Since last week, Martin said he has lost more than 10% of his body weight and experienced extreme dips in his blood glucose levels. On Monday, medical staffers supplied him and other strikers with a plastic bag full of vitamins and a 10-gram glucose tablet, with instructions to take it in an emergency situation.
“I don’t want to have to do any permanent damage to my body … but I’m prepared to stand for my brothers and sisters,” Martin told KQED.
Last spring, Stanford was among more than 130 schools across the country whose students built nests of tents, tarps, blankets, Palestinian flags and large banners and spent weeks camped out on their campuses, bringing attention to U.S. support for Israel and pressuring their universities to pull financial investments from companies that supply weapons or surveillance technology to the country.
After a group of protesters occupied the university president’s office in June and refused to leave until they were arrested, administrators shut down Stanford’s encampment and later updated “freedom of expression” policies with a new policy requiring demonstrators to remove face coverings when asked a clarification of the camping policy, requiring that tents and structures be removed overnight regardless of whether people are present.
Now, 12 protesters face felony charges for the occupation of the president’s office, and other student activists have rallied around them.
Martin said that since he arrived on campus in the fall, there’s been a feeling of hostility between protesters and the administration.
“We’ve had one major rally where we marched here from White Plaza around the main quad and back, and within five minutes, you saw administrators swarming, asking us to disperse, threatening to send the police to come and disperse us,” he said.
Brian Liu, a graduate student studying computational and mathematical engineering, has also felt a shift.
“I’ve felt more of a double standard,” he told KQED on Monday.
While Liu said he’s often seen party details or advocacy messages chalked by fraternities and clubs stay on campus bike paths for weeks, “whenever [it’s] something that we talk about Palestine and bringing attention to the people whom Israel kills in Palestine, there’s immediate suspicion if there’s any university agent who walks over.”
“And even if no one asks immediately, [the messages] usually get washed away or erased within just a few days,” Liu said.
On Monday evening, students kneeled on the sidewalks surrounding White Plaza, drawing Palestinian flags and writing messages in colorful chalk. One student wrote “There is no clean water in Gaza” in block letters.
Liu, who has also been a part of the strike since last week, said that as a member of Stanford’s Graduate Student Council, he’s been invited to have discussions with administrators about the ongoing conflict, and has been told repeatedly that they welcome engagement from students. Now, he said, they’re refusing.
“So far, they’ve been taking a completely opposite stance, and that’s very hypocritical,” Liu said. “We want them to apply the same standards to us and allow us to engage with them as well.”
Liu said Stanford has a history of sit-ins against the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa that led to campus policy changes — and added that choosing not to see the June action as the same is shortsighted.
“Today, we celebrate those protests of the past,” he said. “We hope that the university can learn its lessons from the past, and not wait until decades later to celebrate things that happened like last year’s occupation of the president’s office, but really take action now.”
