Our Free Society is at Risk
Dear Leading Ladies,
I’m a double Jumbo. For those who don’t know, that means I have two degrees from Tufts University; in my case, a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. A half-century separates our years on campus; still last week’s detention of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk hit me harder than other recent ICE actions. As I viewed the footage of her arrest, I realized that Ozturk and I had walked the same school paths, studied in the same library, attended class in the same buildings. We even gathered with friends in the same area where she, a Turkish citizen with a valid visa, was grabbed forcibly by masked ICE agents before being incarcerated in a facility in Louisiana. Her crime is still ill-defined, but apparently she co-wrote an op-ed for the school newspaper criticizing the university for not divesting its holdings in Israeli companies, and she participated in a protest about Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
In the late 1960s when I was an undergrad, there were peaceful protests on the Tufts campus. Many of us protested the war in Vietnam. Others protested the employment of a construction company with racist hiring policies to build a new dorm. Some demanded the creation of an African-American House and more diversity in admissions. Many marched and gathered to protest the existence of ROTC on campus. A close friend recalls providing the guitar accompaniment for more than one protest singalong on campus. Another close friend recalls her boyfriend at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy joining with Harvard students to protest the war. She believes he may have been the only Fletcher student to be involved in protests, perhaps because many of the others were themselves in the military or seeking government jobs, also because they didn’t share the views of protesters. Protests among the Class of 1969 culminated at Commencement when some students took off their gowns as a show of anti-war sentiment; others wore balloons attached to their mortarboards. And the Class Poet marched up on stage and pronounced that he was a homosexual, only to have the microphone immediately go dead. He kept talking, his words heard by at least those in the front rows.
Throughout that year, no arrests were made. Nothing like the violence that occurred the year before at Columbia University and Kent State. Many might argue that not enough change was accomplished, but ROTC was abolished on campus, an Af-Am House was established, and the racist construction company was replaced. Furthermore, Time Magazine found the commencement doings newsworthy enough to feature alongside that of Harvard’s in its summer story about college graduations and student activism.
What happened at Tufts last week was unprecedented on its campus and such horrors are being replicated throughout the country. The president of the university, Sunil Kumar, is now advising all international students to carry their documents on their persons at all times. This is exactly what Jews had to do in Germany before they were forced to wear yellow stars. Then their passports were nullified. And then they were sent to concentration camps.
I don’t remember that. I was not alive then. But I do remember going to college and graduate school in a free society. Who among us is willing to give that up? And who is willing to ignore that what was done to Rumeysa Ozturk is a step towards a more repressive and inhumane American society?
All the best,
Judy (she/her/hers)
Therese (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team