Six students suspended at US college over pro-Palestinian encampment

Amid escalating tensions on the campus of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, six students have been suspended without due process for setting up a pro-Palestinian encampment.

Swarthmore’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said in a statement on Friday that the students were told to evacuate from campus.

Of the six students who were suspended, four were people of color, and three were first-generation, low-income students, the statement said.

“This is part of a disturbing trend of Swarthmore exploiting the vulnerabilities of student protesters on the basis of racialized discrimination,” it added.

The students on interim suspension are banned from attending college events or stepping foot on campus

According to SJP, this is the first time the college has suspended students for protesting since at least the 1960s.

Swarthmore College’s president, Valerie Smith, claimed in a statement on Thursday the suspended students had vandalized campus property.

“Should they continue to fail to disperse and violate the college’s policies and the law, we will have no choice but to escalate our response as we consider all actions to bring the encampment to an end.”

The suspended students had ignored repeated requests to vacate Trotter Lawn, where they erected the camp, Smith said.

On Swarthmore College’s campus, the remaining students and SJP members said that they plan to continue the protest at their encampment.

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“These repudiations are inconsequential when we remember what we are here for: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who have been martyred and displaced yet continue to resist in the face of genocidal violence,” they said.

The college is one of scores of US higher education institutes that are under investigation by the Trump administration for budget cuts for pro-Palestine activism.

Despite the punitive measures applied by the Trump administration, pro-Palestinian protesting students have set up fresh encampments at a number of US colleges and universities this spring in a revival of last year’s pro-Palestinian movement in opposition to the Israeli regime’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Since the launch of the war on October 7, 2023, at least 52,400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and many more injured.

Last month, Yale University witnessed a crackdown on hundreds of student protesters who set up an encampment, leading to the dispersal of the protest within days and the arrest of 44 students, some of whom now face disciplinary action from the university.

Similarly, Tulane University has initiated disciplinary measures, including potential suspension or expulsion, against seven students who attended an off-campus protest in New Orleans, calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian former Columbia University student and protest organizer facing deportation from the United States.

Since January, the Trump administration has been clamping down on students who show support and take part in pro-Palestinian protests.

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