Henry Abbott

“You belong at Bowdoin.”

From freshman year orientation week to your final steps on the graduation stage, this sentiment permeates the Bowdoin undergraduate experience. Undergirding every moment of your Bowdoin career, the promise of community surrounds you as you navigate what it means to receive a Bowdoin education: “To lose yourself in generous enthusiasms and cooperate with others for common ends—This is the offer of the college for the best four years of your life.”

For myself and many others in this past week, we have only just realized what it means to be in community—to lose ourselves in generous enthusiasms, to cooperate with one another for common ends. In the halls of Shaban al-Dalou Union, we have realized the Offer of the College and discovered what it means to belong at Bowdoin.

I entered the encampment on day one, Thursday evening. I left the encampment on day three—a personal risk assessment I made as the implied threat of arrest and suspension from the administration became overbearing.  After I left, I coordinated the arrival and delivery of food and supplies to my peers inside, an effort that enlisted the help of hundreds of classmates, community members, faculty and alumni. The anecdotes I present next are not purely personal, but rather a collective journal of experiences from Shaban al-Dalou Union. In resisting complicity to genocide, here is what we have learned about community:

• Community is playing cards while listening to a Palestinian boiler room set at midnight after Katie Toro-Ferrari threatens to take your name down and send it to your dean if you don’t leave the student union by 1 a.m.
• Community is laughing at YikYak threats from faceless strangers threatening to tear-gas your encampment and tweets referring to you and your peers as “terror supporters” that “violently stormed a building.”
• Community is tallying sharpie lines on your arm for each time you’ve gotten your ID taken by Randy, joking (but not really) about how you would get those lines tattooed when this was all over.
• Community is waking up with your friend half-dressed to a security guard in your tent demanding to see your ID, realizing together that Smith Union has been locked down and your presence in a space has been incriminated.
• Community is watching a community rally perform a 100-person Dabke through the second-floor window, as your peers attempt the same inside the locked doors of Shaban al-Dalou Union.
• Community is reading bundles of notes sent in from outside telling you to keep smiling, keep singing and keep resisting as the hours blend together under never-relenting fluorescent lights.
• Community is a stranger sending in a box of sugar-free red bull after 36 hours of sleep deprivation.
• Community is dancing with your friends at 2 a.m. after being told by administration that you would be leaving the encampment “one way or another.”
• Community is sitting with your peers under a panopticon of security guards, administration and faculty working to isolate you and break down your will.
• Community is crying to your friends after being told by a tenured member of the faculty that you would be personally responsible for getting your friends deported.
• Community is your friend sharing her bed with you the night you leave the encampment, because she knows that to be alone in this moment is a vulnerability you cannot bear.
• Community is sneaking in carrot cake and eyeliner through a window at 11 p.m. to your friends as they await imminent suspension.
• Community is the classmates that carry you to the health center as your body gives out from the collective trauma of sleep deprivation, surveillance and chronic anxiety of being penalized for your act of protest.
• Community is smoking your second-ever cigarette with six peers whose names you barely knew a week prior after witnessing the end of the first pro-Palestinian encampment during the second Trump administration.
• Community is the support you find as eight of your peers remain suspended and over 50 remain in disciplinary limbo for daring to hold your college to its mantle of honoring the common good.
• Community is crying and holding the hands of your peers as you listen to a message from the students and faculty of the besieged Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank acknowledging and thanking you for your act of solidarity:

“Solidarity is a verb.”

In essence, community is the thousands of strangers whose names you’ll never know but whose acts of kindness you’ll always remember as you stand together with your friends behind the locked doors of a building that you dared to “occupy” in protest against genocide. Community is realizing that your school administration has surrendered themselves in anticipatory obedience to the encroaching fascist regime, but understanding that you must continue your act of resistance regardless.

These last few days have taught me what it means to belong at Bowdoin. Not in classrooms with one icebreaker after another or dancing drunk with a stranger in the basement of a College House—but in a room of a dozen strangers that have become family, participating in an act of revolutionary love and resistance.

Julia Xiang-Wang is a member of the Class of 2026.