The students end their multi-day occupation of the Dal administration building

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 actively demanding that the administrations of the five schools represented by the coalition—Dala, King’s College University, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Mount Saint Vincent University—remove Israel’s war and occupation of Gaza.

Beginning at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, November 26, more than 150 students rallied outside and inside the Henry Hicks Building, where the university’s board of governors met on the first floor. They stood in the corridors and, if space permitted, in the room adjacent to the boardroom to watch the proceedings.

Dal Student Union President Mariam Knakria put forward the divestment motion, which was the result of collaboration between the Dal Palestine Society and DSU, and was supported by an earlier divestment request by the Dal’s own faculty association and a petition signed by members of the Dal community, including students, staff, alumni and faculty.

The meeting started well for the students. Knakriah succeeded in getting the meeting agenda amended to add the DSU proposal, with 11 BOG members voting in favor of the addition, with one abstention from Dal president Kim Brooks. From a smaller adjoining assembly room, where Dal security had limited the crowd to 25, students relayed the news to the crowd in the corridors. The successful introduction of changes to the agenda was celebrated with shouts of joy in the boardrooms.

However, when it came time to present and vote on the proposal, it was a different story.

Knakriah, DSU, BOG and SLPK members had previously discussed divestment at other BOG meetings, but the proposal she presented on Tuesday was a request to commit to divestment, with a timeline and reporting plan based on those earlier talks.

Board members did not discuss the proposal itself, but whether it should be discussed in the first place. President Brooks noted that, regardless of the outcome of this vote, the Knacria proposal will be referred to the Finance, Audit, Investment and Risk (FAIR) Committee for comment before proceeding to the Board’s Investment Committee.

The vote on Knakria’s proposal — which was a bit unusual for the BOG in that it was by anonymous paper ballot — was rushed and did not pass.

A second motion by another board member — to defer the proposal to FAIR — passed by paper vote, again without haste. Board Chair Cheryl Fraser responded to Knacria’s question about when FAIR would discuss the proposal. Fraser said the committee’s next meeting is Dec. 12, so FAIR can receive the proposal then and come back to the board with comments at the next BOG meeting on Feb. 11.

That, combined with the denial of Knakria’s request to amend the second proposal to include a commitment to timelines and transparency of the process, prompted shouts of outrage from students in the smaller room and hallway.

Commission members warned students several times that the noise would force them to interrupt the meeting, and students relayed messages to keep the noise down — until now.

After frustrated chatter from students in a side room following Knakri’s request for an amendment, Frazier said the meeting would go into a private session “in camera” and that the doors would be closed to students and the public.

This caused the students from the hallway to rush inside the smaller room and push on the door to keep it from closing. Students pushing the door from outside outnumbered board members and Dal security who tried to close the door and were able to get inside the main board meeting room, with one student jumping on a table and saying, “We are occupying the building until you will not refuse.’

Dahl’s guards quickly ushered the council members out the door opposite to where the students had fled from the next room, leaving only the students, guards, and observers remaining in the hallway and first floor lobby.

The students then announced that the Henry Hicks Building had a new name: “Handala Hall.” Named after the cartoon of a Palestinian boy with his hands behind his back, which became a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and resistance to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

This is how everything looked at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. The security guards told the students that the building was closed and the doors were 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 6 p.m.

Dal Security guards remained at both ends of the corridors and outside the doors of the building. About 30 students stayed inside and spent the night there.

Early Wednesday morning, Dal Security guards stood at the door of the building telling people approaching that the building was closed, though they did not prevent anyone from entering as students in the building kept the doors open.

Shortly before 2 p.m. that day, President Brooks emailed the Dal community that the building “will remain closed until further notice as we continue to monitor campus activity and take appropriate security measures.

“Students, faculty and staff whose studies or work will be directly affected will be notified further regarding alternative arrangements,” Brooks wrote.

For context, Brooks wrote that Dahl “believes that informed debate and critical discourse are fundamental aspects of university life,” but that the university also “has a responsibility to provide physical safety and freedom from harassment, discrimination, and intimidation, and as we have been previously informed , these principles are non-negotiable.

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

Brooks described the situation Tuesday night, writing that the BOG meeting “was interrupted after a group of protesters entered the meeting room 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 the student-led divestment movement associated with Israel. The motion did not pass; however, another motion was made to refer the matter to the Board’s Finance, Audit, Investments and Risk (FAIR) Committee, which was passed. FAIR meets on December 12 and will provide an update to the Board of Governors at the next meeting in February.”

Knakria says the narrative and the outcome are disappointing and upsetting, as she has been trying to get FAIR involved in today’s meeting all along. As she understood from months of discussions inside and outside board meetings, the decision to divest was supposed to come from FAIR, not Knakriah, at Tuesday’s meeting. But less than two weeks before Tuesday’s meeting, she was told that FAIR had decided back in June not to file a foreclosure suit.

Presumably the committee informed the board of this during the June decision, although if so, the DSU president literally didn’t get the memo.

Knakria says that for a committee that had a divestment meeting in June “to still be discussing bringing a divestment proposal to the board two weeks ago is very unacceptable. They could have made it very clear from the start so we could appeal the decision or decide the next steps, but they didn’t tell me until two weeks ago.”

So, Knakriya and the students are disappointed that the movement has been turned back to FAIR.

On Thursday morning, the protesting students left the building past Dal Security personnel who were stationed at the door. They were tired from sleeping inside the building for two nights. They were hungry because some of the food did not get inside them. Brooks emailed another update that day.

“The group occupying the Henry Hicks building since Tuesday night has left,” she wrote, but added that the building “will remain closed for the rest of the week as we continue to monitor campus activity and restore the facility to its original state.”

The Coast has reached out to Dahl for details on the extended closure and the accommodations for students, faculty and staff who may need to visit offices in the building. Mike Fleury, the university’s senior manager of strategic communications and media relations, echoed Brooks’ message but had little else to say.

Brian Bowe is Chair of the Department of Political Science. His office is upstairs in the Henry Hicks House. He was working in his office Tuesday afternoon when students filed into the building’s lobby and first-floor hallway.

“We’ve all worked in offices,” Bowe says. “It was a bit noisy and a lot of us knew there was a board meeting downstairs so it wasn’t hard to understand what was going on.”

Bowe says someone he didn’t recognize from another office in the building came up and said something was going on downstairs. They were told that if they wanted to go and work from home, they could, and that a bunch of people were going to do it.

“I think a lot of people left right then, but no one would have guessed from that announcement that there might be some kind of long-term closure,” Bowe says. “People left their laptops and work things in the offices.”

Bowe learned Tuesday night that the building would likely be closed on Wednesday, having learned it through second-hand information from Hicks people who knew something was up.

Regarding Brooks’ announcement Thursday that the building would remain closed all week, Bowe said, “If there’s one thing about all of this that seems a little strange to me, it’s that the building is still closed even though people are gone, and that Two the reasons they gave were “campus activity monitoring”, which sounds strange and cryptic, and “restoring things back to their original state”.