On March 10th, 2025, at 12pm, the Hamilton Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa organized a demonstration named “Stand Up for the Humanities” in front of Root Hall. A small number of faculty, students, and members of the local community protested the combined POTUS and DOGE agenda to slash funding for the humanities in higher education.
I stood among the protesters holding a sign that my friend made, which said “Fund the NEH. Stand up for Mahmoud Khalil. Fuck ICE.” NEH, one of the five organizations the demonstration was focused on protecting, or “lobbying for” as one of the event’s organizers framed it, is the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that funds humanities programs in the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency that supposedly “[conducts] criminal investigations and [enforces] immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”
ICE unlawfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and participant in Columbia University's 2024 student encampment protests. The Department of Homeland Security has alleged that Khalil "led activities aligned to Hamas" while failing to provide any evidence. Even though Khalil is a U.S. permanent resident who holds a green card, the State department has decided to revoke his green card. Funding the NEH is just as relevant to the conversation for students as protesting ICE is, especially considering the violent repression that Columbia University has faced in light of recent Trumpian executive orders.
While I appreciate students and colleagues mobilizing together to protest the Presidential administration’s crusade against the humanities, I was disappointed by the sanitized nature of the demonstration. We were not obstructing anything. Everyone was making polite conversation amongst each other. We stood “civilly,” waiting for the press to roll in. It felt like we were posing for the camera. We were facing the dorms, where there was a noticeable lack of people walking by, just so that the press could catch a glimpse of us protesting. This sense of staged activism left me questioning its deeper purpose.
Besides protesting against the funding to NEH getting cut, I would think chanting “stand up for humanities” means standing up for the humanity in humanities. A white woman with medium length gray hair came up to me and said that “Fuck ICE” was diluting the purpose of “what we are trying to do here.” The press, who were scheduled to attend the protest, would wrongfully focus on “Fuck ICE” instead of “Standing Up for the Humanities.” She told me to “please think about that,” and then walked away. My, I do love the spirit of open conversation and dialogue at a prominent institution such as Hamilton College. (1)
As I talked to my friends standing in the other corner of the Root Hall entrance, another white woman with short gray hair approached. She walked up to the person of color holding a sign that said “Fuck ICE” in big, bold letters. She told them that if the media saw the sign, they would view us as rich, snobby liberal arts college students on a hill. She did not speak to many of the White people who surrounded them, carrying similar messages.
In response to these white women trying to censor protestors of color regarding an issue that directly implicates vulnerable student populations on campus, one of my friends astutely pointed out: Nazis burned books before they burned people. So if we are protesting against burning books, should we then not protest against the burning of people? If we are protesting against defunding NEH, should we then not protest against the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil?
We can pretend to care about human beings. We can pretend to care about education as one of our basic human rights. And so we should protest against the President of the United States, but I guess not ICE necessarily. So we should only protest against the DOGE agenda? So we should keep the humanities intact for all the non-immigrants in the U.S..Technically speaking, don’t we all come from immigrant families? (2) So then the message of this demonstration is that we should keep funding the humanities for white people.
In a faculty meeting on March 4, 2025, several faculty members brought up concerns regarding potential ICE raids on campus. (3) Dean Munemo responded,
“What do we do if ICE shows up on campus? The answer there is straightforward. Whoever comes to campus, don't take it upon you to adjudicate what it is that they're asking for. Send them to Campus Safety. Campus Safety is the one place that has been tasked with handling all manner of issues, should we get to that place. If people are coming to campus, funnel them to Campus Safety as a central clearing space, and they will have a protocol of how they respond to those requests.”
During the same meeting, faculty members raised concerns regarding surveillance on campus, rendering students vulnerable to ICE raids. One of the faculty members mentioned how the government at one point told libraries that they would possibly need to turn over the records of who borrowed which book. Thus, they were concerned about the extent to and degree of detail in which information about DEI efforts across campus would be collected. Furthermore, another faculty member brought up their concern regarding the protest policy on campus (i.e., students are required to make public who is organizing a given protest) and about how international students might be more at risk during potential ICE raids. They requested that the college be very careful about what it documents.
When college policy ostensibly promotes inaction, when there is a fear of surveillance on campus and faculty are finding themselves in a precarious position, how can we not say “Fuck ICE” at the same protest where we are saying “Fund NEH”? How can we not say we “stand up for humanity” at the same protest where we are standing up for humanities?
President Trump placed executive orders to not only implement the Department of Governmental Efficiency initiative, but also to supposedly “restore merit-based opportunity” by criminalizing DEI efforts, redefine “American citizenship” and crack down on “illegal immigrants” to the US. We are fighting against the same administration that plans to defund the NEH. The separate causes we are fighting for are spawning from the same administration. It does not make sense for the organizers of the “Stand Up For Humanities” protest to suppress conversation about ICE. None of us are free until all of us are free. Do we at Hamilton College realize this? Do we at Hamilton College truly believe this?
An old white male reporter from WKTV came, set up their camera, recorded our demonstration (after being heavily talked to by the same aforementioned white women), and left. Right after, the same short-haired white woman who called out the student of color for holding a “Fuck ICE” sign announced that students and faculty were free to leave for class or lunch. Ah, a photo-op for human rights. How spectacular. No wonder they didn’t want us to hold signs that said “Fuck ICE”! Inside, while we were taping our signs onto the walls, a faculty member made sure to use tape that “didn’t destroy the walls.”
It’s clear that “standing up for humanities” at Hamilton means only standing up for some people’s human rights. It's clear that it means only going so far as to not "destroy the walls" of the systemic and culturalized passivity that is so deeply American. Yes, we must “stand up for the humanities.” I just ask: if NEH remains funded by the Trump administration, then will we continue to stand up for humanity? Or do we still think that standing up for immigrants dilutes our institutional messaging and “destroys the walls”?
Now how does that sound? I’m asking, because that sounds pretty racist to me.
Footnotes
Sarcasm
Except for Native American peoples.
March 4 2025 Faculty Meeting under Community Tab, Faculty Meeting Notes, My Hamilton