SFSU President Lynn Mahoney meets with campus occupation representatives
While ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel continued Monday, at San Francisco State, protesters and school administrators held a public meeting to openly discuss student demands.
Sitting face to face, just feet apart, surrounded by students, faculty, media, and outside supporters, pro-Palestinian student protesters who set up the encampment in the middle of San Francisco State's campus laid out their demands to SFSU President Lynn Mahoney.
"We are students, we are faculty and we are staff demanding that CSU and SF State University divest from all companies and partnerships which actively participate in the colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people," said one student protester.
The students here at SF State, like so many other student protesters across the country, are not just demanding the university divest from companies that do business with Israel. They also want the university to disclose all of its investments, defend the rights of pro-Palestinian speech on campus and declare their support for the Palestinian people in Gaza.
"Just as Mahoney and SFSU praises 1968 liberation strike, we demand SFSU President Lynn Mahoney publicly oppose bill SB 1287 and defend our right to protest, speech and assembly," said another student protester.
President Mahoney promised to work with student protesters, saying she was willing to meet with representatives as soon as possible and work with them to meet some of these demands.
"We can have two conversations. One is about what full transparency would look like and how we can make it clear to anybody who wants to see how San Francisco State invests its funds and how it spends it. But the second is to take another look at that investment policy," said President Mahoney.
In the end, President Mahoney and the student protesters left the conversation to be continued, but both sides seemed optimistic about the results.
"Appreciative of my students willing to have a conversation. What's the next steps with this? I'm going to continue the conversation with them," said President Mahoney.
"I feel very confident that she has appeared to be very open to our conversations and moving forward with the majority of our demands and we are looking forward to continuing to have these conversations and it looks like we will be making very steadfast progress into their implementation," said Sydney R., a student protester and media liaison for the encampment.
