Ram’s Speech at Solidarity Rally, 04/21/23
“Holaaaaaa, so good to see familiar faces, and so many new ones, too. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Ram, and I’m a senior! I know there’s quite the line-up of speakers here today, so I’ll try not to take too long.
As my time at Swarthmore comes to an end, I find myself in a situation that I think many seniors and upperclassmen can relate to.
At the same time that we are working to wrap up our time here, finishing our senior projects, tying up loose ends, we are also having to think a lot about the future, what we’re gonna do after Swarthmore, what life will be like, how we’re going to sustain ourselves.
And for me, I also find myself reflecting a lot on the past, on what my four years at Swarthmore have been like, and on the harm that I have witnessed so many of us experience at the hands of this and other institutions… and it this past, this history, that I want to center in this space today.
At the end of my sophomore year, I was elected as the first Low-Income Latinx Vice President of the Student Government Organization. I thought, you know, this is the official student voice that college administration recognizes. I’m going to be in meetings with a lot of really high-ranking folks, I’m really going to be able to shake some shit up, bring about some change that we have been fighting for for a long time. I was wrong.
I want to emphasize that I think it’s important that we have folks fighting the good fight in those positions, but we should by no means think that SGO is where transformative, radical change will originate. If there is anything I learned during my time in Student Government, though, it is two things.
The first is that institutions, including this one, will always be resistant to change. A lot of the people that elected me into student government were folks like me, folks who come from low-income, first-generation backgrounds… and that was my whole campaign when I was running, right, making this place better for those of us who have the least access to social and material capital…
… and yet when I was in meetings with a lot of these administrators, I literally got told that I could not weigh in or involve myself in FLI issues because it was a conflict of interest. Let that sink in.
I was literally only the second FLI person to hold that position, and I got told that it was a conflict of interest to work for the needs of the very same people who had elected me…
… and yet, those same administrators who told me that then invited me to sit on the college’s 10 year strategic planning committee for developing inclusive leadership amongst our students. They’ll include us in leadership but will not actually listen to our voices when we try to lead.
The second thing I learned is that the administration will actively work to erase the history of our struggles so that we forget our power and our ability to strategize outside of what they tell us is possible… and if we are not careful and intentional about how we organize, how we pass down knowledge to future students who will be here long after we graduate, they will be successful.
Let us not forget the abolishment of the frats, the existence of the Black Cultural Center, the existence of the Intercenter, the existence of the Women’s Resource Center, none of those things would have happened had it not been for the work of student organizers across this college’s history.
Let us not forget that the demands of Solidarity at Swat are not new. Let us not forget that the United Undergraduate Workers of Swarthmore began to form a union in 2018, after the college announced that they would no longer be paying those who hosted prospective students overnight, instead offering them a blanket or sweatpants. In their own words, five years ago, those workers said:
“We are not just students, but workers as well, and as workers we are entitled to labor rights protecting us from mistreatment or exploitation. A student union, however, is needed for this protection, which would extend to all students and would hold the college administration accountable for its actions as our employer.
With tuition fees increasing and student debt mounting, we need to be compensated rightly for our work; that requires collective action in the form of a student union. The union would not only ensure that we are heard, but it would also mean a formalized grievance process, constant and open negotiation, and transparent employment policies and expectations, as well as higher wages for all undergraduate campus workers.”
Five years ago… five years ago they said this, and look at where we are now, fighting for the same issues that go even further back than 2018.
As I look around today, and I see so many different faces, so many different campus groups represented here, I want to remind us of what practicing solidarity in our organizing really means.
If we are to really practice solidarity, that requires us to really look at our past, and the history of struggles at Swarthmore. We have to look around us and see that all of our individual struggles, all of our grievances, all of the things we fight for, are interconnected.
If we organize in silos, away from each other, the college succeeds. If we are not united and connecting all of these different issues together, then we don’t harness the power to really leverage the change we want to see happen at this institution.
The demands that we are fighting for here today are connected to the demands of the Black Affinity Coalition, who demanded that “Swarthmore extend hazard pay to its staff until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
These demands are connected to the demands of the Swarthmore Indigenous Students Association when they called for “flights to and from home” because “all students need the ability to return home if their economic status doesn’t allow it.”
And so today, as I end this speech, I want us to take a moment and thank all of the people that have labored for these struggles before us. All of the Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer, Neurodivergent, DACAmented, Undocumented, First-Generation, Low-Income, and other marginalized voices who have worked to hold this place accountable long before we arrived to Swarthmore, and who will continue this work long after us.
I encourage us in all of our organizing, to refuse to forget our history, the history of our struggles at Swarthmore.
I also will do a little shameless plug and say that for my senior project, I’m building a website that documents a lot of these different student movements, and I hope that all of you who will continue this work after I graduate can use that as a resource to make sure you got your receipts against the institution.
I’ll be sure to share that out once it’s finished in the next few days. Thanks y’all.”