Students end multi-day occupation of Dal admin building

At 8am on Thursday Nov 28, roughly 30 students packed up their signs, blankets, snacks and water and walked out of the Henry Hicks Academic Administration Building on Dalhousie University’s Studley Campus. They had been there for over 40 hours, since a board of governors meeting on Tuesday afternoon, and had decided to leave “on their own terms,” the group posted in a story on Instagram. “We have not given up.”

The occupation was a protest against Dal’s board for voting down a motion that the student union president had introduced to divest the university’s financial ties from Israel. “We remain unwavering and determined in our commitment and demands for @dalhousieu to fully divest from the state of Israel and for a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” posted the group.

The students who occupied the building were members of the Students for the Liberation of Palestine – Kjipuktuk, or SLPK coalition, including Dal students. Since May, the group has been vocal in demanding the administrations of the five schools represented by the coalition—Dal, the University of King’s College, Saint Mary’s University, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Mount Saint Vincent University—divest from Israel’s war and occupation in Gaza.

Starting at 2 pm on Tuesday Nov 26, over 150 students rallied outside and inside the Henry Hicks building, where the university’s board of governors were meeting on the first floor. They stood in hallways and, as space permitted, within the room adjoining the meeting room, to observe the proceedings.

Dal Student Union president Mariam Knakriah brought forward the motion of divestment, which was a result of collaboration between the Dal Palestinian Society and the DSU, and was supported by the Dal Faculty Association’s own previous divestment motion and by a petition signed by Dal community members, including students, staff, alumni and faculty.

The meeting started well for the students. Knakriah was successful in amending the meeting’s agenda to get the DSU’s motion added to it, with 11 members of the BOG voting in favour of the addition—with one abstention from Dal president Kim Brooks. From the meeting’s smaller adjoining room, where Dal Security limited the number of people allowed to 25, students relayed the news to the crowd in the hallways. The successful amendment to the agenda was celebrated with cheers heard inside board chambers.

However, when it came time to present and vote on the motion, it was another story.

Knakriah, the DSU, the BOG and members of the SLPK had previously discussed divestment at other BOG meetings, but the motion she presented Tuesday was a request to commit to divestment, with a timeline and reporting plan based on these previous conversations.

There was some discussion from members of the board, not on the motion itself but on whether it should be discussed by them in the first place. President Brooks made a point of saying that, regardless of the outcome of this vote, Knakriah’s motion would move to the Finance, Audit, Investment, and Risk (FAIR) committee for their comment, before moving to the board’s Investment Committee.

The vote on Knakriah’s motion—which was slightly unusual for the BOG because it happened by anonymous paper ballot—happened without haste and did not pass.

A second motion raised by another board member—to defer the motion to FAIR—passed by paper ballot, again without haste. Board chair Cheryl Fraser responded to a question from Knakriah about when FAIR would be discussing this motion. Fraser said the committee’s next meeting is on Dec 12, so FAIR could receive the motion then and come back to the board with comment at the next BOG meeting on Feb 11.

This, coupled with denial of a request by Knakriah to amend the second motion to include commitments of a timeline and transparency of the process, caused shouts of outrage from students in the smaller room and the hallway.

Members of the board had warned students several times that noise would cause them to adjourn the meeting, and students had relayed the messages to keep the noise down—until now.

After disappointed chatter from the students in the side room following Knakriah’s request for amendment, Fraser said the meeting would be moving to a private “in camera” session, and that the doors would be closed to students and the public.

This caused students from the hallway to rush inside the smaller room and push against the doors to keep them from closing. The students pushing the doors from the outside outnumbered board members and Dal security trying to close the doors from the inside, and the students were able to get inside the main board meeting room, with one student jumping on top of a table and saying “we are occupying the building until you divest.”

Dal Security guards quickly escorted the board members out through a door opposite from where students were flowing in from the adjoining room, leaving only students, security guards and observers remaining inside the hallway and lobby of the first floor.

The students then declared the Henry Hicks building had a new name: “Handala Hall.” The name honours a cartoon of a Palestinian boy with his hands held behind his back who has come to symbolize the Palestinian fight for liberation and resistance to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

This was how things looked at 5pm on Tuesday. Security guards told students that the building was closed and the doors locked. A small number of Halifax Regional Police officers spoke with Dal Security guards at one end of the building inside, but left without incident before 6pm.

