1y ago

1,000 Harvard Students Walk Out of Commencement to Support 13 Seniors Barred from Graduation over Gaza

www.democracynow.org

Students Walk Out of Harvard Commencement After 13 Barred from Graduation over Gaza

More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard.

Asmer Safi, one of the 13 pro-Palestinian student protesters barred from graduating, says that while his future has been thrown into uncertainty while he is on probation, he has no regrets about standing up for Palestinian rights.

US News @lemy.lol

TVgog56789 @lemy.lol

1y ago

1,000 Harvard Students Walk Out of Commencement to Support 13 Seniors Barred from Graduation over Gaza

www.democracynow.org /2024/5/24/harvard_gaza_protests

146 comments

Meanwhile, this is Harvard University senior Shruthi Kumar, who went off script as she gave the English commencement address, slamming Harvard for denying the degrees. She read from notes that she pulled out of her graduation gown.
This should get air time. While the others walked out in solidarity together, she's putting herself on the line individually. It gives administration a name to the crowd.
- There is a video in the article where her speech is aired. Her speech went so hard the word "slammed" might be justified for once.
- https://youtu.be/Ap6PqQ9wPYA
  This goes so hard
  
  Damn that crowd went so wild if they cheered any longer Harvard would call the police to tear gas them.
  
  where's the piped bot when you need it?
  
  Wow, how incredibly brave.
  
  i cant save this for later because it's made for kids? what?
- Damn, Gen Z is killing it
If we do not stand together then we'll fall alone.
- If we don’t stand together, we fall apart.
  Pithy and multi-faceted. (Also not mine.)
  In looking to credit this, I can’t find anything, but apparently Franklin said “we must all hang together or we will hang separately”, which is 100% the same vibe.
- We hang together, or we hang separately.
- And when we fall, we will fall together
Asmer Safi, one of the 13 pro-Palestinian student protesters barred from graduating, says that while his future has been thrown into uncertainty while he is on probation, he has no regrets about standing up for Palestinian rights.
I guarantee this person that half a dozen institutions around the world will issue them a degree with full credits already earned just for their standing up for Palestine.
- Are those institutions worth as much as Harvard on your resume?
  
  At this point it looks like they are worth more… so..
  
  Very possibly depending on the institution.
  
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a valid question and I don't think you're asking it to be mean.
  
  Of course not but you will get downvoted anyway cause this is Lemmy
  
  Who the fuck cares
- Attending a graduation ceremony is a different thing than being able to graduate. I think I read earlier that they were banned from the former, but I had not seen where they would literally be denied their actual degree.
  
  As this article points out they're barred from graduation itself.
  
  Your info is out of date. The university has since stated that the 13 students are on academic probation for a year, and will be ineligible for graduation. In short, they’re being held back for at least a full year.
  And realistically, the uni is likely waiting for the fervor to die down, before they find some bogus reason to kick all 13 out entirely. But they know they can’t do that while the spotlight is on them, so they’re barring the 13 from graduating while they wait for people to lose interest.
  
  No, they've been placed on probation and cannot graduate for at least 1 year.
The kids are alright.
- https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=bvSXGsKjxnA&si=iHDdDtvXOH2IkeLu
They are doing the right thing.
That’s like 50% of the graduating class?
- I just checked, and yeah, just over. The graduating class of 2024 has 1,980 students.
And Genocide Inc recruiters looking closely at the ones quietly graduating.
Good for them, it takes courage to go against the grain.
Trump will arrest all Palestine protesters on day 1 and promote REAL genocide in Gaza. All you anti-Biden assholes can eat a dick because that’s what you’ll get from orange Mussolini.
- K, and how is that relevant?
  In your mind, all these students were "Palestine protestsers" that hate Biden? Can you help us out here? Do you have a full thought you'd like to complete, or are you just scared and angry?
  To everyone else, how did people learn absolutely nothing about politics, or even basic communication during the last 8 damn years? Yelling and nagging at people, even if you're right, will always come off as being an insufferable, annoying asshole to anyone that doesn't already agree with you and isn't interested in something you've immediately felt the need to put down because you think you already know what's important
  There's plenty of good books out there for anyone interested in learning how to communicate with others, especially those you disagree with - I recommend You're Not Listening or I'm Just Saying as good starting points
  
  https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046
- It is already a real genocide. Israel just bombed tents in Rafah, causing a child to be beheaded.
- Nobody here said anything about biden, you're just insulting people unprompted.
  Edit: What exactly are you trying to accomplish by posting this?
  
  It is related. Moreover, can't blame him for preemptively calling out the typical bullshit and virtue signaling we've been seeing.
  
