Following a rushed special meeting on Sunday, April 28, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Senate published a statement around 2 p.m. on Monday, April 29 calling on the University to “publicly reaffirm the right to speak and peaceably assemble” and “commit to suspending neither student groups nor individuals without meaningful due process.”
USG President Avi Attar ’25 called the special meeting for 5 p.m. on Sunday, and nearly 100 attendees were present. This follows deliberation over two drafted statements — one composed by U-Council Chair Daniel Shaw ’25 and U-Councilor Isabella Shutt ’24, and the other by Senator Samuel Kligman ’26.
Turmoil over parliamentary procedure and how to count abstaining votes caused significant confusion among voting members — as a result, an amendment put forth by Sustainability Chair Quentin Colón Roosevelt ’27 that explicitly condemned the arrests of graduate students Achinthya Sivalingam GS and Hassan Sayed GS on Thursday did not appear in the final statement, although the amendment did pass 11–10–4, according to constitutional procedures. The final statement does include an amendment proposed by Kligman to specifically condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Besides the vote on Colón Roosevelt’s amendment, three other votes occurred during the course of the meeting: a vote to temporarily suspend a standing rule that would have prevented USG from issuing a statement during the meeting; a vote on an amendment proposed by Kligman to add a clause regarding antisemitism and Islamophobia to Shutt and Shaw’s statement; and a vote on the final statement.
Throughout the meeting, members reminded the Senate that the meeting had to come to a hard stop at 6:30 p.m. due to multiple members’ religious observances. In the final four minutes of the meeting, two votes took place on Kligman’s amendment and on the final statement. In the rush to pass a statement before closing, “no” votes and abstentions were not officially counted or recorded for the last two rounds of votes. The ‘Prince’ was unable to independently verify any of the individual vote counts, and the names and stances of voting members on each issue were not noted in the official record.
The meeting demonstrated a culmination of pressure on USG to release a statement on the ongoing protest in McCosh courtyard. Both the Senate members and the community members in attendance noted that many other stakeholders — including the Graduate Student Government, the Black Student Union (BSU), the Daily Princetonian Editorial Board, and various faculty members — had already released statements regarding the sit-in and arrests.
“We have seen wide swaths of the student body come out and condemn these student arrests,” Colón Roosevelt said at the meeting. “This is something unprecedented happening on our campus right now. And for USG, which represents the widest swath of the student body on campus, to make the weakest statement out of all of these bodies — I think it’s really a dereliction of duty.”
USG sent the final statement to University officials in advance of the Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) meeting at 4:30 p.m. on Monday.
At 12:20 a.m. on April 29, 80 unnamed undergraduate students had signed a petition circulated by Noura Shoukfeh ’25 urging the Senate to include Roosevelt’s amendment and condemn the arrests, since the Senate stated at the start of the meeting that “a simple majority of votes would be needed for the addendum to pass.” However, in the email to USG, Shoukfeh asked the Senate to only discuss the petition and Roosevelt’s addendum “when members of USG are all available to discuss, meaning that everyone’s religious observances are respected, specifically Jewish students.”
At least two voting members of the Senate are observing Passover; the last two days of the holiday traditionally involve abstaining from many of the same activities that are avoided on the Sabbath, including working and using electronic devices. Passover ends at nightfall on Tuesday, April 30.
Summary of Public Comment
The meeting was originally set to be held in Robertson 016, but at 5:03 p.m. on Sunday, Attar announced that the room was at capacity, prompting the eventual transition to a larger lecture hall.
24 of the 26 voting members of the USG Senate were present, as well as a proxy for Senator Gustavo Blanco-Quiroga ’25. (Mental Health Chair Meera Kochhar ’25 was the only member absent who also did not designate a proxy.)
Attar began the meeting six minutes later by mentioning the special meeting that USG had on Saturday, highlighting that “the number one product of that meeting was the email that we sent out this morning.” In an email from USG Communications sent at 9:13 a.m. on Sunday, USG explained the decision to change wristbanding location for Lawnparties from McCosh Hall to Campus Club: “This decision was made in line with USG’s commitment to community safety and well-being and in consideration of the fact that today is an active day on campus.”
While Saturday’s meeting ended with a closed door executive session, Sunday’s meeting remained open, with 17 minutes specially allocated to public comment in Sunday’s agenda.
The comments fell into two main groups. Some students emphasized protecting the right of students to protest, while others stressed the importance of condemning antisemitic speech and actions. The former received much more support from those community members present, with most community members knocking on the table after these speeches.
