The University of Michigan's experiment in woke governance has come to an end. Today a majority of the student government voted to impeach the body's current president and vice president, both of whom were elected earlier this year as part of a slate of pro-Palestinian candidates.
The Ann Arbor-based school’s Central Student Government voted 30 to 7 in favor of ousting President Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Elias Atkinson — who are part of a pro-Palestine activist group called “Shut It Down” — for neglecting their responsibilities and actively trying to block funding for student groups on campus, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The pair had reportedly refused to resign after calls from the rest of the CSG, which alleged that they both had also threatened physical harm against its members.
“Since their time in office began, they have refused to do the duties constitutionally required of them, have incited violence against members of this body, and have openly degraded representatives for disagreeing with the mechanisms by which they govern,” said sophomore CSG member Margaret Peterman during a public meeting on Tuesday. “After repeated calls for their resignation from over 40 current and former members of CSG and repeated refusals to do so, this assembly is left with no choice but to impeach.”
To really appreciate this we have to go back to the beginning. Earlier this year when pro-Palestinian campus protests were all the rage, a group of activists at UM came up with a unique plan. They would run for student government on an explicit platform of shutting down the student government until the school agreed to divest from Israel.
The first part of the plan worked. The activists were elected and Alifa Chodhury became student president. She promptly vetoed the distribution of any funding to campus groups over the summer break. And when student returned in the fall, she did it again.
At this point, students who hadn't voted for this plan were getting irritated. The money in question wasn't coming from the school, it was a fee which all students had to pay to fund these groups. They still had to pay but now none of their activities had any money.
As opposition built, the university put forward an alternative plan. They agreed to essentially loan student groups the money to continue operating with the promise that, at some point in the future, those groups would pay the university back once student fees were released. As you can imagine, the activists running student government were angry because this ended their leverage. In one last desperate act, they tried to pass a plan to redirect all of the money to rebuild a university in Gaza. That plan failed to pass and that's when things got ugly.
