On winter nights, Bowdoin College campus is usually quiet, and with a snowstorm on the horizon the silence that sets in is borderline eerie. Students shelter in their dorms; dining workers, many of whom live across town lines, are booked into local hotels so they aren’t prevented from working by the potentially dangerous weather coming overnight. Around the quad, many buildings closed for the night remain lit up and entirely empty.
But between Thursday, February 6 and into the night of Monday, February 10, the atmosphere took on a different edge, as Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine turned a rally in the student union into the first encampment of the new year—and the new administration. The Shaban al-Dolou Encampment was formed in Morrell Lounge, the main meeting area of the student union, out of donated tents and populated by a varying number of student activists. They named their space after a peer: Shaban al-Dolou, a Palestinian student who was burned to death by an occupation airstrike.
A speech from the second floor window of Morrell Lounge explained why they chose to name the encampment after Shaban al-Dolou,
He spent his last months recording the everyday horrors in Palestine… The constant bombing, the hunger, the intense, unending fear of children, families, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters… no individual has been spared. He was displaced and [he was] attempting to get his family out of Palestine. He was a student studying to be a software engineer. He was nineteen… he was nineteen years old and he was burned alive in a hospital. [Shouts of “Shame!” come from the crowd.] These are the tragedies that are happening every single day. More deaths than we can ever imagine. We brought this campaign to this campus in Shaban’s name and for all the individuals in Palestine. That is who we are fighting for. That is why we are here. Let’s not forget that. Let’s dig our roots into this knowledge. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for supporting the people of Palestine.
The atmosphere was charged—tense sometimes—as students rushed past security or clambered through open windows to join the encampment. Yet it was jubilant at others, as students within Morrell led cheers from the second story and supporters outside blasted music and danced together. During the night, community members from a number of different groups—including Bowdoin Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Maine DSA, PSL, JVP, PeaceWorks of Greater Brunswick, and Maine Coalition for Palestine—patrolled the sprawling complex at all hours, watching for a potential incursion by police or security. It was during these cold, small hours of the morning that a sense of uncertainty dominated.
For decades, students, staff, and faculty at Bowdoin have understood the “Bowdoin Bubble”—a sense that this small, exclusive liberal arts college tucked away in a quiet corner of Maine is uniquely isolated from the complicated workings of the rest of the world. Of course, the real world has always been reflected in the internal Bowdoin experience. Over two centuries old, the college has long been a bastion of wealthy whiteness, which comes with its own intense political identity. Though recent decades have seen a marked increase in non-white and low-income students, it’s debatable how well Bowdoin has adjusted, as the campus culture remains mired in assumptions around student privilege and accessibility, often leaving marginalized students frustrated or without the resources inherent to the experiences of their more privileged peers.
There have been political movements at Bowdoin in the past. It took over a decade of student organizing to convince the school to divest from the Apartheid regime in South Africa; more recently, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, students came together multiple times to advocate for better pay for service staff.
The encampment itself did not come from nowhere. It represented another step in more than a year-long campaign by Bowdoin SJP, including a campus referendum in which a supermajority of students voted to ask the College to “take an institutional stand against scholasticide in Gaza… and refrain from future investment… in certain arms manufacturers.”
But Bowdoin had never seen anything like the Shaban al-Dolou encampment. It showed. Security on the first day was visibly confused and unprepared, regularly making phone calls to establish admittance procedures, and administration fumbled early on by electing to shut down the entire student union building.
For context, the renamed Shaban al-Dolou Union (formerly Smith Union) is the main student hub on campus. It is normally open 24/7 to campus community members, and houses three dining hubs—the grill, the cafe, and a convenience store—as well as the student book store, mailroom, a gymnasium, an art gallery, and several rec rooms.
The student encampment obstructed none of these operations. Morrell Lounge is a large open space dominated by chairs, couches, and coffee tables, where students would be working, hanging out, or sleeping anyway. On Thursday night, the first night of the encampment and prior to the building’s closure, the C-Store raked in money from the encamped students.
The administration’s decision to shut-down the whole building antagonized a normally politically apathetic campus. Admin attempted to frame the peaceful protest as “hostile,” necessitating the closure for staff safety. It’s difficult to say immediately after the fact how effective this piece of propaganda was, but as a former dining staffer at Bowdoin, it’s transparently ridiculous. After all, dining staff—deemed essential by the college—are expected to work through severe snowstorms, pandemics, and county-wide active shooter emergencies. As Fatah Azzam from the Maine Coalition for Palestine explained, “It’s not like they’re violating anyone’s safety or security or anything like that at all. They’re just sitting and saying, ‘We are here; we want you to listen to us.”
