Nuriel Vera-DeGraff and Shraddha Joshi are two Harvard College students being disciplined by the College due to their involvement in the pro-Palestine movement at Harvard. Vera-DeGraff, who has been placed on academic probation, and Joshi, whose degree is currently being withheld, sat down with The HPR to discuss their organizing experience, the university’s response to pro-Palestine protests, and the future of the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: On April 24, protesters, including yourselves, erected a Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard. What was it like organizing and participating in the encampment?
Shraddha Joshi: I think it’s important to note that this didn’t start in April. It started several months ago. I mean, it didn’t even start in October, but I think the sort of escalation we see in pro-Palestine protests certainly happened when the genocide really escalated in October. I think since then, we’ve seen repeated shutting down of pro-Palestine voices on Harvard’s campus. We’ve seen this sort of neglect and abuse of pro-Palestine protesters, and all of that has led to a pattern of oppression and this exceptionalization of pro-Palestine speech. When the encampment went up on April 24th, that was also two days after the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which is the only pro-Palestine group that was recognized by the university, was suspended under the premise of a probation that was actually deemed illegitimate by the ACLU of Massachusetts. And just hours before the encampment went live, the ACLU sent out this letter essentially calling out the unfair nature of the suspension, which was predicated on this illegitimate probation. So I think it’s important to consider all of that context even before we start talking about the encampment and what went into it because, you know, people don’t protest for no reason. People don’t protest just to shout, but rather to express their civil disobedience when every other option has been shut down.
And I think just weeks before the encampment went up, we saw that the divest referendum that was being done in a way that checked all the boxes and met all the administrative criteria was unfairly repressed, all referenda were indefinitely postponed as a result. And I think all of that context is really important when we talk about what happened on April 24th. What we saw on April 24th was the start of this civil disobedience campaign that was very much calibrated with a national movement for calling for divestment, and for pushing for the university to engage with student demands. However, at Harvard, I just think it’s really important to consider that it comes after a pattern of repression, and that repression has only increased since April as well.
Nuriel Vera-DeGraff: I totally agree with everything Shraddha said. Given all that context, again, honing in on the fact that this encampment was an escalation following almost total ignorance at best, and again, suppression from the administration, it was one of the only options. Civil disobedience was one of the only options remaining, again, with the goal of divestment and having the administration hear our students and our faculty and staff on what they had to say on the matter.
In terms of the actual participation, I mean, there’s a lot to go into. More than anything, it was an act of protest. It was a beautiful act of solidarity with what was happening in Gaza. And I think one thing that the encampment and people involved maintained throughout which is that despite, you know, the fact that there’s all this attention happening in the United States on college campuses, the reason that we’re here in the first place is not simply because of the repression. It is mainly because of the genocide that’s happening in Palestine, in Gaza. And so something we’ve done throughout is really just centering Gaza, centering Palestinian voices, centering what’s actually happening on the ground, and making sure we’re not kind of getting distracted, because the reason we’re calling for divestment in the first place is to prevent and stop further genocides from happening in Palestine.
HPR: As the encampment progressed, tensions between the Harvard administrators and the protesters seemed to rise, with both non-Harvard and Harvard affiliates calling for the university to shut down the encampment, and the administration warning that continued participation would result in punishment. What was that administrative pressure like?
SJ: There’s been a constant presence of administrators at every pro-Palestinian action that’s happened on this campus. That, obviously, was severely escalated during the time of the encampment: There were routine ID checks; there were, you know, various ways in which administrators wanted to surveil who was on the premises.
And personally, my role in the encampment was as an admin liaison, so I wasn’t actually camping. I was on the exterior of the encampment, on the perimeter, talking to administrators when these sorts of ID checks and such were happening. And I think one source of frustration that a lot of students felt was that administrators were never there to engage in conversation with the protesters, and the encampment was not the first time students were calling for divestment. It was certainly not the first time that these demands had been articulated. There had been so many other efforts before this to actually engage in discourse with the university in a very different form. As early as January, just weeks after interim President Garber took up that role, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee and Jews for Palestine sent this joint email asking for a meeting on discourse and starting a conversation about what Harvard can do to sort of support pro-Palestine protesters, pro-Palestine organizers, and also to listen to these demands and these concerns about divestment. And none of that was really responded to in good faith, so I think what we saw was a mounting frustration, and a lot of that went hand in hand with repression, went hand in hand with what was happening in Rafah and in Gaza.
