by Ohanzee, May 15, 2025, 9:25 ///
On May 12th, students at stanford university began a hunger strike “to protest the Israeli government’s ongoing siege of Gaza and demand that stanford university uphold its ethics and values” (@stanfordsjp). The hunger strike began alongside a list of demands delivered to the administration of Stanford. These four demands relate to divestment, dropping charges, resisting the trump administration, and fighting repressive university policies. The announcement letter can be read in full here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DJhcms4ONSq/?img_index=1
That same day, May 12th, the hunger strikers received an email from the Vice Provost for Student Affairs refusing to meet and condemning the means of protest. Reading this email, students from the university of chicago noticed a familiar figure. The person trivializing the actions of students, repeating empty platitudes, and shielding weapons manufacturers at stanford was the former university of chicago Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen.
Students at the university of chicago are familiar with Michele Rasmussen as the administrator who directed police to arrest 26 students and 2 faculty during a peaceful sit in in November of 2023. The chief demand of that protest was a public meeting with Rasmussen to discuss university investments. Rasmussen, the target of the protest, and the person who ordered the arrest of students, then oversaw the disciplinary case brought against these students.
Rasmussen, after serving as the mouthpiece of the university to condemn the 2024 encampment and defend the police raid against it, left Chicago to take her current place at stanford. It is here that she is resuming her daily labor as a monotone spokesperson for those unmoved by genocide.
As student organizers, there are two major takeaways from this:
Firstly, from thousands of students across the country, fuck Michele Rasmussen.
Secondly, the reappearance of Michelle Rasmussen gives us some clear truths about the nature of the student movement for divestment:
1. The group of people we are directing our demands to are an extremely small set of people who represent the wants of the Boards of Trustees which govern Universities.
2. These people do not share their thoughts, they repeat back the lawyer determined sentences they have been taught.
3. Pressuring them is an easy fight, but our energy should be directed at the boards
To the first point, while universities are run by CEOs and Oligarchs, Rasmussen is the textbook image of the billionaire defenders who stand between students and change. Although university administrations are bloated in many ways, the group of people in positions worth pressuring is in fact very small. The president of a university and a select few deans are the only administrative figures able to effect divestment. At each university, there are 2-3 priority targets aside from the board of trustees. We outnumber these figures by thousands. There are only twenty one universities in the US with an endowment over $10 billion; this includes stanford and the university of chicago. On route to sweeping divestment from the most complicit institutions nationally we only need to overcome about 60 low level academic bureaucrats.
In December of 2023, faculty at the University of Chicago pressured Michelle Rasmussen to drop the charges against students who participated in the entirely peaceful sit in. At one point they sent an email signed by dozens of faculty members. The response they received from Rasmussen was so polished and robotic, full of inhuman sentences, that they could not even tell if Rasmussen had read their initial email. This brings us to the second point, these figureheads are nothing more than PR foot soldiers. These people will not negotiate in good faith, they will not by moved by impassioned pleas. These people are paid to uphold the authority of the boards of trustees they work for and are only capable of operating under a small set of lawyer approved tactics.
To the final point, it is worth mentioning that when these people speak, they cannot help but leak out the residue of evil. The messages sent by university administrators reflect the soullessness of their offices. These are dispassionate life long middle managers who could not behave charismatically if they wanted to. Because of this, victory over these middle men simply means making the power of protest and disruption more impactful than the cheques these dunces receive. That is something we are capable of. Use every empty message to students to grow your numbers. Put pressure on the small set of figureheads day in and day out until they give up their posts. We can win these fights.
However, the most important fight is not against mouthpieces like Rasmussen, Aliviasatos, and Levin. The fight must be brought to the real decisionmakers: the board of trustees. While the daily harassment of these interchangeable administrators helps unseat the business-as-usual ethos that universities are hiding behind, systemic change only occurs when we target the bloody handed trustees.
The most visible agents of empire on US campuses are a small class of PR trained empty suits. Every day in Palestine people find the strength and bravery to stand up to and overcome bullets, tanks, and bulldozers. Surely we can find the strength to overcome suited cowards hiding behind ornate desks.
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