In Anonymous Vote, Harvard Law School Student Government Calls on University to Divest From Israel
Law student activist Lea Kayali: “We students are dissenting! … And these so-called leaders of this institution would be best served to listen to what we have to say!”
Not to be outdone by the performative stunts at other elite schools, Harvard Law School students have now inserted themselves into the ongoing campus conflict over the Israel-Hamas war. In a resolution passed by anonymous vote on March 29, The Harvard Crimson reports, they called on the university to divest from Israeli “occupation and genocide” amid its ongoing battle with the terror group.
The resolution urges the Harvard Management Company (HMC), which administers the school’s over $50 billion endowment
to divest completely from weapons manufacturers, firms, academic programs, corporations, and all other institutions that aid the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians, including withdrawing investments in securities, endowments, mutual funds, and other monetary instruments that provide material assistance to the commission or maintenance of flagrant violations of international law and human rights against Palestinians;
and it calls on the Harvard community
to divest from institutions, weapons manufacturers, firms, academic programs, corporations, and all other institutions that aid the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians.
Two members of the law school student government reportedly resigned in protest over the resolution.
Harvard really doesn’t need this now. The law student government’s move comes smack in the middle of a federal probe into pervasive antisemitism at the university. And it follows former President Claudine Gay’s abysmal performance last December at the congressional antisemitism hearings, followed by her resignation over plagiarism charges. The scandals are taking their toll on applications for admission to the school, which have dropped markedly during this time.
Meanwhile, aside from adding to the strife over antisemitism at the university, it’s hard to see what the resolution accomplishes: The law students’ demands to divest aren’t binding on anyone. University spokesperson Jason Newton stated that the university’s leadership has “made clear that it opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions.” Unless the school actually divests, the resolution is a win on paper and nothing more.
That was Nerdeen Kiswani‘s complaint when she spoke at the recent anti-Israel, student-organized “Resistance 101” Columbia webinar we covered here. “Not one single board of any school has ever actually divested or pulled funds from Israel or cut off relationships or cut off funding” because students “called on” them to do so, she said.
But for publicity purposes, a win on paper is still a win, and the law school students seeking to cut the Jewish state off from Harvard celebrated it.
The organization Law Students for a Free Palestine hailed the “historic divestment win” in an Instagram post:
And the day the resolution passed, Palestinian student activist Lea Kayali, HLS ’24, rallied a roomful of law students to congratulate themselves on their success.
Here they are, wrapped in keffiyeh scarves, ready for their close-ups:
Harvard Law students are celebrating the passage of a divestment resolution made by the student government. The vote was an anonymous one which is unprecedented in Harvard's history.
Two members of the Harvard Law School Student Government resigned because they felt the… pic.twitter.com/jgN9MM7vSt
— Stu (@thestustustudio) March 30, 2024
Phone in hand, Kayali read the crowd her scripted victory speech:
Today, an absolute majority of student government representatives of Harvard Law School took bold and necessary action to urge Harvard to divest from genocide!
She put the administration “on notice”—and in its place:
We students are dissenting we condemn your complicity and we are calling on them to immediately divest from genocide!
…
Students are speaking and these so-called leaders of this institution would be best served to listen to what we have to say, because one day, when we win and Palestine is free, they will come crawling back. They will be begging us to rewrite history. The ilk of the ego’d men in power at Harvard will try to use us as props as they have always done. With every student movement, that progresses our community and our society. But this time, it will be too late because there is no room on the mantle of Liberation for the cowards who did not have the courage to take action when it was needed.
Ending in a neo-Marxist woke call to free Palestine:
Our student movement, our demand for divestment, is one thread in the ties of resistance of oppressed people all around the world. Those threads of resistance bind us to the right side of history—
And a chant:
—and when we fight…We win!
A Harvard Law student after they passed a divestment resolution:
“This is our story and we are co-authoring it with the resisting people of Palestine. Our student movement, our demand for divestment, is one thread in the ties of resistance of oppressed people all around the… pic.twitter.com/D4vOALyl9G
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) March 31, 2024
Full video is here:
But when the thrill of victory passes and the time comes to find a real-world job, who is going to want to hire these cowardly, self-entitled, antisemitic brats who voted on condition of anonymity?