In terms of the administrative pressure during the actual time of the encampment, we saw a lot of negative response from administrators, but never really the good faith attempt to have a conversation, which was something that students were constantly demanding, sending emails for, having an entire admin liaison team that was ready to have those conversations, and there really wasn’t much effort on that front.
To the point about sort of external eyes on Harvard’s campus, I mean we’ve seen that all year there’s been immense right wing pressure to shut down pro-Palestine protest and pro-Palestine speech, and we’ve seen that as early as October, but also during the time of the encampment. It isn’t a coincidence that when you look at, for example, the Instagram posts that were coming out of Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, you see that just an hour or so after students were placed on involuntary leaves of absence, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, which is a Zionist lobby group, is coming out of a meeting from the president’s office. I think those things, unfortunately, are not a coincidence, because there is a lot of right-wing pressure, there is a lot of Zionist pressure on Harvard to make certain decisions. And unfortunately, we haven’t seen administration engage with students in a matter in a means of actually advancing conversation and advancing good faith dialogue, but rather only from a very punitive standpoint. Which is wildly unprecedented considering other peaceful civil disobedience actions that have happened in the past, that have taken similar shape and form as the encampment, but have not been met with the same question.
NV: The other thing I would add is that not only was it, you know, as a standalone incident, just very disappointing and frustrating as a student to see the administrative response being purely disciplinary and suppressive and repressive instead of engaging in good faith conversations, I think what was even more frustrating, going back to the Palestine exception on free speech that Shraddha mentioned earlier, is that in past similar movements and past similar encampments, for example Occupy Harvard from 2011, I believe, the response from administration was nothing like the draconian response we were seeing with this iteration of civil disobedience and protest.
I’m looking at, and again — please look at the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine’s Instagram account, because there are a lot of great resources there as well — but there was an email from the president at the time, Drew Faust, and just reading through the email, you can see very clearly that the administration is, if anything, supporting the Occupy Harvard occupations and encouraging dialogue between people involved in the protests and other members of the Harvard community. There’s no mention of disciplinary action, nothing of that kind of administrative pressure that we were seeing with the encampment in the spring.
It was kind of a double blow to see the clear anti-Palestinian discrimination happening on top of just the fact that this is not a response that is, you know, should be coming from university to any town, on any topic, right? The university has a responsibility to encourage discourse, encourage free speech, and also be responsible to its stakeholders, a key group of which I believe should be students. And so when you have a group of students being ignored for many months, many years, and finally, kind of doing something about it, responding to that with even more repression and even more pressure, instead of actually even pretending to listen to what the students are asking for is just extremely disappointing.
HPR: Shortly after the end of the encampment on May 14, the Administrative Board placed at least 35 students under academic sanction. Some condemned this decision as “the Palestine exception to free speech,” while others stated that those protesting should have been willing to accept the potential consequences of their actions. Given this, how do you conceive of what the Ad Board did, and what does the Palestine exception to free speech mean to you?
NV: I think we both touched on this earlier. For me, to be honest, when I first got involved with protests that the Palestine Solidarity Committee was doing, I didn’t really have a full understanding of why going against disciplinary action was such a big tenet of our organizing, because, in my mind, I think maybe naively, I gave the university the benefit of the doubt and thought that if they were to be using any kind of disciplinary action against protesters, it really was only because, you know, the protesters had actually done something that deserved that kind of reaction, and that they were doing so in a content neutral way.
However, you know, as I got more involved and started to organize more, and going to more rallies and seeing firsthand the kinds of behaviors that were being punished — for example, at the encampment, like Shraddha and I said before, it’s very clear that is not being done in a content neutral manner. And so for me, the Palestinian exception to free speech just means applying completely different standards and disciplinary rules to any content that has to do with Palestine. There are numerous examples that Shraddha can definitely talk to you more about, but one example is, you know, as someone who was put on probation and disciplinary action, looking through all the materials that I was sent — and I can’t really go into too many specifics — but it just became very clear that there is a lack of specificity and a lack of precedent that the Administrative Board and its members were following.
SJ: This is not the first year that we’ve seen this exception come up at Harvard, right? This is a pattern that has, that has been recurring. The fact that Cornel West was denied tenure back in 2019 is, at least in my time, one of the first examples where such an exception felt so salient. But just to add on to that, I mean, last winter in, I believe, the start of 2023, the Harvard Kennedy School denied a position to human rights defender Ken Roth because he was overly critical of Israel. Eventually, after a lot of faculty and student lobbying, they brought the position back, and they didn’t say that it was because of Palestine, that’s what happened, but there was literally no other factor that had changed, except for the fact that he had been outspoken about Palestine and Israel’s human rights record. Those were, in my mind, what I see to be the seeds of the exception that we see now, which is now so much more salient and so much more obvious.
