As college students, the mundane life of classes may make our daily actions feel meaningless against the backdrop of national unrest. Yet, we each have the ability and obligation to stay informed about ICE’s impact on our community and oppose their presence and actions.

Approximately 20 protesters marched from Anheuser-Busch Hall around 1:10 p.m. this Friday to the steps of Brookings Hall. The march, following the protest on Oct. 23 against the University administration, included a beating of a drum and chants of “no compact for fascism.”

While the University has not publicly stated the amount they spent on the transition, an internal financial document obtained by Student Life shows the school spent almost $235 million on Workday.

A newly drafted protest protocol by an administration-commissioned task force would prohibit masks for nonmedical reasons and provide resources for students barred from campus. The protocol faced blowback for concerns over racial profiling, lack of clarity of language, and concerns about housing insecurity for suspended students from Student Union (SU) senators during their meeting last week, Oct. 14.

Professors, researchers, graduate students, and PhD candidates stood across the street from the Barnes-Jewish Hospital on Friday afternoon holding signs that read “My research saves lives, cutting my funding will not” and “Science not silence.” As cars drove by and honked in support, the group of a few hundred protesters cheered and clapped. 

Those of us whose relationships to power are more contingent, more conditional should wield those tools at our own risk or, perhaps, not at all. Instead, we should model for our students what it looks like to destabilize the truth claims made by those in positions of power — with deep respect, but rigorously.

The story of the ROTC fires continues as producers Jeremy Slaten and Alan Zhou recount the tumultuous end of the 1969-1970 school year.

If we keep spreading the narrative that WashU is a place of suppression of expression, then yes, it will be a space of uncomfortable silence. We, the student body, have both passively and actively created that perceived reality for ourselves.

Washington University’s Board of Trustees recently established an ad hoc committee in response to last semester’s protests to examine the University’s open campus policies and promote campus safety.

I deeply value the intellectual community I have found at WashU, and am regularly struck with admiration for the students, faculty, and staff who constitute it. That is why it pains me to see our community represented in a national news outlet by such a morally unserious statement. WashU deserves better.