  I’m trying to highlight the distinction between Biden and Trump options. There are many on social media that are proclaiming they will not vote for Biden because he is “promoting genocide”. Despite the fact that every POTUS in the last 50 years has had this exact policy (supporting and providing weaponry to Israel). Despite the fact that Trump is actively in favor of genocide and fascism. The lesser of 2 evils is also known as “the better choice.”
- Yeah genius, they're out there protesting "Biden"
- Because they aren't being arrested now? Did you have some kind of news feed that didn't show the police going after college kids with batons?
  
  Your inability to understand the difference between much and few is embarrassing. Thanks for proving my point of lunatics asking for worse than now.
- Joke's on you, I love dick!
- I can't tell if you're here to instigate as a right wing psyop or because you have so much electoralism brainrot that you have to make everything about an election that is still months away when there are more important things happening right now. People are dying.
  
  JFC, pick your topic to get over outraged about. 150,000 people die a day in the world. Burning fossil fuels is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 of those deaths. https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel-emissions-higher-previously-thought
  Get some perspective and realize that there are more important things happening right now. People are dying. All over the world.
- Not related to the article, and anyway if Biden wanted my vote he should actually try to earn it rather than bash his opponent.
  
  lol how dense do you have to be to not realize Biden is the most progressive president in the last 50 years. Progressive enough? Of course not. But the most progressive in your lifetime. Good luck cutting your nose off to spite your face lol.
  
  https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046
- The origins of this are almost certainly rooted in right-wing operative and foreign troll farms intending to sow defeatism and wedge-drive the Democratic coalition. The people promoting this have a tendency to fall into the category of either being the ones serving the kool-aid, or drinking the kool-aid.
  What's more is that the right is trying so hard to use this moment to paint the left as being antisemitic. If Republicans didn't paint with such broad strokes the pro-Gazan civilian protests by pointing to fringe protesters — often from outside groups — this wouldn't have been a problem in the first place. Shame on any university staff that cave to the bullshit pressure.
  
  Are the democrats actively supporting genocide and alienating the voters they need to win in November?
  No, it is the children who are right wing troll farms.
That speech and the crowd's reactions gave me the chills.
Harvard, Harvard, Harvard.... Isn't that Bill Ackman's school?
Anyone know who this dude at 11:26 in the speech and what his stance is? He looks like he's upset at the speaker.
- You know what I love about Lemmy? If you block someone, you legitimately just don't see their comments.
- Fuck off scammer
Graduation is optional. The dream we were sold in highschool of "go to college" was propaganda spun up by colleges looking to pad their books with your tuition. Many jobs you are seeking have apprenticeship programs where they pay you to learn.
College is and remains a giant expensive mixer to find someone to date. That's mostly it. Anything outside of a select few professions can be learned outside of a campus with fresher material.
If you want to learn a profession there is nothing gatekeeping you from doing it.
- I can't speak for you, but I personally want a doctor who learned the profession through an organization that gatekeeps people who didn't go to college from doing it.
  
  It's almost as if you breezed by the acknowledgement that some jobs do require secondary education. A fun fact about those doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals: following school they then spend another 4+ years in residency where they actually develop the skills they need to be that doctor you were referring to.
- The gatekeeping happens at the end or after the university and before you enter the profession.
  It's generally called a test (or multiple tests) which judge the quality of one's knowledge before one is allowed to practice as an expert in a certain area.
  The graduation is the part where the University produces a certificate in which they state that they have indeed tested somebody's knowledge and how good it was determined to be. If a person goes through the whole learning process but don't get that certificate, future employeers might not (in some areas, they legally can't) consider that person for employment in that area (I explain why at the end).
  Generally the actual learning is not gatekept: for example, in my area - software development - people absolutelly can do the entire learning outside formal education and still end up working in it professionally, though at the start of one's career one still has to have some kind of evidence of one's capabilities (which in this case isn't provided by a University having assessed your knowledge on it), so normally the path to it that bypasses Academia involves first working professionally in an adjacent area (such as systems administration) and moving from that to software development (good sys admins have to know how to program)
  However for "protected professions" (such as Law) or for were the costs of errors can mean death (such as Medical or Civil Pilot) at minimum you have to be assessed including a significant practical period under supervisions (a couple of years for a Medical doctor depending on speciality, 1000h of flight for Civil Pilots, plus specific training each kind of plane they're flying) and that practicing under supervision is lot harded - often impossible - to get if a person didn't come via a formal education setting.
  Also in some areas it's pretty close to impossible to get certified as knowledgeable without going through the entire formal Education process, which is indeed unfair and should not be the case - if should be possible for anybody to pay to be assessed and certified without having to pay for the formal learning.
  Even in areas which are neither protected professions nor life-and-death, not having the certification which is the Diploma negativelly impacts a person's chances to find their first and maybe second jobs. The problem is when hiring managers get lots of candidates for a position, they don't have time to talk to them all because they also have to do their normal job alongside candidate selection, so instead they prune the list of candidates and not having something that in some way certificates that a candidate has the required knowledge (which for a first job is generally a Diploma, but for latter jobs is going to be previous job experience) is a common criteria because it usually works.
- College increases your pay rate and opens the door to research and development, there is no alternative. You're not going to engineer bridges and plan cities without a degree. The majority of Citizen Science papers submitted are students pursuing a PhD, and the vast majority of them have incredibly small sample sizes for data sources.
  You're just not going to have a large impact without a degree, and the number of exceptions prove the rule.
  
  This is true. I went back to school for computer science. As soon as I graduated, received a significant bump in pay at my current job. Well worth it.
  
  Pay rate increases while at your job and gaining "higher" education is a mixed bag. How much did that education cost vs the pay raise? How long is required to break even on that investment? With the constantly rising costs for said education that gap isn't getting smaller either.
  The sciences are, certainly, one field that can benefit from higher ed. Of course I made such an acknowledgement in my original statement as well. While it seems a few dozen people chose to take that as 'we don't need no education'... the statement was directed at funneling the masses through a system to extract profit... and to have a high hit rate offer courses that could be learned directly from the trade being entered. It's a racket. A long con. And it's an unfortunate reality a lot of students don't realize they are caught in until they exit the machine on the other side.
- That use to be the case for programming jobs, but ever since the layoffs, those with a degree are at an advantage. I was laid off, but it only took me 6 weeks to land a new job thanks to my CS degree. My cohorts without a degree have been looking for 6 months...
  
  I've seen the opposite be true as well - but food for thought here: some of your cohorts probably had similar work experience as you... meaning the differentiator (tie breaker) was certainly the additional "experience." I'm glad you found the job. Layoffs have been brutal lately.
  
  Balls
- College (esp private schools, more than community colleges) can certainly be overpriced for plenty of people.
  Though…
  What percentage of Big 4 and big tech company employees have college degrees?
- Learning a profession is sadly a relatively small part of how an institution helps you get a good job.
  There are a number of jobs that have an insurmountable check box for "has college degree" in the HR checklist. Doesn't matter if every interviewer says "hire him", HR will refuse. Hell about three years into my career, my employer lost some records including their documentation that I had a degree, and they had informed me that I had three months to get my university to prove my status again, or my job would be terminated, that I had gotten and by their own admission I could not possibly have had if hadn't proven it before, but their process was clear, so I had to get them what they wanted to keep the job.
  Further, there are particularly exclusive companies that may insist on a particular set of colleges, e.g a list of ivy League universities that they will accept applicants from and nothing else will cut it, because they advertise their ivy League credentials to clients.
  Even without a formal list, the names carry weight. When I was working on vetting candidates, which was usually a pretty grueling interview process, management had one guy skip the interviews and go straight to job offer because they saw MIT as their school.
  In my experience, the people from there are not special and are not particularly better equipped for the sorts of work I deal with, but branding carries a lot of weight.
  
  That sounds like a rough experience friend, but if I was working at a company that needed to check up on my documentation after working there for some time - I'd probably find a new job where I wasn't just employee 253966.
  To your point about names carrying their weight - that's a problem in itself: what about those that don't go to ivy league? What about those that do that simply lack any marketable skill outside of where they went?
  I agree that the interview process at a lot of aforementioned places is particularly awful. Once working there it typically doesn't improve. The facilities are nice enough, sure... but I've seen far too many people working for companies like that get laid off regardless of how performant they were. They are just a line item.
  The point I made initially was that many jobs do not require the degree to do the work. Many professions do not benefit from a 4 year college building a curriculum around now outdated information.
  There are good companies and good professions that do not have those requirements.
- While it's true that many people's careers post-college are not directly related to their degree, it's still valuable to employers.
  What a degree says is that an individual can sucessfully complete a project that takes years of work and at least enough professionalism to get through.
  
  I see this point used frequently - and it isn't wrong ... but it's only half of a statement. In that time let's say someone holds a position for 4 years of experience. These two things are not equally weighted, but very similar at that point. As time progresses that piece of paper continues to lose value when compared to experience in the field.
  The degree is, in essence, a signal that someone has achieved at least the base level of competency in a field and stuck with it for x time. So assuming 2 parties with 0 work experience vie for a job naturally the degree holder will win out. It gets murkier when comparing someone with 4 years with in field experience to a 4 year degree holder with 0 experience.
  The point I aimed to make was just that. It's a perfectly reasonable assertion.
- I thank BIG MUCH.. EXPERT removed ON INSTAGRAM made I many dollars!!! $$$
  /s

146 comments