Photo courtesy of Minnie Madden ’26
In the midst of our current Fanning lock-in, The College Voice worked with the Conn Archives to contact Conn alumni involved in past takeovers. We connected with alumni Zach La Rock ‘16 and Aparna Gopalan ‘17 via the Occupy Fanning Facebook Group from 2016 to discuss their involvement with the protests and how the current occupation both mirrors and differs from the past.
Gopalan and La Rock connected the 2016 occupation to events that occurred the year prior. Professor Pessin contacted The College Voice in April with a request to include this revised paragraph after the original publication of this article:
“Gopalan recalls that in February 2015, the College community became aware of a Facebook post by Philosophy Professor Andrew Pessin from the previous year, one of a series in which he was analyzing the then occurring war between Hamas and Israel. In that post he imagined a political cartoon which likened the Israeli military blockade on Hamas, whose kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers triggered the 2014 war, to a person defending himself from a rabid pit bull by encaging it. Thinking the post was about Palestinians in general rather than specifically Hamas, students wrote op-eds in The College Voice to convey their outrage, including then SGA Chair of Diversity and Equity Lamiya Khandaker ‘17, who condemned the College’s ‘institutional racism.’”
Pessin’s Facebook post in full with comments and a detailed timeline can be found on page 5 of Richard Landes’s 2020 Salem on the Thames, available in Shain Library.
In response, the administration organized what Gopalan described as a “sort of therapy session” between “eight brown people and this Zionist man” to resolve the issue. Gopalan explained, “The issue became the College, not Pessin […] We were not asking the College to silence him or remove him. All we were asking for is [to] put a statement out saying we don’t agree with him. That’s all you’re being asked to do. We’re not saying apologize. We’re not saying cry with us. We were just asking to clarify that you are not a college that thinks Palestinians are rabid pit bulls. Just say that much, and that’s great. And they never, never said that.” Competing interpretations, doctored images of the post and a debate over if Pessin was referencing Palestinians or Hamas, a terrorist group operating within Gaza, led to frustration and confusion within the College community.
The alumni said that incidents across campus, including the painting of the N-word in a bathroom in Cro, played a role in sparking conversations over the treatment of minority students at Conn. Student unrest led to a campus-wide shutdown, during which President Bergeron canceled classes on Mar. 30, 2015 to hold an all-campus forum to address the issues. Gopalan explains that the open forum became a place for students to open up about their struggles and speak directly with Bergeron. “Instead of the audience going and being like f*ck you or whatever, the audience was crying [saying], ‘Please help me, President Bergeron. I’m really suffering’ and stuff like that.” The students were divided: some felt that the administration genuinely cared while others felt like they did not take enough action to protect their students.
La Rock explained to us that when Bergeron became President, the College community had a lot of hope for the change she would bring. Gopalan recalled that Bergeron’s presidency initially seemed revolutionary. The previous president, Lee Higdon, was an investment banker focused on improving finances, but Bergeron was an academic, and an artist and humanities scholar at that. She seemed like the fresh leader Conn needed. Their hope dwindled once they realized that Bergeron’s concerns came down to protecting the College’s reputation and raising its finances more than addressing the issues on campus.
In 2015, the students felt like they won. The administration seemed to have listened. The College created the DEI office in response to the hate-speech emergency and hired three current faculty members at the time to work in the office, including interim Dean of Equity and Inclusion David Canton. These faculty members were the most passionate against the hate speech across campus and had a lot of student support. Students were happy with this move and the staffing of this office. Gopalan recalled it being a quiet fall 2015 semester as the new division established itself. That was until it became clear that the DEI’s voice sounded a lot like that of the President’s. That the DEI’s actions looked a lot like the President’s. And that all amounted to a lot of nothing.
Fast forward to the spring of 2016: DEI had not done enough to quell tensions from the year prior. A campus group called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an unofficial student club, distributed posters in residence halls in the form of eviction notices as a commentary on dispossession of Palestinian land on May 10, 2016. However, some students submitted bias incident reports, which resulted in a campus-wide email demanding the posters to be taken down and what Gopalan said felt like a “manhunt” for the SJP members. She said, “The people who had done that work [wondered], what’s going to happen to me? Are the police gonna come for me because I put up posters on the poster board in the dorm?”
On May 13, 2016, the third Fanning occupation began. “From what I remember, five to ten people marched into Dean Canton’s office one fine day and then we didn’t leave. There was no plan for taking over Fanning. We just walked in,” said Gopalan. The students decided not to leave until DIEI took action about the division across campus. Unlike today, Fanning was still open for classes and administrative business, but the DIEI office was constantly occupied with students until the end of the academic year.
“I think it was finals that really killed it. People had no other choice but to go and finish and take their exams and write their papers,” La Rock recalled. “I remember that I withdrew because it was Senior Week, and I just wanted to completely disconnect from everything. And the administrators […] were digging their heels in. They weren’t really acquiescing to any demands and even requests for meetings. And so it became harder to sustain as peoples as the numbers.”
Gopalan and La Rock were surprised by how much organization and planning went into the current Fanning occupation and lock-in, which they did not experience. They also said that much of what is happening now with protests is what they wished could have happened during their time at Conn. La Rock said, “I think that what’s different, other than the scale, is the faculty involvement. I was floored to see what [The College Voice] posted with the pictures and the quotes from all of these faculty members asking her to resign,” said La Rock. “Publicly speaking is what makes a true difference.”
He continued, explaining, “What’s happening at Conn is actually not really any different than what’s happening in any other university […] universities are becoming increasingly sort of corporatized. They have higher budgetary needs necessitated by rising prices and higher tuition and they have created these massive administrative and bureaucratic structures.” He believes that the College is concerned primarily about protecting its image and the image of the President. “They’re concerned with reputation, and they’re concerned, ultimately, about fundraising and finding donors.”
Alumni are becoming increasingly involved in the current protests at the College. La Rock and Gopalan collaborated with Conn’s Rethinking Economics chapter to present a history of student activism at Conn and beyond via Zoom. Other alumni have emailed students with their thoughts and support, left comments online, and donated to mutual aid funds. On Instagram, @ccalumsagainsthate quickly gained a following, offering ways for former students to support the current generation of camels fighting for equity and justice. Conn has a long history of student activism, and alumni are proving that campus engagement does not end at graduation.
*Update as of 6 p.m. on Apr. 21, 2023: The College Voice learned of new information, including full quotes from 2015 and further context from involved parties, in the weeks following the original publication of this article on Mar. 7. The editors have revised the content and wording to reflect the corrected information.
* Update as of 1:10 p.m. on Apr. 26, 2023: The College Voice added a revised paragraph from Professor Pessin following communication between faculty and the Editors-in-Chief. Additionally, a reference to the book, Salem on the Thames, was added.
