Editor’s Note: The Retrograde utilized Al Mitchel’s chronology collection of early UTD history in conjunction with the physical Mercury archives to access publicly recorded history of UTD. Because of campus administration’s attempts to withhold the degrees of student demonstrators who graduated in spring 2024, the fall 2024 graduate quoted in this article has been granted anonymity.  

Since its founding in 1969, UTD has experienced exponential growth and a rapidly transforming student culture, turning what was once a highly-specialized private institution into a populous public university. Among the many changes the university has faced is the dramatic rise of student activism, with 2024 marking the most politically active year on campus. 

Student protesters disrupting graduations on Dec. 16 and 17 last year joined 28 total documented protests on UTD’s campus, with 71.4% of those protests occurring within the past four years. While students have demonstrated for a wide array of causes, including but not limited to divestment from apartheid South Africa, opposition to space laser programs and mass evictions, the issue central to the majority of recorded student protests has been Israel’s occupation of Palestine. 

The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at UTD has organized 21 of the documented protests as part of its ongoing divestment campaign, which calls on UTD and the UT System as a whole to divest from weapons manufacturers that sell arms to Israel.  

The Dec. 16 and 17 graduation protests included students marching across the stage with Palestinian flags that read “Divest from Death.” Former SJP president Mousa Najjar was escorted out of his spring 2024 graduation for doing the same. No students were detained or escorted out during the fall 2024 graduations. 

An alum from Gaza who had protested at their fall 2024 graduation said that while graduation was an exciting achievement for them, they wanted to ensure people remembered the thousands of students in Gaza who have been denied that chance because of Israel’s attacks. The United Nations has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “scholasticide,” in part because of the last university in Gaza being destroyed Jan. 17 last year.   

“This very same expression of joy has been stripped from thousands of kids no different from us in Gaza, and that our own university is complicit in that fact,” the alum said. “Especially as an engineer, knowing that a lot of my classmates graduating at the same time may now think about working at a weapons manufacturer is disheartening.” 

Palestine became more prominent on campus in 2018 when SJP began hosting more demonstrations at UTD, whose frequency rapidly increased in 2022. Prior to 2018, the only record of Palestine being mentioned at UTD appears in a  1987 opinion editorial and a 2014 article published in UTD’s former student newspaper, The Mercury. The op-ed, titled “Remember the Palestinians” and written by then-government and politics graduate Mohammad Salem, discusses the massacres and displacement of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians since Israel’s founding. The 2014 article, “Trapped in Gaza,” details the experiences of a UTD student caught in conflict in Gaza when visiting.  

“The Palestinian people are still looking for that day when they return to their homeland and an independent Palestinian state is created,” Salem wrote in the op-ed. 

From 2018 onwards, over 30 articles that discussed Palestine were published in The Mercury, including discussion of student poetry nights and markets at the Plinth in addition to protest coverage and opinion pieces. 

Thirty-eight years after Salem’s opinion was published, student demonstrators at UTD have significantly expanded their advocacy for Palestine. 2024 saw many firsts for protest action at UTD because of this activism.  

April 23 marked the first time students organized a sit-in at UTD when over 60 students occupied the Administration Building for over seven hours. The Mercury reported that Nidaa Lafi, a UTD alum and former SJP president, said that because campus administrators had ignored SJP’s protests and Student Government’s passed divestment resolutions, the sit-in provided necessary pressure to get the Office of the President to meet with student organizers. 

“If this shows us anything, it shows us that pressure works,” Lafi said during the sit-in. “Being in this building, this disgusting overheated building for [hours] does something right.” 

The student organizers would later boycott the meeting after they were informed it would also include what SJP referred to as “Zionist organizations.” Instead, SJP leaders delivered a letter to the office restating their demands. 

May 1 was the first time an encampment — an escalated form of protest where activists refuse to leave an area long-term — was established on campus. It also marked the first time police and state troopers were called in to raid a student event. Prior to this raid, the only reported arrest of protesters occurred in 2000. when one protester was arrested for protesting a meeting between then-U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush and then-Mexican president-elect Vicente Fox at UTD.  

Law enforcement arrested 21 total individuals at the encampment, including nine students, three faculty and three alumni in addition to six people unaffiliated with the school. UTD conducted disciplinary hearings throughout fall 2024 for the arrested students, ultimately resulting in written warnings, while the 21 arrestees’ court cases regarding their charges of Class B criminal trespassing are still pending. If found guilty, the defendants could face fines up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail.  

With roughly 200 attendees, the May 1 protest remains one of the largest protests in campus history. May 1 is rivaled only by the Oct. 28, 1986 “Star Wars” protest and the June  1993 “Waterviewgate,” both estimated to have roughly 200 demonstrators attending at the time.   

The “Star Wars” protest, referring to the nickname given to the U.S. space-based Strategic Defense Initiative by its opponents, was the culmination of a semester-long saga that dominated the pages of The Mercury throughout fall 1986. Controversy first erupted in August, after physics professor Carl Collins received a $1.8 million contract from the federal government to continue his research on a gamma-ray laser because of its potential usefulness in strategic defense.  

A month later, the Sept. 22 issue of The Mercury shone a spotlight on the grant’s controversial nature by running numerous back-and-forth letters to the editor, where students called the grant “blood money” and administrators called students opposing it “zealots.”. On Oct. 16, the Jonsson building was vandalized with the phrase”Scrap Star Wars at UTD.” These events led to the formation of Faculty and Students Against Star Wars. The group would go on to organize the Oct. 28 protest, which included poetry, plays and chalk art.  

“Waterviewgate,” playing on the 1974 Watergate scandal, began June 22, when 119 residents of the Waterview apartments, which now comprise phases 1-3 of the University Village, received notice they were being evicted to make space for a new cohort of freshmen. Residents quickly organized a week of protests, which led to campus administrators working with the third-party owner of the apartments, Worthing Inc., to relocate the residents to other apartments in the area owned by the company.  

UTD had four recorded protests between 1980-2009, four protests between 2010-2019 and has seen 20 protests since 2020. With the rise of student activism, UTD administration has reacted with new policy measures, including restricting the types of stands students can use to advertise and prohibiting political chalking, and has attempted imposing punishments on arrested protesters such as deferred suspension and denial of degree. However, the punitive administrative response after May 1 has not deterred the current cohort of student activists on campus. In a press release to The Retrograde, SJP stated it remains committed to its demands for divestment with the goal of continuing to make Palestine “unavoidable.”  

“We recognize that as the [year] comes to a close, our work towards liberation is only beginning,” SJP wrote in the press release. “In every ceremony, in all parts of campus, we will continue to confront and disrupt. Until UTD and UTIMCO [the investment managing company for the UT System] divest, we will continue to take action.” 

Those interested in information regarding the recorded protests in UTD’s history can reach out to theretrogradenews@gmail.com for article scans and additional information.