I graduated from university a little less than a week ago with a weightless degree validating my status as a (Honours) Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences. While I am, expectedly so, an affable and eligible Bachelor of various Arts, the parenthetical Honours was an extraneous tag that left me confused. Honour, like its vernacular cousins, valour, glory, and virtue, are qualities that I have almost exclusively associated with Disney protagonists, cricketer Virat Kohli, and my mother. To regard myself, someone who got caught copying MAT133 answers from Chegg.com, as honourable was laughable. So, sitting inside the circular dome of Convocation Hall at 31 King’s College Circle, clad in a rental gown and regalia, smelling of borrowed success, perfume, and sweat, I laughed, wondering what the Honours represented then, if it did not represent me. I attempted to read the Honours as an accompanying adjective for my graduating degree. A glorifying remark towards my education. “His is not any ordinary Bachelor of Arts. It is an Honourable one.” A marketing gimmick then it seemed and like most promotional shticks, one borne out of falsifications. Had my education really been honourable? Not entirely.
As automotive industry leader Flavio Volpe, the honorary speaker for the day, lectured about the legacy of the University of Toronto, my mind was drawn to two pressing and seemingly interconnected matters – the dubious prestige of my university education and the documentary The Encampments. In describing the aged Hall that we sat in, Volpe remarked, “It ages, but it always echoes with the voices of the kids who’ve gone here.” Having seen The Encampments just the morning of my graduation, the images of the rubble of the Al-Aqsa University resurfaced to memory. What of the walls of the universities in Gaza city that no longer exist? The Al-Azhar University? The University of Palestine? The voices that transitioned to screams and then silence.
The state of Israel strangled the present, silenced the past, and spoiled the future, all in one blow. The Encampments contends with these questions and more importantly emphasizes how academics and professionals working in education are unwilling to recognize a genocide as a genocide. Neither of the speakers at my own graduation or my sister’s the next week addressed Gaza directly, opting instead for the vague and ultimately safe masquerade of “the wars going on in our world right now.” My education from the University of Toronto in the field of Peace, Conflict and Justice has taught me that the war in Gaza is anything but a war. So, when the very educators who sanctioned my degree fail to call a spade a spade, where is the honour?
The Encampments, which is focused on the development of the protest encampments at Columbia University in 2024, is a story that played out similarly across several university campuses around the world. Students (for the most part) mobilized for one unanimous and urgent call – universities must divest from Israel. Students do not wish for their tuition money to be associated with funding the genocide in Gaza in any way whatsoever, and rightly so.
As I sat in my graduation ceremony, the faces of The Encampments’ protagonists Sueda Polat and Mahmoud Khalil, who led the protests at Columbia, glimmered in the expanses of my memory. Ever since students have been around, their interests, fights, and beliefs have been dismissed as childish endeavours. The ideas of a people who aren’t privy to the complicated and cruel machinations of the “real world”. Political radicalization is often viewed as a form of deviance in this regard—a point underscored by Khalil’s arrest as The Encampments began its festival run and rolled into theatres. A step away from the normal. Films like The Encampments expose the cowardice of this very normal by treating a historic and world-changing event with the gravity of one, instead of allowing it to get lost in the world’s absurd normalcy. The film questions why the abnormal political slaughter of over 60,000 people must be reasoned with a “normal” understanding of this world, when it is human tendency to act, to feel, to emote.
I remember last year, being in the same Convocation Hall for my friend’s graduation. The University of Toronto encampment was situated right outside the building and as graduands filtered out of the hall into the open, looking for a spot to commemorate the day with photos, a protest for the liberation of Palestine went past Convocation Hall. The encampments, Palestinian flags, and signboards calling for a free Palestine were immortalized forevermore in that moment, in the background of the fabled photos of last year’s graduating class. I know a lot of families felt “cheated” then—a celebration ruined by an unnecessary backdrop. Such privilege becomes apparent after a viewing of The Encampments. While several writers have been observant enough to liken Israel’s collective ignorance of Gaza to the ambivalence of the Höss family from Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest—Nazis who enjoyed their dream home next door to Auschwitz while the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded on the other side of the wall—it seems as if everyone in this “real world” has been roped into this zone of ignorance. The Encampments, above all, allows one to contend with this utterly bizarre emotion. How does one act in a tragedy? Is it normal to keep marching on?
Through Khalil, Polat, and the thousands of students who mobilized for a free Palestine and through the course of my own graduation ceremony, I learned that the initial and the most crucial step would be to recognize and question the circumstances within which one receives their education. It is not a matter of honour that I have graduated with my degree. It is a matter of chance. It is a by-product of a system that ranks countries, and by extension their people, from first to third, turning its back on all who are not number one. It is not honourable to have an education from an institution missing a moral backbone.
In The Encampments the (missing?) morality of these institutions is typified by the then-President of Columbia, Minouche Shafik. Caught between listening to the students’ demands and those of the Board of Directors, Shafik stutters and fumbles her way through the film’s events. Towards the end, there is a video interview with Shafik that is in stark contrast to the authentic and emotionally charged interviews with the student protesters throughout the film. Shafik appears outside in the grounds at Columbia University where the encampments had once stood, delivering a robotic monologue about Columbia’s duty through these protests and the University’s dedication to its students throughout. Shafik’s orchestrated hand gestures, exaggerated expressions, and meaningless promises while standing on the very grounds where students had forged an unlikely community through resistance and bravery, offered a rather eerie site. Her unnecessary enthusiasm intensifies the underlying morbidity of the scene. Even though Shafik seeks to provides warmth through her words, one is never convinced by the PR-trained cowardice expected from the flagbearers of this system.
In that regard, our degrees should consider doing away with referring to us as (Honours) Bachelor of Arts and instead title us (Privileged) Bachelor of Arts. I disagree with those who call the encampments performative, as counter-protesters in the film do, as do critics in conversations about the campus sit-ins. Instead, they are the least that we could be doing to show solidarity with fellow “real” humans. In a world constantly overcome by stimuli of distraction, the encampments were the only logical form of protest against a system that peddles knowledge but privileges commerce. A system that prides itself in the prowess of its educational institutions but does not consider the power that education – real, unadulterated, free education holds. To occupy the pristine campuses that these universities stamp across pamphlets, websites, and graduation photos and to remind the world to take conscious action is an act of tremendous courage. And it’s one that requires the moral righteousness and heart that, despite all popular notions, only students have ever had.
