On Thursday, April 18 and Friday, April 19, students at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) voted in support of a resolution written in response to the arrest of 20 students at Pomona College.
In an email sent to the CMC student body at 10:22 a.m. on Friday, the results revealed that 419 students — or 30.76 percent of the student body — participated in the vote. Of those who voted, 70.24 percent voted to approve the resolution and 29.76 percent voted to reject it.
The document was authored by Rukmini Banerjee CM ’24, Kenneth Owusu CM ’24, Maya Kurkhill CM ’24, Pranav Patel CM ’26 and Elijah-Emory Muhammad CM ’26 and was passed with a 11:3 vote by the ASCMC Senate Monday, April 15.
Following the Senate vote, ASCMC Ethics and Procedural Officer Paloma Oliveri CM ’26 sent a ballot to the CMC student body at 8:02 a.m. on April 18 via ElectionBuddy, an online voting software, that closed 24 hours later.
“Approval of this resolution means that ASCMC will continue to collaborate with the authors and DOS to determine next steps,” Oliveri said in the email. “We will be in touch shortly with further updates.”
The resolution calls for the creation of a committee to revise the 7C Demonstration Policy and for CMC to clarify its own demonstration policy to “protect students’ right to freedom of speech and assembly.”
Henry Long CM ’25, a student who voted against the resolution, explained his belief that the 7C Demonstration Policy is reasonable, especially when concerning protests which are peaceful but “disruptive” to the colleges’ academic missions.
“The resolution conflated civil disobedience and protected speech,” Long said in an interview with TSL. “It also misunderstood the purpose of campus free expression. Free expression commitments are meant to promote the fearless pursuit of truth in the classroom — not to indulge megaphones and megalomania on the campus quad.”
At a CMC Student Union meeting which convened on Monday, April 22, Banerjee discussed further steps to create such a committee focused on the demonstration policy, including working with CMC Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Diana Graves.
“DT [Diana Graves] already reached out to me and [Owusu] and said ‘hey, regardless of whether the resolution passes or fails, I would be interested in working together to change the demonstration policy,’” Banerjee said. “But I still think it was important we got a win for the purposes of Pomona Divest from Apartheid.”
Banerjee mentioned plans to meet with Graves and Owusu in the coming weeks to discuss the selection process for the committee.
She then transitioned to the creation of a new statement which would bring attention “back to Palestine.”
“Pomona Divest from Apartheid and a lot of pro-Palestinian movements don’t want these statements to co-opt the conversation from free speech to Palestine,” she said. “What we need to do is to push the conversation back.”
Owusu clarified his and his co-authors’ intentions to move forward with the new statement upon a positive response from the student body.
“This conversation is important, especially for how administrators engage with student protest in the future,” he said in an interview with TSL. “But we do not, emphasize do not, want to take attention away from the call to divest.”
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