The quest to divest from Israel at Earlham College
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Student protesters and graduates have been demanding their colleges and universities divest from investments in Israel. But how easy is it to do – or to know if it’s happened? We look at the fight to divest at one small college.
In this episode:
- Nolia Wilcox (@WilcoxMagnolia), Recent Earlham Graduate
- Steve Tamari, Professor, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
- Amal Tamari, Earlham College Alumnus and Studio Potter
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Amy Walters with Manahil Naveed, Marcos Bartolomé, and our host Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our lead of audience development and engagement is Aya Elmileik and Adam Abou-Gad is our engagement producer.
Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, has your university stopped investing in Israel? |
| 0:15.0 | It's become a nationwide movement for U.S. universities to divest, but it's a long, hard process. |
| 0:26.6 | In this moment, Erlum has still failed to divest from Israel. |
| 0:31.6 | What we're all hearing about divesting versus what is actually happening. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm Malika Bilan, and this is The Take. |
| 0:49.2 | Today I'm joined by one of our senior producers here at The Take, Amy Walters. |
| 0:54.0 | Hey, Amy. Hey, Malika. It's good to have you back on. |
| 0:58.8 | So you have been doing some fact-finding on a university divestment story, but this story you have a |
| 1:06.0 | personal connection to. Yeah, it's actually the school that I went to, Erlham College. It's a small school, |
| 1:15.9 | many people probably don't even know it. When I was there, it was just over a thousand students, |
| 1:21.5 | and now after COVID, it shrunk to just over 600. And it's in a pretty unremarkable town, Merchman, Indiana. So knowing that, |
| 1:30.6 | you might not think divesting in Israel would come up, but it did the day before graduation. |
| 1:38.4 | Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. |
| 1:43.2 | Nolya Wilcox, one of Erlum's graduating seniors, was leading the closing speech at one of the ceremonies. |
| 1:50.2 | We had to submit our script to the registrar and get it approved and all of that. |
| 1:54.8 | And it was very, like, poetic, la-la, like, yay, you're graduating. |
| 2:00.4 | The world offers itself to your imagination, |
| 2:03.6 | calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, |
| 2:07.6 | over and over announcing your place in the family of things. |
| 2:12.6 | And then I woke up the morning before we were supposed to deliver it, and I was just like, |
| 2:19.4 | why are we not talking about Palestine? |
... |
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