Edward Said mural. Lead Artists: Fayeq Oweis & Susan Greene.
Battleground San Francisco State University
At a March 2017 conference of the National Association of Ethnic Studies held at San Francisco State University (SFSU), President Leslie Wong boasted about the University’s role as a sanctuary campus. He referenced SFSU’s proud history of engaged social justice scholarship going back to the 1968 Third World strike by students which established the first Ethnic Studies College in the country.
To Terry Collins, an alumnus of SFSU who was a member of the Black Student Union that started the Third World strike, and is the current Board President of KPOO community radio, Wong’s words rang hollow. “We fought for a radical vision of what ethnic studies should mean,” Collins told me. “Last spring students had to protest and even hunger strike just to keep Ethnic Studies alive after it was threatened with major cuts. They won a few crumbs but so much more is needed. And Palestinian faculty, students and programs have been under constant attack! Where’s the sanctuary for them at SF State?”
Collins, an adamant supporter of Palestine since the sixties, was referring to a series of incidents over the past year at SFSU that have targeted the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) ,Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, and the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program which she founded. Most recently, racist, Islamophobic posters were…