And you see that in the way that the Palestine Solidarity Committee and other groups were targeted, or in the ways in which, for example, our divest referendum was shut down. Then now specifically with the disciplinary action, you see that students who are participating — or not even participating, but being perceived to participate — in a particular action are being put under extremely heavy disciplinary sanctions. Looking back at the precedent, looking back at the ways that Harvard has responded to the anti-apartheid movement, the Occupy movement, the living wage movement, there has always been more of an encouragement of discourse, and nothing like what we see now, which has been almost an aim to demobilize these movements by placing students on mass probation or by threatening students with suspension.
One takeaway that has come up from this year is that the Palestinian exception is a lot harder to to ignore. I think for students who may not have been really familiar with Palestine in the past, or the political history behind it, they at least recognize that when you talk about Palestine and you advocate for it on this campus, you are being faced with a new host of repression that you may not experience for any other cause. I think that awareness has really increased this year.
HPR: Among the 35 students under academic probation, 13 seniors were barred from graduating and receiving their degrees. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to place the 13 seniors back on the list of those graduating before the Corporation reversed this decision. Shraddha, as one of the seniors prevented from graduating, what was it like experiencing that back and forth?
SJ: Yeah, I think it’s been a pretty complicated ride. I mean, for me, on May 10th, I was placed on involuntary leave despite not physically participating in the encampment. I was told in my leave that I had been seen in the encampment, and as such, was being placed under these very radical disciplinary measures. A week afterward, with the encampment ultimately ended, that decision was overturned, but that began my Ad Board process, which eventually yielded the probation decision on May 17th. On May 17th, I was essentially told just, you know, a few days before my graduation, that I would not be receiving my degree until May 17th, 2025. So that obviously was quite shocking news, but we had a lot of supportive faculty who were really outraged. And some of these faculty members were those who had been engaged with these kinds of movements in the past, and some were those who just felt like what Harvard was doing was completely outrageous, regardless of the political cause that was being invoked at hand.
On Monday, faculty voted overwhelmingly to grant us our degrees, and I think that was a particularly important moment, because it really showed that students and faculty and student organizations really stood on one side of this. We had this petition going on with over 1,500 student signatories. We had over 500 faculty members sign on to a letter saying that we should be getting our degrees. And we had over 45 student organizations releasing statements in support of the students who were not able to graduate. So on one hand, you see all of that, and then the night before commencement, the Corporation overturns this faculty decision, and we receive emails saying that “you’re not going to be graduating this year.”
It was, on one hand, surprising, because it really shows where Harvard’s interests are coming from, and it really shows that the school is not for its students and faculty, but rather for the interests that shape it. But at the same time, after the initial shock, I really have to question, “is this surprising?” given what happened in fall when we were being doxxed and harassed and intimidated and Harvard was so unwilling to even provide us any support or even recognize the pain of students. Is it now surprising that they are taking these measures and withholding our degrees in this manner, in a way that is overriding the student and faculty opinion? In the grand scheme of things, it is unfortunately unsurprising. I think the ways in which Harvard has treated pro-Palestinian students all year has been rather consistent, and it’s been consistently punitive and very targeted. And I think this is sort of just a continuation in that long, long trend of behavior.
HPR: Nuriel, you were placed under probation as a result of your involvement in the encampment. How has that impacted you? And how has this impacted your conception of Harvard University?
NV: In terms of my conception of the university, very similar to what Shraddha says, I think I had mistakenly been under the impression that a university should have its students in mind when it makes most, if not all, of its decisions. Getting to see exactly, on a personal level, how the university’s governing boards and disciplinary boards interact with students and treat students who are simply protesting a genocide that the university is complicit in really just kind of changed that perspective for me. I now more deeply understand the lack of care that, in this particular case it’s the administrative board, but the university as a whole has for its students and even its faculty at this point. Again, nodding to what Shraddha says, the fact that hundreds of faculty could write in support of letting the seniors graduate, and then that the FAS could have this vote and have that be overturned by the Corporation, which is again unprecedented, just shows that it’s not even the students that the university is not accountable to. It’s even the faculty as well. In terms of my conception of the university, I now just more deeply understand where I stand as a student.
