A few dozen students gather outside the Sarratt Student Center — the heart of undergraduate life at Vanderbilt — near a plywood wall. They’ve spent a week going back and forth with administrators about whether this wall, a hand-painted mix of images and text about the history of Palestine, can exist on this grass triangle for these few days.
Student groups came together in February hoping to pass a resolution through the Vanderbilt Student Government supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led effort to leverage international economic power against the state of Israel. Five-plus months into Israel’s military invasion of Gaza — a response to deadly attacks on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 — Palestinian deaths climbed above 20,000 and Israel was fighting allegations of genocide.
“What’s happening in Gaza now is evidence of the immense oppressive power Israel has over Palestine,” one organizer tells the Scene. Students involved in pro-Palestine organizing have asked to remain anonymous fearing retaliation from classmates. “The fact that everyone on campus has been apathetic and silent made us feel more passionate about creating a space for students to express their support for Palestinians.”
Vanderbilt chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spearheaded the BDS effort. The first flyer, encouraging students to sign a petition supporting a student government BDS resolution, appeared on Feb. 23. It garnered more than 600 signatures, clearing the threshold required to put it in the student government constitution.
The next day, SJP received a citation from the student accountability office. So began a series of procedural setbacks culminating in an ongoing sit-in by students demanding that their government be allowed to vote on an official BDS position.
New campus rules around speech and protest, organized under a three-pillared “Commitment to Free Expression,” quickly followed Daniel Diermeier’s ascension to the Vanderbilt chancellorship in 2019. Regular op-eds from Diermeier position Vanderbilt as a bastion of enlightened discourse restoring “reason, rationality and honesty” to America’s campuses in hopes of healing a fractured nation.
Diermeier’s strategy has been to augment and strengthen university rules around expression and, in turn, crack down on students who don’t comply with administration-approved definitions of speech. A bulked-up student handbook functions as administrators’ law code; the office of student accountability is its judicial system. Campus campaigns to form a graduate student union, divest from fossil fuels and, now, express pro-Palestinian views have all tested the administration’s ability to referee contentious campus debates in recent years. Between 2021 and 2022, Vanderbilt expanded the handbook’s 186-word “Demonstrations and Dissent” paragraph into a 1,400-word section titled “Demonstrations, Dissents, and Protests” setting out rules around protest definitions, planning and implementation. This year’s policy can be found here.
These semantic definitions became the boundaries of debate between pro-Palestine student organizers and Vanderbilt deans. Students came back with a flyer explaining the BDS movement and describing efforts as a coalition between registered student groups. Dean Neil Jamerson fired back on March 1.
“Your postings failed to include the name(s) of the individual(s) posting, date posted, and were not posted in designated spaces in accordance with the ‘Notices, Posters, Banners, and Printed Announcements’ policy,” he wrote to five student leaders heading the coalition. “Note that future policy violations can be referred to Student Accountability to address on an individual basis, which may include the identified leaders of an unrecognized organization in accordance with the ‘Suspended, Expelled, or Otherwise Unrecognized Organizations’ policy.”
On March 5, the university abruptly canceled SJP’s room reservation for a March 6 coalition meeting, implying that SJP, a registered student organization, was a “front” for the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition, an unregistered student group without reservation rights. A contentious email chain between organizers and student affairs deans Jamerson and Traci Ray mired conversation in a debate over whether VDC was a campaign of registered student groups (as students maintain) or itself an unregistered student entity, the view posited by Ray and Jamerson. Neither Ray nor Jamerson responded to the Scene’s requests for comment.
“The presidents of the recognized organizations will need to work with Dean Ray to move away from Vanderbilt Divest Coalition moniker given the actions of those involved with VDC to date are organizational in nature,” Jamerson wrote in an email to student organizers on March 6. “You should prepare for potential protests of the meeting should you move forward in person.”
The groups met elsewhere. There were no protests. In the subsequent days, Jamerson confirmed that SJP was the official student group sponsoring the coalition. On March 14, Vanderbilt canceled SJP’s reservation outside Sarratt to display its info wall. Oliver Colbert, assistant director at Vanderbilt’s Student Center for Social Justice and Identity, broke the news to the SJP president, offering an alternative location on a different quad. He cited imminent landscaping at SJP’s initially reserved location and shared university concerns that the wall might tip over.
Around the same time, students got news that the university rejected its BDS petition from being heard by the student government. Administrators, student representatives and university lawyers had weighed the legality of a BDS constitutional amendment for three weeks. Vanderbilt legal counsel issued an opinion, delivered by Dean Traci Ray:
“VSG was informed by the Office of the General Counsel that under federal and state laws, boycotts by U.S. organizations of countries friendly to the United States can result in fines, penalties, or disbarment from contractor status. Any action by VSG, or any other registered student organization, to preclude expenditures of University funds on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement’s consumer and organic boycott targets could run counter to these laws, expose the University to potential fines and other risks, and therefore cannot be the subject of an amendment to the VSG constitution or statutes.”
On Monday, March 18, lawyers at Palestine Legal, a nonprofit center enlisted by student organizers, sent Vanderbilt General Counsel Ruby Shellaway a cease-and-desist letter accusing the administration of violating students’ rights and urging the school to let a BDS vote go forward. The same day, students put up SJP’s wall outside of Rand Dining Center, setting in motion the original plan that had been approved by the university before it had reneged a few days earlier. No groundskeepers showed up. They were told the work order had been pushed to Wednesday. On Wednesday, they were told work would be pushed to Friday. Protesters intend to stay until Vanderbilt allows their student government to move forward with a BDS vote.
Diermeier has not commented directly on the campus push for a BDS vote, but screenshots reviewed by the Scene show that his executive assistant has viewed the coalition’s Instagram account in recent days.
