More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard. Asmer Safi, one of the 13 pro-Palestinian student protesters barred from graduating, says that while his future has been thrown into uncertainty while he is on probation, he has no regrets about standing up for Palestinian rights. “This is an ethical stance that we’re taking,” Safi says. We also hear from history professor Alison Frank Johnson, one of over 100 faculty members who voted to confer degrees on the 13 seniors, who describes Harvard’s punishment of them as an “egregious departure from past precedent,” as was the board’s subsequent overruling of faculty. “We hoped then that the Corporation, as it has always done in the past, would accept our recommendations for degree recipients and allow the 13 to graduate, which they chose not to do.”
More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard.
Asmer Safi, one of the 13 pro-Palestinian student protesters barred from graduating, says that while his future has been thrown into uncertainty while he is on probation, he has no regrets about standing up for Palestinian rights.
I’d rather doubt it. They worked really hard to get into and graduate from Harvard, there’s a reason they got into that school. There’s a reason they got a degree there. It was probably their dream. It was an accomplishment they could be proud of, and one they knew that would help further their dreams in the future. To suggest they could just get one anywhere else is dickish.
I’d rather doubt it. They worked really hard to get into and graduate from Harvard, there’s a reason they got into that school. There’s a reason they got a degree there. It was probably their dream. It was an accomplishment they could be proud of, and one they knew that would help further their dreams in the future. To suggest they could just get one anywhere else is dickish.
And after this fiasco I’d wager their feelings have changed.