Despite being disappointed and upset and frustrated about the probation and the seniors not graduating, and people who are being suspended and can’t come back to campus for a year, year-and-a-half, it’s now very understandable to me why that kind of action would be taken by the university. It’s now not something that I see as a surprise. I see it in a long line of actions that follow this pattern. Again, it’s not only the Palestine exception to free speech at this point. In this case, it is the Palestine exception to free speech, but it’s also a larger sign of where the university’s priorities are because the university is complicit in many things. I think this is going to be kind of a turning point when students and faculty are realizing that the university does not care about them as much as it purports to. I’m really, really, honestly excited to see what happens in the years to come, and how this kind of momentum can be used to further student activism and faculty activism at this point.
In terms of the personal impacts of probation — generally, what probation does to people is it really limits. It can provide a really massive financial burden. For example, if you were depending on any kind of Harvard funding for a summer study abroad, or an internship or a fellowship of any kind, all of that is in jeopardy if you’re placed on probation. There are other stipulations that prevent you from studying abroad in the year or year-and-a-half. Following your probation, you’re not in good standing. It’s also very hard if you have parents who are not supportive. Depending on your family situation, you know your parents will be notified of this, which can also cause problems at home. Many students in the encampment I know have parents who are not supportive, and so it’s really an act of bravery for them to be participating. And then to get this probation is kind of additional damage to that kind of relationship. And I’m sure there are a couple more things that probation does, but can’t think of them at the moment, but either way, even just probation, which is kind of like one of the smallest disciplinary actions, can still be pretty destructive. But again, this is nothing compared to the suspension that five students are facing.
HPR: The pro-Palestinian movement, at Harvard and beyond, has used chants, such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “intifada.” The usage of such phrases has been met with condemnation, including from Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, and accusations of antisemitism. Do you believe that these criticisms are sound? What, if any, obligations do you believe the movement has to address the concerns of its critics?
SJ: I think that the criticism that comes from these terms often stems from the lack of political education and a lack of awareness. One of the things that we really strive to do as organizers is to bring awareness to why we claim this language and why this is not language we want to take off the table just because it is met with critique that is often not well-informed or does not understand the whole picture.
When President Gay released that email about “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” there was definitely a period of time where there was a lot of internal questioning about how to message this, how to think about this, because this is something that we’ve been chanting proudly for months and years, long before an email from President Gay went out, but this was now the time to think about how we can message this to those who are not aware of what this chant means. And so at that moment, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Jews for Palestine, Afro, and a lot of pro-Palestinian groups sat down together and wrote a really long explainer and statement about how “from the river to the sea, Palestine would be free” is a call for equality. It’s a liberatory call that is not exclusionist and not eliminatory in any manner, and how it really espouses the values that we want to see in a liberated world, and why we chant it with pride. And so I think that is always going to be a staple at our protest.
Likewise, with “Intifada” I think there is, first of all, the angle of racism in which people hear an Arabic word and automatically assume that it is associated with something because that’s the sort of perception that they have gained from the media or from the stereotypes that have sort of been put on particular cultures and languages. One important thing we’ve been able to do is to try to bring it into the discourse and think about how “Intifada” is a call for liberation, how it is a call for shaking up or shaking off oppression. And that is the term that has been used in Palestinian civil disobedience moments for decades, starting from a really long period of time before this. And now it’s really been brought into the language of the student movement, in that there’s the student intifada, a student uprising that’s happening. And I think to use a different term would not be able to do justice. I think no other term would be able to do justice to the movement than one that truly captures the origins that it, that it comes from, which is the Palestinian civil disobedience.
For us, our obligation is to educate and to continue using this language, but thinking about how people can engage with it and see it to be their own, rather than to back down if people are coming at it with misconceptions or a lack of information.
NV: I think for a lot of us, it’s been very troubling. I think for anyone in the movement for Palestinian Liberation, it’s been very troubling and disappointing and hard to see any kind of demand for freedom or justice or non-violence, any call for the end of an occupation that’s been lasting for 75 years, any kind of language around that just to be branded as antisemitic. It’s something that the Palestinian movement has been facing for decades. Like Shraddha says, a lot of it does stem — I think it’s not just a lack of education, I think it’s also active mischaracterizations and fear mongering done by, oftentimes, pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies, which have spent a lot of effort and money into spreading propaganda, especially to the American, Jewish, young population, about what Israel means and what Palestine means, and what you know is going on in the region.
