What Is To Be Done? (Ohio Style)
Theorizing a strategy to win divestment at THE Ohio State University
As students are strolling back onto campus and I settle into my final year of being a student at The Ohio State University, it’s hard not to feel struck by the contrast in the end of last semester and the relative calm of the beginning of this semester.
I catch myself asking how the same spots where incoming freshmen are buying posters for their dorm rooms are the same places where, just a few months ago, dozens of activists peacefully protesting for OSU to divest from Israel and from the genocide in Gaza were brutally arrested.
Even more than that, I can’t help but remember what UN experts describe as the scholasticide in Gaza— the Israeli government’s “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system”. It’s become nearly impossible to sit in class without remembering all the Palestinians who can no longer sit in class because of the ongoing genocide, apartheid, and settler-colonialism perpetuated by the Israeli government, all while The Ohio State University continues to invest in this destruction.
In the face of our university’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, OSU students, faculty, staff, and the Columbus community have rallied, marched, disrupted the OSU president’s speeches and Board of Trustee meetings, organized USG ballot initiatives, and more. We should celebrate the bravery of the masses of people who have stood up against the genocide and for the liberation of oppressed peoples across the world.
And yet, after all of our efforts and our bravery, our movement has failed at halting OSU’s complicity in the genocide.
This, then, brings us to an important question as we enter a new school year: Are we, in the face of an increasingly repressive university that punishes student activists while profiting off of the genocide of Palestinians, going to throw our hands up in the air, say we fought the good fight, and accept our defeat?
Or, are student activists finally going to ask what it will really take to win?
Luckily, the students of conscience today don’t have to start from scratch; past divestment movements at OSU have produced answers, and they’ve won.
Throughout Ohio State’s history, students have fought tirelessly to divest OSU’s endowment from South African Apartheid, from genocide in Darfur, from the prison industrial complex, from israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, and from the fossil fuel industry.
Only one of these movements, though, has managed to win.
Since OSU’s founding, there has been one successful divestment campaign— the student campaign by Students United Against Apartheid (SUAA) to divest from South African apartheid.
Students United Against Apartheid (SUAA) is similar to the divestment campaigns that have followed it. The SUAA’s divestment campaign sought to push OSU to divest from South African Apartheid through undergraduate and graduate student government resolutions, peaceful protests, and even disruptive actions during Board of Trustee meetings. It was shortly after these disruptive actions that OSU’s Board of Trustees voted to divest from South African Apartheid.
If this approach to student activism sounds familiar, it is because the campaigns for fossil fuel divestment led by Ohio Youth for Climate Justice (OHYCJ) and for divestment from israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and OSU Divest have used the same tactics.
Just like SUAA, both OHYCJ and SJP’s divestment campaigns have pushed for undergraduate student resolutions. The fossil fuel divestment resolution passed in both 2014 and 2022 and OSU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has introduced a BDS resolution in 2015, 2022– the first and only time it passed– and 2024.
Similarly, both OHYCJ and SJP have rallied on campus and, just like SUAA, disrupted OSU Board of Trustee meetings.
It is neither the disruptive tactics nor the internal pressure from student governments that enabled SUAA’s success where all other divestment campaigns on OSU’s campus have fallen short.
What sets SUAA apart from the movements that have followed was the magnitude of their protests, their coalition with unions on OSU’s campus, and the top-down support they received from state senators.
OHYCJ and SJP’s disruption at a Board of Trustee meeting in November 2023 brought out several dozen protestors. SUAA’s disruption at a Board of Trustees meeting in 1985 brought out almost ten times that amount.
While scale was critical, it was not the key factor setting SUAA apart.
In 1985, SUAA allied themselves with the Communication Workers of America Local 4501, a union made up of OSU communication members, as they were renegotiating their contract with OSU. On May 3, 1985, the CWA’s support for the students’ divestment campaign manifested in them bringing 100 unionized workers to SUAA’s protest, a third of the protest’s attendees.
The scale of the SUAA’s protest was possible only because of the key alliance between students and labor— an alliance that unified the power of OSU’s workers and its consumers (i.e. its students). It was only after this protest solidified the alliance between students and workers in disruptive action that OSU decided to divest from South African Apartheid.
While this might seem discouraging to student activists in the present— especially given the fact that the percentage of workers in Ohio represented by unions has gone from 23% in 1989 to 13.5% in 2023— there is hope for a new student-labor alliance to build solidarity between the two and help both parties achieve success.
In January of 2024, “[nearly] 1,000 [healthcare workers] at the Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center… voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).”
This represents an opportunity for Ohio State student activists to once more form an alliance with labor, and combine our collective strength to win better working conditions and divestment from the fossil fuel industry and israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid.
To build this alliance, students will not only have to align the interests of the IAM with their divestment campaigns, but also invite students to once more mobilize in solidarity with OSU’s staff.
If student activists wish to win divestment, our next move must involve uniting with OSU’s unionized workers. There are additional lessons to learn from SUAA’s successful campaign.
In 1979, State Senator William F. Bowen first introduced a bill calling for state funds to be divested from South Africa. This bill failed. For many years after that, he would attempt to pass the bill again, only for it to fail. Eventually, Bowen would ally himself with SUAA and highlight their divestment campaign.
This collaboration ensured that OSU felt not only bottom-up pressure from its consumers and workers, but also top-down pressure from state senators with governing power.
This is markedly different from the state’s relationship to present divestment campaigns. In fact, the state legislature has recently introduced bills that would forbid OSU from divesting from fossil fuels and already passed similar bills targeting OSU’s ability to divest from israel.
While state senators do not seem particularly excited about supporting present divestment campaigns, recent successes with ballot initiatives defending abortion rights and legalizing weed could inspire an avenue for how Ohioans might put top-down state pressure on OSU.
If we want to learn from the successes of SUAA in achieving divestment, then we must connect bottom-up and top-down forms of power and scale up our movements.
A better world is possible if and only if we are smart enough to build it. So let us be smart, let us be brave, and, above all else, let us win.