The longer the encampment held out, the greater the sense of uncertainty. Since this was the first time Bowdoin had seen a direct action of this scale, it was impossible to say whether the higher-ups would cave or lash out in response. Over the next few days, admin continued to send out self-contradictory warnings, including veiled but confused threats of disciplinary action and moving-target deadlines. According to students inside and allied faculty, conditions in the encampment became increasingly hostile as administrative pressure mounted.
At SJP’s request, community members mobilized. Supply runs, letter write-ins, cop watches, and alumni pressure campaigns were organized to maintain the encampment, and students and locals alike rallied around the clock to support the activists.
The Bowdoin activists were up against a formidable foe. Bowdoin has many billions of reasons to remain committed to the status quo. It’s a private “little Ivy” that depends almost entirely on alumni and parent donations. The college’s leaders may feel they can’t afford to rock the proverbial boat and fund the latest football field makeover.
More insidiously, advocating for serious change at a small privileged school puts marginalized students at risk. With a student population of less than two thousand, and a campus culture dominated by workaholic perfectionism and political passivity, there is little safety net. The students in the Shaban al-Dalou encampment wouldn’t have had much in the way of padding from privileged classmates looking out for them. Many student activists face an outsized risk from a disciplinary suspension or trespass charge, which could carry life-altering consequences without the backing of family wealth or security. One of the crueler ironies of the past year and a half at Bowdoin is that the administration frequently insisted divestment would threaten financial aid—and then leveraged the loss of that aid against student protestors as part of their potential disciplinary procedures.
For many community members and more experienced organizers, this was one of the most important parts of their own participation: they wanted the students who were risking so much to know that, in advocating for Palestinian liberation, they had support from outside Bowdoin campus. They hoped that this support would encourage the students and give the administration pause, convincing them to back away from some of their more dire threats.
On Monday night, during a rally which attracted hundreds of supporters on the fifth day of the occupation, several Bowdoin deans were seen exiting the union through an adjacent building. Not long after, the Shaban al-Dalou encampment student activists agreed to disperse pending further negotiations.
The Bowdoin Orient quoted Olivia Kenney, Bowdoin class of ‘25 and one of the lead organizers: “The College has finally come and agreed to work with us in good faith toward a conclusion to this action.”
Within days following the dissolution of Shaban al-Dalou, Bowdoin SJP released a statement thanking supporters and recommiting themselves to the fight for justice in occupied Palestine. They also revealed that around sixty students were facing disciplinary measures, and eight were under temporary suspension, denied access to food and housing by a college that has frequently used both as a means of control.
It is as yet too early to know the totality of policies and punishments that will be discussed between Bowdoin SJP, FSJP, and a rattled administration, but a few things seem clear. Bowdoin has not divested any of its considerable wealth from the genocidal state of Israel and remains a campus dominated by a sense of liberal complacency. Following clean-up, the student union will once again be humming along on its operations, and depoliticized Bowdoin community members can get coffee and sandwiches without having to think, however briefly, of the suffering of the people of occupied Palestine.
At the same time, community members clinging to that sense of complacency may now be doing so a little more desperately. The student activists proved that the Bowdoin Bubble can be burst, and a window opened on to the global atrocities propped up by entrenched academic systems.
Local supporters will not soon forget the encampment, or allow it to be forgotten. And if and when Bowdoin does decide to follow the path of divestment, the names of its administrators will be invariably linked with this refusal of even basic economic justice.
Furthermore, Bowdoin students—those who camped inside and those who supported them from outside—have seen the enormity of the resistance against which they must push to affect change. Many are energized by their experience—angry but looking forward from Shaban al-Dalou with renewed commitment to global justice.
As SJP said in their most recent statement: “We did this for Shaban […] He was our peer, a student of computer science, a loving brother and a selfless son. He was our age when he was martyred by an Israeli airstrike. We named our Union after him to honor his memory, and today we rededicate ourselves to him. The movement is strong, and though the struggle will be long, victory is inevitable. Long live Shaban al-Dalou Union.”