No one should. At least, not these major law firms, who signed onto a letter to law school deans last November to say so. Students hoping to join their firms after graduation must be “prepared to be an active part of workplace communities that have zero tolerance policies for any form of discrimination or harassment … There is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses [or] in our workplaces.”
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Comments
socialism always needs useful idiots.
Good for you Lea Kayali! Now, I hope you love non-profit work because good luck trying to find a top law firm job.
Since the vote was annonymous, perhaps top law firms will just have to pass on the entirety of the next three years of law graduate.
Well, to be clear, it was just the student government who had an anonymous vote here, not the school itself. That’s what? 10 or 15 kids, with 2 opting out?
There will be no divestment and a week from now nobody will remember this happened.
This is only “news” because the media co-operated with the terrorist propaganda arm to make it so. Otherwise it is as a fart in a hurricane.
These students are so brave to anonymously stand up for their beliefs and hold a secret vote to make clear their demands.
These kids are cosplaying.
They may as well be wearing Batman costumes as they act out their rebellious, cool, oppressed, POC, media-fed fantasies.
Stuffed full of propaganda tropes by the experts and granted a world stage on which to recite their lines but still completely ignorant of the realities of their topic.
the next General Counsel at Meta or Apple, or the next Asst US Attorney from MA
Yeah. Sadly, this vile twit will have no difficulty procuring employment among Dhimmi-crat government bodies, or, non-profit orgs, for whom rabid Jew-hatred and vilification of Israel are prerequisites and are accordingly displayed as badges of honor.
Or, at “woke” corporations, as Drill Sgt fairly observes.
Let her join one of the many six-figure salary-paying, white shoe law firms in Gaza.
I really would like to review the listing of all blacklisted firms.
Since the USA supports Israel, Harvard would have to sell all of its US Treasury investments.
This country is so unbelievably screwed. Considering these people, and their other Ivy League cohorts, will be running the country in 25-years, it’s impossible to overstate how dire America’s future is. And, for better or for worse, as America goes, so goes the free world.
Yes. And too many people keep pretending old rules governing custom, culture and law will always keep America in good order. They cannot conceive, which is insane, that others are coming along with new rules. It’s happening in front of everyone’s faces.
Name a country that followed English common law that has gone in any direction but tyranny. The timeline to reach this dead end seems to be exponential, not linear.
These budding commissars in HLS student government are all to eager write those new rules. And they’ll assert their dominance with pleasure and a little bit of a dig if they can.
They must be undercut. That’s going to be a theme of the coming 50 years, if we’re to survive here. They’re not all that bright and got where they are by DEI.
Ivy grads have been destroying the country for decades. This lot is nothing new. The young people taking serious majors at non-ivy league colleges either don’t think of this nonsense in the first place, or, they grow out of it eventually like I did.
My wife figured it out after she got her first paycheck and realized that “free things” were paid for by people who work.
She hasn’t been a Democrat in decades.
Try a century+ Girzzly.
Woodrow Wilson, arguably the godfather of marxist wokism in the US, was President of Princeton University where he championed the progressive movement in higher education.
What he did as US president hasn’t received half the attention it deserves. For instance, during his first year as president, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of racial segregation inside the federal bureaucracy, opposed women suffrage, imposed the federal income tax, created the Federal Reserve system, etc. – facts that the Dem party will do anything to keep from being brought to light now.
I’ve had three kids graduate from blue-chip schools over the last five years. They all have STEM degrees. While those STEM departments and colleges aren’t as bad as the Humanities departments…they’re still bad, particularly the health fields.
But, even if they weren’t, our problem is the people who will be running the country aren’t the engineers, mathematicians or even biologists. Instead, it will be the LAW SCHOOL grads, especially those from the Ivies. They will populate most of Congress as well as the Judiciary. Will some of them move to the right as they age? Sure. But, the vast majority won’t..and that’s what will seal our fate, as a free republic.
