college presidents faced intense scrutiny during the last school year over their reaction to pro-Palestine protestors, and were called in front of Congress and pressed by conservative lawmakers who said they needed to do more to combat antisemitism. Three Ivy League presidents resigned over the issue.
A Bowdoin spokesperson did not respond to an interview request to discuss whether the order affected the college's reaction to the protest.
Kenney, the Bowdoin senior, characterized the college's response as "pre-anticipatory obedience" to the Trump administration.
"I do believe that the college is concerned about how the Trump administration will react to colleges that have demonstrated any form of sympathy to Palestine protestors, but what they're doing, really, is ceding to fascism before the true consequences of fascism have even descended upon them."
The Bowdoin encampment ended around 6 p.m. last Monday night. As students rallied outside, Kenney said administrators had a more thoughtful conversation with the encamped students, which made them feel like productive talks might be on the horizon. That included a visit from Zaki to the encampment, according to Feiles.
Eight students remain suspended, but Kenney said about 50 are facing some sort of disciplinary process, and the college still hasn't made any commitments to the referendum. But Kenney said many things about the protest, including non-student community turnout, still felt like a success.
"There was this collective realization of what we all need to be willing to do to work toward the world that we all claim to stand for," she said. "And this was shown not only by Bowdoin students, but by many members of the Maine community."
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