OPINION: Where have all the political organizers gone?

Begin here.

When political action disappears, those who once performed it are invariably asked to account for its absence. At the Claremont Colleges, the absence of anything approaching the scale of student mobilization seen in 2024 have become the subject of just such an inquest: Where have all the political organizers gone?

The question is not entirely misplaced. Whatever nostalgia has done to the memory of 2024, it did not invent the difference between then and now. Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza continues; the Claremont Colleges have refused to divest from, and are indeed beneficiaries of, weapons manufacturers and corporations complicit in Israeli occupation and apartheid; and the relations binding American universities to capital and imperial warfare remain far from dismantled. The conditions which summoned the mobilizations of 2024 have, it seems, proved rather more persistent than the mobilizations themselves. 

Where are the students who emptied their classrooms after Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr called five police departments to arrest their classmates in Alexander Hall in 2024; who erected a Gaza solidarity encampment at Pitzer later that spring; who occupied Carnegie Hall the following October demanding disclosure and divestment? Where, for that matter, are the Mudders who looked upon the defense contractors waiting for them on the other side of graduation and decided that an engineering education in the imperial core ought not terminate in the service of occupation? For a time, the struggle for Palestinian liberation accosted the colleges at every turn, forcing into view what the university would ordinarily prefer to hold at the serene distance of knowledge production: The same endowment that made institutional life possible also bound students materially to genocide, imperial warfare, ecological destruction, and global racial capitalism. Palestine could not remain an object of humanitarian concern without also becoming a question of institutional complicity. 

Perhaps the explanation for the change is as simple as its more melancholic observers suppose. Perhaps students have become too timid … too careerist! Too narcotized by the ordinary pleasures and petty ambitions of undergraduate life; perhaps the political energies of 2024 have at last spent themselves. And what a convenient explanation this is! Endowed with all the sentimental satisfactions of decline and burdened only by the minor inconvenience of requiring political life to resemble 2024 before it can be recognized as political life at all. 

Yet the apparent retreat from spectacle should not be mistaken for political disappearance: In January 2025, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine continued organizing around Palestinian liberation through its People’s University, situating Palestinian liberation with a broader struggle against policing and deportation even after Pomona had revoked the organization’s access to its own Instagram account. At Scripps, the fall 2024 dispute over The Motley’s decision to display a Palestinian flag outlived the administration’s closure of the coffeehouse and its eventual reopening with bare walls, offering an unusually literal gloss on how conditional “student-run” becomes once the students committed the heresy of taking the phrase seriously. By spring 2026, plans to place the coffeehouse under direct administrative supervision prompted workers to strike on admitted students day and hold teach-ins on the coffeehouse’s political history. That same March, more than 500 students, faculty, staff and community members would crowd Walker Beach as the Black Student Union demanded that the college substitute enforceable forms of accountability for its customary avowals of commitment to inclusion.

If these are the annals of an apathetic student body, apathy has certainly acquired a rather demanding definition. What distinguishes the political life of 2026 from that of 2024 is not the presence of political conviction in one and its absence in the other, but the collapse of an extraordinary sense of collective possibility that had made Palestine the organizing principle of campus political life — leaving in its wake a more dispersed politics and, where Palestinian liberation is concerned, a profound pessimism about what collective action can accomplish. The familiar story of decline thus begins by observing, correctly, that the campus has changed, and ends by mistaking an erosion of collective possibility for the erosion of political conviction itself.

I belong to Pomona’s Class of 2027, the last graduating class for whom the arrests at Alexander Hall are undergraduate memory. We were first-years in spring 2024, when 20 students were arrested after President Starr summoned five police departments to campus, and sophomores the following fall, when the occupation of Carnegie Hall ended in 12 suspensions and 36 students from the other Claremont Colleges barred from Pomona’s campus. While this history is hardly ancient, four years is certainly enough to turn lived political history into hearsay. This fall, only seniors remain who were students during Alexander Hall; only seniors and juniors were here for the suspensions that followed Carnegie. When my class graduates this spring, the arrests will pass out of firsthand undergraduate memory. One year later, so too will the suspensions. The university, exempt from the four-year graduation requirement, will remember perfectly well. 

The conflicts of 2024 entered the institutional memories of the Claremont Colleges unevenly, each shaped by the forms of dissent that had most directly tested its authority. The sit-in at Alexander Hall demonstrated how readily force could be summoned against a student occupation but too how quickly spectacular repression could generate solidarity – six days later, some 700 people walked out in support of those arrested. The occupation of Carnegie Hall furnished a different lesson. The suspensions that followed carried discipline into the material conditions of student life, allowing an administrative decision to determine where one slept, whether one ate, whether one attended class, and whether one could return to the community in which one had made a life. 

What appeared as a retreat from spectacle — the move from police arrest to suspension— was its very intensification, for it was precisely this intimacy of punishment that made the full reach of institutional power visible. What Pomona acquired from these confrontations was precedent — an accumulating knowledge of what student movements might attempt and what consequences could be brought to bear against them. Just a month after the suspensions, President Gabi Starr was already touting Pomona’s “Year of Dialogue,” a series of workshops intended to train the campus in conflict resolution and “weave civility and respectful exchange into the fabric of the Pomona culture.” After five police departments and 12 suspensions, Pomona had apparently determined that the outstanding defect in campus politics was insufficient training in conversation. 

The students, of course, were learning from the same history. The effects of suspension reverberated well beyond the suspended themselves, as friends and professors absorbed the labor of sustaining those whom the college had displaced. A friend’s belongings filled my trunk as we circled Claremont waiting to learn where they would sleep that night; later that week, another friend and I would stuff green boxes full of food beneath our lab coats before meeting them in College Park between calls with lawyers and friends arranging spare beds. Such is the pedagogical function of exemplary punishment: its object may be particular, but its lesson is general. The lesson need not produce submission to alter political behavior; it need only alter what students understand the consequences of escalation to be, and therefore what forms of action can still appear possible. One must wonder, if escalation had come to signify punishment more readily than victory, what forms of political action could still appear worth attempting, let alone capable of succeeding?

It is hardly surprising, then, that student political life after 2024 assumed an altered form. Teach-ins, vigils, town halls, cultural programming, the defense of institutions like The Motley Coffeehouse — activities whose political significance is easily discounted — belong to the processes through which a movement reproduces the conditions of its own political existence after repression. What is preserved in such moments is a practical knowledge of defeat: how repression distributes its costs, how those costs are borne collectively, how political relations endure their interruption, and how a movement recovers the capacity to conceive of renewed escalation as something other than the repetition of punishment.

So, to the Class of 2030 — you were not here for Alexander Hall; nor were you here for Carnegie and its aftermath. The history belongs to you nonetheless. To enter an institution is to inherit struggles one did not choose, and histories one did not personally witness, along with whatever claims upon the future those struggles left unresolved. That inheritance matters only insofar as it can be made practical — passed through organizations, friendships, records, stories and the instruction by which one cohort teaches another how a struggle survives the passing of its witnesses. Pomona will keep what it learned from us. Whether we manage to preserve what we learned from one another is another matter. 

Lina McRoberts PO ’27 organizes with the Claremont Student-Worker Alliance and often feels like the bottom-left curve of the letter C in the standard English alphabet.