A really big responsibility that our movement has had is, you know, to the question about “an obligation to address the concerns of its critics,” is not to bow down to the criticisms of antisemitism, and instead to inform and just to do our best to be a place where people can come and learn. That was one of the things I valued the most about the encampment is that we were very intentional about having educational spaces as well. We had scholars come in to talk about topics like the ongoing Nakba, and why we say Israel is an apartheid state, and why we say there’s a genocide happening, and even more nuanced topics than that. I think one of our primary responsibilities, and I think one of the positive effects that I hope we’ve had on campus at least — and I’ve definitely seen this at least in my immediate circles — is an opening up of conversation around these topics and a kind of educational goal of really showing people and explaining to people why we say things like, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” which, when you take it at its most literal, can in no way be antisemitic when you’re just calling for the freedom of a region and calling for people to live in an equal state instead of in an apartheid state. So it’s very, very hard to see those kinds of chants being misconstrued as antisemitic.
And I do think people will always have criticisms, and I don’t think it’s wrong to criticize. As Shraddha said, there’s always internal dialogue about, “how are we branding the movement?” and “how are we communicating our values?” which are very consistent. I think that’s an ongoing conversation. There are definitely valid questions to be asked and arguments to be made about the balance between saying everything you think and then facing kind of the most harsh criticism, or sometimes moderating your message and being able to bring more people in. That’s a discussion that was happening often in the encampment. But the bottom line is to keep our values consistent and make sure that we’re not not saying things just because a few people who will always disagree with what we’re saying will attack us for that. Definitely an ongoing conversation, and one that’s been going around all over the country.
SJ: A lot of the people at the forefront of our movement, as well, it’s important to note that they are Jewish. One thing that gets erased in this is, there’s often this binary of “pro-Palestine protesters versus Jewish students,” but I think there are so many Jewish students and community members who make up the pro-Palestine movement, both at Harvard and across the country, that it’s really important to think beyond that binary. When we talk about narratives of safety, when we talk about narratives of liberation, and supporting one another, there are broad communities that are making up these movements, and it’s unfortunate that sometimes there are these false binaries that are being placed on the Palestine movement, whether that’s on this campus, or Columbia’s campus, or any other campus in the U.S. more broadly.
NV: This has been documented everywhere, but when it comes to criticisms of antisemitism, especially in the pro-Palestinian movement, a lot of times it can be interesting to think about what the people who are making those criticisms believe in. A lot of times the ideology of Zionism is one that itself ends up being antisemitic because it purports that the safety of Jewish people worldwide depends on the existence of Israel as it is, as an apartheid state, as an occupation, and as a state that commits genocide. I think putting the safety of all the Jewish people in the world on this one country, which, again, is an apartheid state, which is committing genocide, is itself antisemetic, because then where does that leave all of the other millions of Jewish people around the world who are not able to be in Israel if, again, following the logic of Zionism, that is the only safe haven for Jewish people? That is something that there is a lot of documentation and scholarship on.
HPR: Looking back on the past few months, do you have any regrets about your participation in the pro-Palestinian movement? Do you plan to continue with the pro-Palestinian movement, and if so, how may that look like in the future?
NV: I have no regrets about my participation in the pro-Palestinian movement. I think I have a lot of lessons and definitely learned a lot of useful information about how best to organize, how best to rally people, how best to mobilize people, things to avoid, things to do more of, but definitely no regrets whatsoever.
Of course I plan on continuing with the pro-Palestinian movement. I will be here for two more years, so I will continue organizing on campus and I’m really, really excited to see what the next year will look like for the movement, and continuing to expand it, bring people in, educate people, and hopefully talking to administrators and see if they keep any end of their bargain up — that’s to be seen.
SJ: I absolutely don’t have any regrets about my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. If anything, thinking back, I sometimes am like, “I wish I had been doing more of this,” rather than getting caught up in my thesis or other academic commitments. Overall, I am really proud of what this movement has done this year. There is so much more work to be done. We’re at the start of a conversation about divestment that is gaining a lot of traction on this campus, but needs to be made more actionable. A lot of that does come from what administrators have to say, but a lot of that also comes from seeing the student pressure. During commencement, there was this immense walkout of over 1,000 people, and a lot of people were chanting “let them graduate!” in solidarity with their peers. I think there’s room for our political work now to redirect people’s anger and rage that they’re feeling when they see that their peers can’t graduate, toward the genocide in Gaza, toward this apartheid system, and toward these 75 years of occupation, because that is what should be creating the most rage and frustration. It’s one thing to be frustrated when your friends can’t graduate, but you should also be even more angry that there’s this genocide that your university is complicit in. In my mind, that is the future of what the pro-Palestine movement will look like at Harvard.
On a personal level, I certainly do plan to continue organizing. I am supposed to be starting a masters at the University of Cambridge in the UK this fall, but it’s unclear if I’ll be able to do that because of my degree status. Regardless, I definitely hope to center the Palestine movement wherever I am at.
