As an alumna of Marlboro College, which closed in 2020 but gifted its endowment to Emerson College to create the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, I read the dismissive column about students protesting the slaughter in Gaza (June 30) written by an Emerson professor, Rich West, with some surprise.

Maybe it’s nostalgia for the good old days, but I don’t remember any Marlboro professors taking such a publicly snarky attitude toward any of their students. Among West’s many belittling comments about the protesting students and what he thinks they will be doing over the summer: They’re “traumatized” Gen-Zers (his internal scare quotes), with “ostensible convictions,” who will be, in his outdated terminology, “surfing the net for sales on tents.” After denigrating some of his colleagues for what he calls “shepherding unethical marches,” he lets us know that he remains confident in his assessment that the protests were only “performative in nature.”

The track record of student protests, from the Vietnam War to divestment from apartheid South Africa to fossil fuel divestment, is pretty spot on, I think, but let me close with what I consider a more astute perspective on these students, from Macklemore in his rap song “Hind’s Hall”:

“What if you were in Gaza?
What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretending that you didn’t exist
You’d want the world to stand up
And the students finally did.”

My thanks to those students.

Renee Cote
Auburn