Starting at 7 a.m., around 30 San Francisco State University students picketed on Holloway Avenue near the Administration Building, following Monday’s open bargaining session with SFSU President Lynn Mahoney.
After Mahoney met with elected representatives from Students for Gaza SFSU to publicly negotiate on May 6, the student organization announced via an Instagram post that their demands were not met. As a response, they held a picket line this morning “to let admin know they will not stop until they Disclose, Divest, Defend, and Declare” according to the Instagram post.
Students showed up outside of the Administration Building, across from Manzanita Square, chanting, “Lynn Mahoney, you can’t hide, you invest in genocide.” Protesters also blocked the entrance to the administrative parking lot.
Miguel Hernandez, dean of students, and Chris Trudell, assistant dean of students, were present to witness the demonstration.
Sydney R., a media liaison for the SFSU encampment who did not want to disclose her last name for safety concerns, said the open discussion does not mean students will be complicit but instead, they’re hoping to make their voices louder as they enter the second week of encampment.
“Yesterday was a big step forward, but we still have a lot of work to do,” Sydney R. said. “We’re going to be out here and make sure that we are heard until that work is finished. She [Mahoney] will not take a political stance but we want to make it very clear that genocide is a nonpartisan issue. Genocide is a human rights issue. It is not political. Human lives are not political.”
Students for Gaza SFSU have been in communication with organizers of encampments across California, including at UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, USC and Chico State, to aid each other with necessities, according to Sydney R.
Students passed around a megaphone amongst each other, taking turns chanting and recapping Monday’s open bargaining session on the picket line. Their demands to disclose, divest, defend and declare were touched on during yesterday’s discussion and they felt like progress was made except on the fourth demand — declare.
“The fourth demand, which was to declare what is happening in Gaza a genocide was not something that the administration of this campus necessarily agreed on,” said Amey K., another media liaison for the SFSU encampment who did not want to disclose her last name for safety concerns.
Mahoney stated Monday that it was not her job to “make political statements.”
“I am not the secretary of state,” Mahoney said. “As a president of a university, I don’t make political statements. I have in the past broadly talked about how I don’t support as individual violence or violence against unarmed civilians. That never changes. But no, I don’t I don’t make broad political declarations. I’m not running for office; I have one concern, and it’s everyone around this circle. And it’s making sure that you and the folks who come after you, and the people who disagree with you on campus, or outside organizations that don’t agree with us and have the right to come here and engage in that messy democratic process. And to do that, I steadfastly believe, requires that [university] presidents not mistake their roles for being that of secretary of state.”
Police were patrolling the picketing site. Students hung posters, a flag and their list of demands as they continued to chant. The group of students grew around 10 a.m., ending with around 40 by 11 a.m.
Students for Gaza SFSU’s encampment will have a screen printing event from 1-3 p.m. later this afternoon. A “CSU-wide day of action,” a call for all their campuses to rally to demand a stop in supporting the genocide in Gaza, is set to occur on May 8 at 1 p.m.
“We are ultimately hoping that every CSU possible is going to be able to join,” Sydney said. “We’re hoping to see lots more down in Southern California closer to where the CSU meets. Up here, we’re going to be meeting at our quad and we are going to be gathered together to show our solidarity with all other campuses as well.”
The University Police Department and administration did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
This story has been updated for clarity.
