Fashion Institute of Technology Students on Campus Occupation for Palestine Protests
At one point over the weekend, FIT students were occupying 3 parts of the campus.
BY LEX MCMENAMIN MAY 1, 2024
As protest encampments, sit-ins, and other occupations have grown across dozens of American university and college campuses, last week, New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) caught particular attention. On Thursday, April 25, FIT students established an encampment at the on-campus museum, with more than a hundred students recorded rushing in, according to Women’s Wear Daily. By the end of the weekend, the students had three occupations going: inside and outside of the college museum, and another in front of a busy campus building.
“It was almost like we were on exhibit — like it was our exhibit,” says Mustafa, FIT class of 2027, one of the students who slept at the museum. (The students Teen Vogue interviewed for this article requested first name identification only, citing their fear of doxxing.)
By Sunday evening, students had abandoned the museum occupation, as the school was tightly restricting access in and out, and pivoted their focus to the outdoor encampment down the street.
FIT is a part of the State University of New York system, or SUNY, and the students are seeking detailed information from the administration about FIT and SUNY’s investments. In 1985, SUNY’s board of trustees divested the system’s finances from South Africa after student organizing. (Teen Vogue has sent requests for comment to FIT and SUNY.)
Though national media coverage of protests remains largely focused on Ivy League schools, videos of students on public college campuses engaging in moments of direct confrontation, intervening in the arrests of classmates, and pushing back militarized officers in places like University of Texas Austin and Cal Poly Humboldt have also captured attention.
Continue reading https://www.teenvogue.com/story/fashion-institute-of-technology-campus-occupation-palestine
“There’s a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word “occupation” is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back