Dal Security guards remained at both ends of the hallways and outside the building’s doors. Approximately 30 students stayed inside and slept there overnight.

Early Wednesday morning, Dal Security guards were stationed outside the building’s doors, telling people who approached that the building was closed, though not preventing anyone from entering as students inside the building held the doors open.

Just before 2pm that day, president Brooks emailed the Dal community that the building would “remain closed until further notice, as we continue to monitor campus activity and take appropriate safety measures.

“Students, faculty, and staff whose learning or work activities are directly impacted by this will receive further communication regarding alternate arrangements,” wrote Brooks.

For context, Brooks wrote that Dal “believes informed debate and critical discourse are fundamental aspects of university life,” but that the university also has “a responsibility to ensure physical safety and freedom from harassment, discrimination, and intimidation, and as we’ve communicated before, these principles are non-negotiable.

“We will not compromise the safety and well-being of our students, faculty, staff, and broader community members,” she wrote.

Brooks described the situation on Tuesday evening, writing that the BOG meeting “was adjourned after a group of protesters entered the meeting space in an aggressive and threatening manner,” and that “the group has occupied the building since then and is refusing to leave, forcing the closure of the building today.”

Brooks wrote that the “protesters were there to support a student-led motion with respect to divestment of investments related to Israel. The motion did not pass; however, another motion was presented to refer the matter to the board’s Finance, Audit, Investment, and Risk (FAIR) committee, which was passed. FAIR meets December 12 and will provide an update to the Board of Governors at its next meeting in February.”

Knakriah says this narrative and outcome is disappointing and frustrating, because she had tried to involve FAIR in today’s meeting all along. As she understood it from months of discussions inside and outside board meetings, the divestment motion was supposed to come to Tuesday’s meeting from FAIR, not Knakriah. But less than two weeks before Tuesday’s meeting, she was told that FAIR had decided all the way back in June that they would not pursue a motion to divest.

Supposedly the committee had informed the board of this around the June decision, although if so, the DSU president literally did not get the memo.

Knakriah says that for the committee to have had a meeting about divestment in June “and still continue the discussion about bringing the divestment motion to the board until two weeks ago is very unacceptable. They could have made it very clear from the beginning, so we could challenge that decision or decide the next steps, but didn’t let me know until two weeks ago.”

Hence, the frustration from Knakriah and the students to have the motion kicked back to FAIR.

Thursday morning, the protesting students left the building, walking past Dal Security staff stationed outside the doors. They were tired from having stayed two nights inside the building. They were hungry as some of their food hadn’t been able to make it through to them inside. That afternoon, Brooks emailed another update.

“The group occupying the Henry Hicks Building since Tuesday evening has left,” she wrote, but added the building “will remain closed for the remainder of the week as we continue to monitor campus activity and restore spaces to their original state.”

The Coast has reached out to Dal to ask for details about the extended closure and what accommodations are in place for students, faculty and staff who might need to visit offices in the building. Mike Fleury, the university’s senior manager of strategic communications and media relations, reiterated Brooks’ messages but otherwise had nothing to say.

Brian Bow is the chair of the Department of Political Science. His office is on an upper floor in the Henry Hicks. He had been working in his office on Tuesday afternoon when students moved inside the building’s lobby and first-floor hallway.

“We were all working in our offices,” says Bow. “It was a bit noisy, and many of us knew that the board meeting was going on downstairs, so it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was about.”

Bow says someone he didn’t recognize from another office in the building came by and said there was something going on downstairs. They’d been told that if they wanted to leave and work from home, they could, and that a bunch of people were going to do so.

“My sense is a lot of people did leave right around then, but nobody had a clue from that message that there might be any longer-term closure,” says Bow. “People left their laptops and work stuff in their offices.”

Bow learned on Tuesday evening that the building would likely be closed on Wednesday, hearing this through second-hand information from others who worked in the Hicks who knew something was going on.

Regarding Dal’s official communications about the building’s continued closure, Bow says “if there’s anything about all of this that seems a bit weird to me, it’s that the building is still closed now, even though people are gone, and that the two reasons they gave were ‘monitoring activity on campus,’ which sounds weird and mysterious, and ‘restoring things to their original condition.’”