The Stanford University student senate recently debated a resolution calling on the university “to divest from companies violating human rights in occupied Palestine.” After rejecting the resolution in an initial vote, the senate reconvened and passed it. (The university’s trustees chose to ignore the resolution.) Subsequently, a Jewish candidate for the student senate was reportedly questioned about how her Jewish identity might influence her perspective on the issue of divestment. Miriam Pollock describes the bizarre campus political dynamic that led to the resolution being considered in the first place, the session of the senate in which the resolution was debated, and what happened in the re-vote:
Most candidates are elected because they secure important endorsements from campus organizations. Around a dozen student groups endorse candidates for the senate each year, but only three really matter: SOCC (Students of Color Coalition), FLIP (First-Generation Low-Income Partnership), and JSA (Jewish Student Association). The endorsement process is opaque, but students do tend to trust that candidates they endorse will represent them and their political beliefs. The four candidates who received the most votes last year were endorsed by all three of the organizations listed above. . . .
SOCC endorsements carry the most weight. . . . Every student group in SOCC is also in SOOP, or Students Out of Occupied Palestine, the coalition responsible for bringing the divestment proposal to Stanford. . . .
When, [at the senate session,] a pro-Israel student started discussing BDS . . . [the university administrator] Sally Dickson, . . . told him to “talk about the bill.” Yet later on, a representative of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation talked about her involvement in queer activism, and a member of Fossil Free Stanford talked about how oil drilling had led him to support the Palestinians. But Dickson did not instruct these students to simply “talk about the bill.”
After the resolution was rejected, the second vote went somewhat differently:
There was no official notice that the senate would be holding a re-vote on divestment. Apparently some of the senators claimed that they were overwhelmed by all the people present at the debate. After thinking it over, they decided they wanted to change their votes.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/article/how-the-haters-handed-defeat-to-students-at-stanford/