On the morning of May 1st, 2024, I was a hopeful graduate student at the University at Buffalo, one final presentation away from earning my master’s degree. One year later, when I return to my alma mater’s campus, I’m flooded with memories of my own screams for help echoing off a wall of officers who forced my body into the pavement outside Hochstetter Hall.
That day, the University decided I should be arrested for protesting SUNY and UB’s financial and cultural complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. I’ve relived this moment a thousand times–when police cars pass me on the street, in mahogany conference rooms before a panel of attorneys, and lying in bed as I try to sleep at night. The pain of that day has stayed with me, long after the bruises have faded away.
The commencement that I had looked forward to for years is now marked by my treatment at the hands of the University for demanding they invest in students, not genocide. A star student, I was no longer proud to don the regalia of the university – a mortarboard and gown, stoles and honors cords, with the addition of yellow bruises and red marks on my skin from zip ties police had tightened around my wrists.
Despite the pain I’ve felt in the year since May 1st, 2024, I know that protesting genocide is right. I am forever changed by what the University did to me and my fellow protestors, and yet my sense of justice has never been more clear—UB and the SUNY system are not only complicit in genocide, they are also guilty of violently suppressing students exercising their first amendment right to free speech.
The accolades and awards I had earned as an accomplished student, which the University had once celebrated me for, did not protect me. Students, alumni, professors—they will not protect you either. The University asks us to be global citizens, and yet I cannot speak up for my fellow students in Gaza without being brutalized and arrested. Professors, if you teach your students to stand up for what they believe in–to build a better world—you cannot support this university any longer. Students, they cannot force us to be silent as money that should go to our education and to our communities is used to burn Palestine to the ground.
If there’s anything I learned in my five years at UB, it’s this—students can change our communities and the world for the better, but first we need to take a stand for what is right.
Free Palestine,
Hannah Krull, Class of ’23 and ‘24
Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
