On Monday, April 15, the Associated Students of Claremont McKenna College (ASCMC) Senate voted 11:3 to pass a student resolution written in response to the April 5 arrests of 20 5C students at Pomona College. The resolution condemns the Pomona administration’s use of police force and issuing of suspensions to the arrested students and calls for revisions to the 7C-wide demonstration policy and CMC’s Freedom of Expression Policy.
Discussions of a student resolution began at an April 8 Senate meeting. The meeting began at 8 p.m. in CMC’s Freeburg Forum and saw an audience of approximately 70 students and senators, in addition to members of the ASCMC Executive Board.
CMC Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Diana Graves opened the meeting by commenting on the arrests, specifically calling attention to the mobilization of four police departments to address the 20 student protestors on April 5.
While Graves stated that the involvement of multiple police departments was likely a decision made by the Claremont Police Department (CPD), rather than by the college, she suggested that it was a distressing event regardless.
“Any time you have police presence on a college campus, it’s scary,” Graves said. “It’s just not what we normally see here.”
Following this, the floor was opened for a Q&A. Graves responded to an inquiry as to how CMC might respond if faced with a similar demonstration and whether police would be called.
“It would have to escalate to a pretty significant place before we would have to call the police,” Graves said. “If you block the [Athenaeum] and shut down a talk, that’s gonna be a really big problem here. There are different thresholds for tolerance for policy violations [at each institution].”
Graves suggested that, if students wanted to see changes, they should turn their attention towards the 7C Demonstration Policy. While she explained that she could not independently change the policy, she also suggested that students could “bring forward what we as an institution with student support think that policy should look like.”
After the Q&A concluded, the ASCMC Executive Board initiated a discussion period for the statement that they had begun to work on. According to ASCMC Executive Vice President Ryu Nakase CM ’26, the statement was meant to be a message specifically from the Executive Board to CMC’s student body. Still, he emphasized that they wanted input from students as well.
“We’re pretty open,” Nakase said during the meeting. “We want to hear what people have to say.”
Some students at the meeting were dissatisfied with the idea of this statement and called for more student input.
“[The Executive Board] is not representative of the student body … [but] your [statement] is going to get disproportionate visibility,” Rukmini Banerjee CM ’24 said at the meeting. “Why is the student body not being involved in this?”
While the Executive Board had planned to meet at a later point to deliberate over the statement’s initial draft, students requested that it be shared with everyone present at the meeting for a more transparent discussion. Executive Board members rejected their request, instead recommending that students draft their own statement in the form of a resolution.
At 9:15 p.m., 15 minutes after the meeting was supposed to conclude and an audience of 60 remained, Senator Pranav Patel CM ’26 made a motion to draft a separate resolution in which non-ASCMC students provided input on deliverables they wished to see in the resolution.
“Use of police force was bad, nature of suspensions was bad, students’ right to free speech should be protected,” the document titled “Consensus from Senate” read. “Students should come together with [the administration] to redesign [the] 7C Demonstration Policy, stand in solidarity with the right to protest [and] urge CMC to gather students to [rethink] the threshold of what counts as threatening or disruptive.”
At 10:15 p.m., the Senate adjourned. Two days later, on April 10, ASCMC President Ava Kopp CM ’25 sent out the Executive Board’s official statement regarding April 5 to the CMC student body, which was approved with 7 “yeas” and 4 “nays”.
Then, on April 14, the Administrative Affairs and Appropriations (AAA) Committee — one of the groups that oversees resolutions before they reach the Senate — met to examine a draft of the student-led resolution. The final draft was co-authored by Banerjee, Patel, Kenneth Owusu CM ’24, Elijah-Emory Muhammad CM ’26 and Maya Kurkhill CM ’24.
The statement criticizes Pomona administration’s actions in relation to the values of CMC’s Open Academy.
“We condemn the escalation of violence on campus by Pomona College and the administration’s subsequent institutional retaliation due to their chilling impact on discourse, free speech, and the principles of Open Academy,” the statement reads.
The draft was passed by the AAA Committee before moving to the Senate, where it would need to obtain a majority vote before being sent to the CMC student body. On Monday, April 15, the resolution was presented for debate at a Senate meeting to an audience of 35 consisting of board members, senators and students.
Some dissenters expressed concern about the resolution’s classification of the protestors’ actions as free speech.
“I don’t know if what [the protestors] did falls under constitutionally protected free speech or freedom of assembly,” Senator Ashwin Rhodes CM ‘24 said. “I don’t know that we want to set the precedent of supporting non-constitutionally protected speech and assembly, things that people don’t have a legal right to.”
One opponent of the document, Violet Ramanathan CM ’27, said she was unhappy with the statement’s political nature and that she was nervous about it setting a potentially dangerous precedent.
“Whether or not it explicitly takes a side in this debate, it definitely implicitly does so,” Ramanathan said. “In doing that, it condones certain actions that put the physical safety and protection of free speech on our campus and in the consortium at risk.”
Supporters of the resolution, however, found that it was beneficial regardless of students’ stances on the Pomona arrests.
“This resolution is about giving democratic power to the broader community and taking it away from the unilateral power of the president,” Rowan Gray CM ’26 said. “Even if you think Gabi Starr was 100 percent right in this case, if you read the text of the demonstration policy, it’s clear that this [clause] could be abused [by] some future president. That in and of itself is why we should address these policies.”
Banerjee echoed a similar idea, highlighting how the resolution embodies CMC’s values.
“CMC premises its entire ethos on being a bastion of free speech and never silencing dissent,” Banerjee said. “This resolution asks people to stand on that.”
Ultimately, after 50 minutes of debate, Senators voted and approved the resolution with 11 yeas and 3 nays. While the resolution was slated to be sent out the following morning, after the Senate meeting ended, Banerjee and other co-authors requested that the resolution be released 48 hours later.
The resolution was sent to the CMC student body on Thursday, April 18 at 8 a.m. for a vote that was scheduled to close 24 hours later. ASCMC affirmed that the results of the vote will be sent out to the student body on Friday, April 19.
Brandon Kung CM 27′ contributed reporting.
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