The University of Michigan's anti-Zionist student government, Shut It Down (SID), has abandoned its protest against the fall budget after the university decided to fund student clubs despite SID's objections. Initially, SID aimed to leverage a spending freeze to push for a boycott of Israel, but after the university intervened, SID's president, Alifa Chowdury, retracted her veto. The decision has sparked debate about the impact of funding cuts on student life, with club leaders arguing that the funding is essential for safety and operations. The article also contrasts SID's approach with tactics used by anti-Zionist groups at other universities.
University of Michigan PhD student, center, carries a sign that says ‘Free Speech! Free Palestine!’ at U-M’s Diag in Ann Arbor on April 4, 2024. Photo: Junfu Huan via Reuters Connect
The anti-Zionist Shut It Down (SID) party, which captured control of the University of Michigan’s Central Student Government (CSG) in May, has conceded defeat and voted to approve the fall budget it threatened to veto to force the administration into boycotting Israel, The Michigan Daily reported on Wednesday.
As The Algemeiner previously reported, dozens of SID candidates won election to Central Student Government in the spring by running on a platform which promised to sever the University of Michigan’s academic and financial ties to Israel. After assuming power, CSG president Alifa Chowdury (SID) defunded the school’s 1,700 student clubs by vetoing the summer term budget, which had been “unanimously” supported by the CSG Assembly, and vowed to block any spending bill that would fund them in the fall term. The measure was, in SID’s view, strategic. It argued during the campaign that crippling university operations would inexorably lead to a boycott of Israel.
“CSG merely serves as an extension of an institution that has perpetuated systems of oppression by maintaining the current status quo of neocolonial capitalism,” the party said in a manifesto issued in March. “Every dollar coming out of this university is blood money. Student government cannot operate as usual as we witness the systematic murder of Palestinians. Student life cannot continue as normal when our tuition and labor are being used to fund a genocide.”
However, the university earlier this month resolved to fund the student clubs over Chowduryand SID’s objections, effectively stripping the new government of the power of the purse. Explaining the intervention to The Algemeiner on Tuesday, university spokesperson Colleen Mastony said it was prompted by Chowdury’s “senior” colleagues in the CSG Assembly.
Now, Chowdury has retreated from her original position, the Daily has reported. When CSG met on Tuesday to vote on the budget for fall term, she withheld her veto, formalizing a policy the university had already enacted without her. Conducted by secret ballot, the measure passed 25-15. Addressing the assembly ahead of the vote, Chowdury, claiming to have acted in the interests of the student body, defended vetoing the summer budget as a strategy for advancing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
BDS seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination. Leaders of the movement have repeatedly proclaimed that their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
“I think by not funding student orgs, we are asking the university to step up,” Chowdury said, according to the Daily. “By asking the regents to not just divest from Israel and weapons manufacturing companies but to reinvest money from the $18 billion endowment to students and to make y’alls [sic] lives better.”
Student club leaders attended the meeting to say that Chowdury and SID’s policies would actually be injurious to campus life, the paper added.
“That money is really going towards safety — things like buses, things like athletic trainers,” president of the university’s rugby team Ryan Grover told the assembly. “When the university isn’t providing much for us, that SOFC money is so huge, and it’s really what keeps us operating and keeps us both safe and equitable … and without that funding, there are a lot of people who won’t be able to find their group. They’re going to be a lot worse off mentally. They’re going to be a lot worse off physically.”
Founded in the months after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, Shut It Down allegedly committed multiple election code infractions to amass its unprecedented power. According to the Daily, students banded together to contest their election victory, citing multiple instances in which they campaigned in proscribed areas and violated other rules regulating the use of posters and email communications. SID ultimately overcame the challenge following a controversial hearing which the student government, breaking precedent, conducted in secret.
Anti-Zionists at other universities have pursued different strategies for achieving their objectives. At Brown University, for example, the Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) starved themselves and ultimately occupied a section of the campus for weeks. Their behavior earned them a meeting with the university’s trustees in May and a promise that the trustees vote on their demands at its annual October meeting, according to The Brown Daily Herald.
The paper added that BDC has buttressed its case for BDS by citing a 2020 report by the university’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices — now renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management — which recommended “divesting [Brown’s] endowment from companies that enable and profit from the genocide in Gaza and the broader Israeli occupation.” Brown president Christina Paxson had previously refused to accept the report’s recommendation, arguing that it breached the body’s mission statement, but it is now the cornerstone of BDC’s case for BDS.
So far, Paxson has positively described discussions with BDC, saying in a letter to the campus community that “the members of the Corporation expressed appreciation to the students for sharing their views and perspectives.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.