Bingo. Higher Ed is churning out these bozos. And people still hire them. When the GOP abandoned education reform (at all levels) as “unimportant,” something I was told constantly over the years, they really screwed us for the long term.
GOP never tried education reform, except for Trump. I remember the deliberately confusing push by William F. Buckley for “educational standards”. He never said what those standards would be. Most of us assumed it would be like performance standards in the essential subjects, “high academic standards”, but I grew uneasy when he never quite said that.
And indeed he was playing a trick. The standards we have now are for amount of money spent, amount of diversity, and so on. Those are the legal standards, and if you have any money left over, you can try to get the kids to read literature and understand Algebra 2. But that’s not what they care about legally.
Abolish ‘student government’
No, don’t abolish it. Things like this are useful. It lets the idiots self report. The fact that this idiot worked this hard to pass a student government resolution that has no effect whatsoever over anything shows potential employers that they do not possess the critical thinking skills necessary to actually be a top tier lawyer.
As someone who is not a Harvard student, I would like to see everybody divest themselves with anything financial that has anything at all to do with Harvard University.
Subotai Bahadur
The inmates are running the asylum.
[The inmates are being allowed to run the asylum.}
Why do muzzie nations with atrocious records on human rights get free pass from the virtue signaling fools?
Because it’s popular to want to kill Jews right now.
Marxist Seminaries doing a great job turning students into comrades
Bunch of absolute useful idiots.
How did they survive to adulthood?
They’re adults? They’re overgrown children.
The volume of antisemitism wherever you look is astounding and downright depressing. 15,000,000 Jews is apparently too many for too many, especially elites at Harvard Law.
Commies always go after ignorant people to push their policies. Hence the professors propagandizing to students.
Useful idiot advocates for genocidal Muslim supremacism, Islamofascist “holy war” and terrorism. Despicable.
We voted on the record to give them lobotomies so they can become useful members of society
Question: how much of an advantage does a law firm obtain when it hires a [legitimate] graduate of a top ivy law school vs hiring a solid student from an above-average, but not ivy-pedigree, law school?
You want a real answer? It depends on whether that law firm can make use of Ivy League connections. God’s honest truth, I overheard a whole lot of talk about Ivy League law schools from Ivy League grads because they thought I must be a “wife of.” The students weren’t impressed at all with their education, or their profs. They said they learned more from their classmates.
It’s a very big country out there, beyond DC and NY.
None. I did well in a none ivy ….and have yet to lose a single case to one. These silly stuffed shirts are government lawyers….
Think “networking” or “good old boy club”.
Depending on the circumstances, like who the Judge is, it can be quite an advantage to have one on staff.
Just saw this: the Abraham Accords may be moving forward, anyway.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the failure of the United States to live up to its better angels may be bringing out the best in those who admire our ideals.
https://x.com/JSchanzer/status/1774954054478705002?s=20
There have been numerous reports that behind the scenes a number of Muslim Countries are encouraging Israel to finish off Hamas.
Simple. Do not hire any in student government.
Now we see the threats of the pro-Palestinians and know how to treat them in return. Don’t let them rewrite history! Wait for them to come crawling, and I do mean crawling, back.
An anonymous vote. The cowardice is strong at HLS.
This right here. How cowardly and self-serving.
Right on! We should indeed celebrate that these self absorbed idiots are still busily generating such compelling momentum for the ongoing divestment from Harvard.
“Anonymous vote” some real Profiles in Courage up there at Harvard Law…..what a joke these people are. Disgraceful.
Those poor institutions; the little wokesters are their literal meal tickets cashed out for tuition n loans, development programs, and long term support from the products of their clubs.
Poor little wokesters, getting worked for what the system can get from them, til they’re tossed away when used up.
They deserve each other. Not sure the rest of us deserve this.
Thanks to the anonymous vote, future legal employers like myself will simply assume that ALL members of the 2023-2024 Harvard Law School student government (except the 2 who resigned in protest) are insane Hamas supporters, and toss their resumes in the trash.