St. Mary’s College students ended their peaceful occupation of a chapel on campus and hunger strike late Thursday night after a meeting between students and administrators.
The hunger strike and occupation of the Chapel of the Most Blessed Virgin, which began Wednesday night , was led by Students for Justice for Palestine, an unofficial student organization on the campus.
Christine Hutchins, a spokesperson for St. Mary’s College, said that the school’s leadership team met with the students Thursday night to “openly share and talk through the student group’s concerns.” Hutchins also said that the students and administrators agreed to work together “create a task force to look into the disclosure of financial investments and address divestment.
“As an institution grounded in its Lasallian Catholic values, we are committed to working together to address this student group’s concerns as a shared responsibility, one step at a time, by creating awareness, education, and positive change at Saint Mary’s,” Hutchins wrote in an email to the Bay Area News Group.
The chapel occupation and hunger strike involved around 20 students and supportive faculty; eight students joined the hunger strike. The students set up a memorial for Palestinian children killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 at the St. John the Baptist De La Salle statue on campus, which they asked the college not to remove.
The students and administrators agreed on Thursday night that they would work together to find another way to memorialize children killed in the conflict and create awareness, Hutchins said.
The school also agreed to work with students to establish a task force examining more financial disclosure of school investments and “address” the question of divestment from company supporting Israel and its war effort.
Kylie Gutierrez, a fourth-year digital media student and co-organizer with the organization, said before the resolution that they participated in the hunger strike after students’ calls for change were met with little to no response from the college.
An occupation at another East Bay college campus, however, ended with twelve arrests on Thursday night. The group that was arrested at UC Berkeley last night, which included one enrolled student, were arrested after they broke into the Anna Head Alumnae Hall.