Fight against time
Student activists struggle to tie up loose ends.
Almost a decade ago, Northwestern’s Associated Student Government narrowly passed a resolution recommending the University divest from six companies that, according to sponsors, aided Israel in human rights violations against Palestinians.
The decision came after a monthlong campaign by NUDivest, a grassroots student coalition dedicated to advocating for University divestment. Naib Mian (Medill ’17), who was involved in NUDivest, says the school didn’t have a reputation as a “hotbed of activism” until then. But the movement brought together groups from all over NU, including Students for Justice in Palestine, NU’s Black student alliance For Members Only and students organizing for University divestment from fossil fuels.
“You had a sense that people from all across campus, from all across these different struggles, had a shared understanding of the ways in which these struggles were connected,” Mian says.
After the resolution passed, a small group of NUDivest members began negotiations with NU administrators, demanding the establishment of an advisory committee to look into how much the University was investing in the companies named in the resolution. Looking back, Mian says he isn’t sure what became of those efforts.
According to current and former student activists, organizing on campus is precarious by nature. Every time a class graduates, student activists risk losing their relationships, communications and momentum.
From what Mian can recall, after the ASG passed the resolution, communications with University administration fizzled as negotiators left campus. The University benefits from this constant student turnover, he says.
“New people come in — ‘They don’t know shit, and we’re gonna trample over them in the same way’ — and they’ll learn by the time they’re seniors,” Mian says. “And then they’re going to graduate, and the same thing’s going to happen.”
by Joyce Li & Abhi Nimmagadda
Selective memory
Evanston-born Sumun Pendakur (Weinberg ’98) says she remembers always being one of fewer than 35 South Asians — out of over 2,800 students — at Evanston Township High School.
Her time at NU, where she says more than 20% of the student body was Asian, felt like “Mecca.”
“It was very exciting,” Pendakur says. “I threw myself into everything.”
Pendakur took classes in Middle East, West Asian and South Asian history and joined South Asian affinity and advocacy groups. In the spring quarter of her first year, she joined the Asian American Advisory Board, an organization which advocated for the development of an Asian American Studies program at NU.
The group had “a lot of fun,” Pendakur says, recounting how she’d bonded with members through film screenings and trips to Devon for Indian food. But she also witnessed the organization’s extensive planning process as members organized year-round educational and social programming.
The preparations led to AAAB’s 1995 hunger strike, a 23-day long demonstration Pendakur participated spring her first year.
“What an introduction to — even if I didn’t have the language at the time — student mobilizing, student power, taking a stand for something you really believe in,” Pendakur says.
But the struggle did not end there.
The University offered AAAB funding for four courses for the next two academic years. According to 14 East, the group initially rejected the proposal and continued to demonstrate, but when former University President Henry Bienen said he would commit to nothing beyond the four-class proposal, AAAB ended the strike and accepted the offer.
It was not until 1999 that the Asian American Studies Program was established as a Weinberg minor. In 2016, Weinberg accepted a proposal to create an Asian American Studies major. These results came after decades of student advocacy, which continues today as students push for program departmentalization.
Pendakur says people often encapsulate movements into “flashpoint” moments like the hunger strike that don’t capture the full breadth of organizing work.
Kumar, who participated in the pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow in April, says she worries that the five-day demonstration for University divestment from Israel will be remembered the same way.
If the encampment goes down in history as the whole of the movement, it would obscure the organizing that preceded it and ongoing efforts from activist groups, she says.
“Those demands still haven’t been met, and we’re still continuing to find ways to add pressure on the University,” Kumar says. “Students have been organizing for divestment from Israel for so long before the encampment.”
Keeping record
For SESP third-year Anusha Kumar, a member of several campus activist organizations including Fossil Free NU, The Jasmine Collective and Students Organizing for Labor Rights, student turnover continues to be a challenge.
This loss of knowledge is particularly salient for Fossil Free, according to Kumar.
After the University’s Board of Trustees rejected the organization’s 2015 proposal for NU to divest from coal companies, Fossil Free members entered negotiations with the University for more transparency from the Board. Those conversations resulted in the creation of the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility (ACIR), allowing students to provide investment recommendations to the Board.
But in 2019, when Fossil Free presented another proposal for NU to divest from the top 100 fossil fuel companies, the Board rejected it the following year. These defeats exhausted students, Kumar says, leading them to leave the organization sooner. She says these departures created a barrier to obtaining documentation from this period of advocacy.
“They were probably here for like one or two years, got burnt out, got their divestment proposals rejected over and over again, maybe sat on ACIR and felt like this was a waste of their time, and then they leave,” Kumar says. “Then you’re losing that history without it being documented or shared with anybody.”
Today, Kumar says the organizations she’s a part of have made a habit of keeping a record of their communications with University administration.
In September, when the University announced alumni would lose access to their NU Google Drives, Kumar says Fossil Free moved away from using NU emails to store and share the organizations’ past records. “We’re starting to realize that it’s really important to have archives,” Kumar says.
Maintaining hope
Today, organizing at NU looks different from 10 years ago, former student activists say.
Dalia Fuleihan (Weinberg ’15), another NUDivest participant, says more students seem informed about the realities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine now than when she was a student.
“The dominant narrative that people knew was, ‘There’s two sides, they’re in conflict — they can’t get along,’” she says. “But the details about what actually was happening on the ground, or the history behind it, or the ways in which the United States was implicated in that were really not known.”
But student organizers are operating under a more punitive environment today, Fuleihan and Pendakur note. Since the encampment, NU has adjusted its demonstration policy to heavily limit displays and ban overnight protest. Students who violate these regulations face disciplinary consequences from the University.
If these demonstration restrictions had existed in her time, Pendakur does not believe student life at NU for Black and Asian American students would exist as it does today.
Still, Pendakur urges activists to exercise flexibility and steadfastness in the face of setbacks.
She says participants initially felt a sense of “deflation” after the hunger strike.
“We did not walk away with the promise of a program,” Pendakur says. “Once you go to the level of a hunger strike, there’s not a lot more you can do in terms of grand demonstrations.”
But students persisted, she says, demonstrating demand for the program by overfilling all available Asian American studies classes.
Though it can be easy to lose faith when a demonstration or campaign doesn’t achieve its goals, the movement doesn’t have to end there, she adds.
“Do you have a backup plan to keep pushing, even if you get what they think is their best and final offer?” Pendakur asks. “And how do you regroup afterwards to continue to build momentum?”
For Kumar, that long-term plan involves being intentional in equipping younger members with the skills, knowledge and relationships required to lead the organization in the future.
Though the activist groups she is a part of often face challenges, Kumar finds hope in the fact that they’re still active, garnering interest from students year after year.
“No matter what, there will still always be people who care about the issue that you’re looking towards solving, and there will always be at least somebody out there who’s like, ‘I want to be a part of something like this,’” she says.
And for many alumni, activism doesn’t stop after graduation. Those with a background in organizing bring those experiences with them as they join new institutions or companies, Fuleihan says.
Fuleihan, an immigration and refugee lawyer, provides representation to displaced people. Pendakur, now a diversity, equity and inclusion speaker and strategist, has worked with hundreds of institutions to build capacity for racial equity and social justice. Mian, a writer, editor and journalist, has been involved in labor organizing through the New Yorker Union and, currently, Writers Against the War on Gaza.
“Not everybody carries that forward with them, but the hope is that they do,” Fuleihan says. “And then you can kind of build spaces wherever you are.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES