Last Tuesday, Providence voters approved Ballot Question 7, divesting city funds from foreign countries conducting severe violations of human rights and companies that enable those violations, by a wide majority: 74.45% for and 25.55% against. Its wide margin of success was the result of months of campaigning by the Providence for Palestine coalition. Despite not mentioning Israel or Palestine by name, both the question’s proponents and opponents understood that Israel was the primary focus. Today, I’m not interested in relitigating the merits of divestment from Israel — I’ve written in favor of a divestment proposal for Brown in the past, and there’s been plenty of robust discourse in this section both for and against it in Providence. Rather, I want to draw from it a lesson for student activists at Brown: Progressive victories are better achieved through local democracy than by appealing to unaccountable university committees.
After my class graduates this spring, few students at Brown will remember the pro-Palestine protests of 2023 and 2024. In my first year at Brown, a coalition of student activists engaged in two sit-ins, a hunger strike and an encampment of over 100 students. Their demand — that the Brown Corporation, the University’s highest governing committee, hear them out on divestment, which had been recommended by a University committee — was repeatedly rejected. Finally, in exchange for the coalition dismantling the encampment, the Corporation agreed to consider the proposal (in part because Brown needed to cut down a tree on the Main Green in time for Commencement), then rejected it once and for all, putting an end to 13 years of campaigning for divestment.
The lesson I learned from the encampment saga is that the undemocratic structure of the University incentivizes its leaders to ignore democratic efforts. Brown is not a democracy. If you want to change policies, you have to persuade the Corporation, our highest governing body. However, Corporation members are unelected (except for a few alum trustees) and therefore unaccountable to students and faculty. Pro-Palestine activists had tried a student referendum, to no avail. They tried appealing to Corporation members directly, to no avail. Consensus-building hadn’t worked, so the only path left was to strong-arm the Corporation by escalating disruptive civil disobedience. Although it was nonviolent, the occupation of the Main Green was a show of physical power intended to pressure the University. After the Corporation rejected divestment, Students for Justice in Palestine aggressively protested. This protest led to the club’s suspension, but one could hardly call them irrational — when the Corporation cut a deal to end the encampment, they revealed that they would respond to shows of force.
The failure of Brown divestment inspired the activists in the Graduate Labor Organization (a part of RIFT-AFT Local 6516) to switch to a more democratic arena: local government. Their communications chair, Adit Sabnis GS, said in a victory speech: “What makes it so special is we decided that we were no longer going to beg our leaders to have a moral compass … we started at Brown, we tried to divest, it didn’t work … So what did we do? We said we don’t care about our leaders, our city charter allows us to bring a binding ordinance to the people.” This choice was innovative: Over 120 city councils around the country have passed divestment resolutions, but Providence was the first in the nation to do so via a ballot initiative.
With the change in arena came a change in tactics. Rather than begging, bullying and bargaining with unelected Corporation members, winning a ballot initiative requires building consensus with voters on the ground. The Providence Eye reported that over six months, 130 Providence for Palestine volunteers collected nearly 9,000 signatures (of which about 6,000 were ultimately accepted by the city) to put divestment on the ballot. Volunteers collected signatures at public parks, on front porches and at political events as the September primary approached. When election day came, far from “dividing the community,” as some opponents feared, divestment won nearly 28,000 votes, accounting for almost 75% of voters. This was democracy in action.
I believe this case study carries important lessons for Brown student activists: prioritize building movements off-campus, not on. . First, local democracy gives us a more straightforward path to victory. Student activism at Brown has long sought to influence University policy and has found many successes, but the encampment showed that on-campus campaigns hinge on the positions of unaccountable administrators. By contrast, the ballot initiative allowed Providence for Palestine to turn a popular message and organizing effort into victory.
Electoral success is not the only benefit: Off-campus organizing also creates more lasting connections. Research shows that student activists tend to stop volunteering after college because they lose their organizational membership. Loss of institutional knowledge when key leaders graduate can also stymie student organizing. But local community organizations and political parties provide student activists a home long after graduation, as well as more experienced organizers from whom to learn.
Moving our organizing center of gravity off campus may also help our political education. The left is often criticized for being disproportionately college-educated and out of touch with the real “working class.” This is partly because elite universities have become a primary incubator of left-wing movements. This is bad for the left: It limits our political dialogue to an Ivy League echo chamber and risks “elite capture,” in which radical movements devolve into ones that primarily serve elite interests. By contrast, winning over voters in a town where just 35% of residents have graduated college and median household income is $68,000 gives us a much more grounded view of social justice.
Plenty of progressive activist groups already partner with local organizations: SJP with the Rhode Island Party for Socialism and Liberation, Sunrise Brown with various environmental organizations and grassroots efforts and Students for Educational Equity with the Providence Student Union. Others, like Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere and Brown Harm Reduction Coalition, do direct outreach to our homeless neighbors. Yet, quite a lot of activist attention is still directed at changing Brown University policies: SEE is aiming to alter financial aid requirements and SJP has targeted Brown’s study abroad programs in Israel. Regardless of the merits of these campaigns, I believe our resources would be better spent off-campus. Winning divestment in Providence was only half the battle; its implementation will face legal and logistical challenges, ones that students could help the city overcome.
My political engagement in Rhode Island — whether protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions, studying state climate policy, giving testimony on legislation, volunteering with refugee resettlement agencies or canvassing to elect David Morales MPA’19 and progressive city council members — has taught me more about politics than any class or on-campus organizing effort. I would encourage all politically minded students, especially those on the left, to climb down from the ivory tower and make change more directly in the Ocean State.
Evan Tao is an opinions columnist and member of the editorial page board. He is a senior from Cambridge, MA concentrating in anthropology and IAPA (policy and governance). In his free time, he leads Brown’s Irish music ensemble.