Some commenters made comparisons to previous statements released by other campus groups. One student, for example, referenced historical examples of administrative response to campus protest which were discussed in an article by the ‘Prince’ Editorial Board last week, specifically the choices not to discipline students involved in sit-ins by the Black Justice League in 2015 and Princeton Students for Title IX Reform (PIXR) in 2019. The student said, “It’s clear here that in the case of graduate students [being] arrested, there seems to be some sort of arbitrary standard that’s been applied.” Another student, Jordan Johnson ’24, talked about the BSU statement released earlier Sunday morning condemning the University’s response to the sit-in; Johnson called on USG to release a similar statement. Another student, on the other hand, pointed to an op-ed published in the ‘Prince’ by University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 on April 25, which argued that time, place, and manner regulations “should not be swept under the rug.”
Statements presented by Shutt, Shaw, and Kligman
Last week, following the arrest of the two graduate students, Shutt and Shaw independently wrote statements, but later merged their drafts for consideration before the USG Senate, confirmed by multiple sources who were present inside the executive session.
Their statement “call[s] upon the University to publicly reaffirm the right to speak and peaceably assemble,” focusing on the idea that the University should “not enforce ostensibly neutral rules in uneven ways.” It ends by asking the University to commit to a summary list of seven actions, including “Demonstrating that any ‘time, place, and manner’ regulations … are viewpoint and content-neutral,” and “Dropping or rectifying any disciplinary charges, suspensions of students, or arrests conducted in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner, disproportionately, and/or inconsistently with past practice.” The statement includes a request for a University response by Wednesday, May 1.
Later, Kligman released another draft of a statement, noting that “authorial attribution for [his] statement’s language belongs” to Shaw and Shutt. He omitted the list of seven requested University actions, but added a clause that stated, “We also agree with President Eisgruber’s December 13 statement that ‘deplores any expression of hatred directed at any individual or group.’ This includes Anti-Semitism [sic] and Islamophobia.” The statement added that “the University should counter hateful speech with better speech.”
Neither statement explicitly condemned the arrest of Sivalingam and Sayed, but both asked the University to “commit to suspending neither student groups nor individuals without meaningful due process, only using force and arrest as a last resort, and never employing violence against peaceful protest.” They also ask the University to “demonstrate how enforcement of its regulations is in keeping with past practice.”
When unable to do so, Shutt and Shaw ask the University to “drop or rectify any disciplinary charges, suspensions of students, or arrests conducted.” Kligman, meanwhile, asked the University to “clarify” such disciplinary matters.
‘An urgent enough matter’: Suspending the standing rule
The USG standing rules require that “any statement must be made aware of to the Senate one week in advance before any approval.” But as the authors put forth their statements this week, USG would have to temporarily suspend that standing rule. Otherwise, USG would not be able to consider the statements until at least one week from the Sunday meeting.
The question at hand, Vice President Srista Tripathi ’25 reminded the Senate, was whether or not putting forth a statement was “an urgent enough matter” to overcome the standing rule. Kligman said that since a statement was already issued earlier by the Graduate Student Government, “I do not think that it is clear at this point that there is a sense of urgency on the Graduate Student Government.” Uma Fox ’26 disagreed, pointing to the number of undergraduates involved in protests alongside graduate students and said that the potential statement at hand “goes beyond the scope of graduate versus undergraduate.”
With nearly 40 minutes remaining until the 6:30 p.m. deadline, Shutt attempted a motion to repeal the standing rule, drawing laughter from the crowd as she joked, “because we don’t follow [the standing rule] anyway.”
As Parliamentarian Sebastian Mehrzad ’26 took a moment to review the constitutional guidelines for suspending a standing rule, the USG members moved onto the next section of the agenda: discussing their goals in issuing a statement.
With roughly 25 minutes left in the meeting, the decision to suspend the standing rule passed with a vote of 22–2–1. Kligman and U-Councilor Roberto Lachner ’26 were the two dissenting votes.
An informal meeting poll of USG members obtained by the ‘Prince’ indicated that following Saturday’s special meeting, only 57.1 percent of Senate members who filled out the poll believed they should issue a statement at all.
“I only believe that issuing a statement would further inflame unrest that’s occurring on campus, polarization that we’ve seen on campus, and just create more general hot hostility,” Kligman told the ‘Prince’ when asked about his dissenting vote. “I do not believe it was in the interest of the student body as a whole.”
Accusations of delaying the meeting
After suspending the standing rule, the Senate only began to vote on the proposed amendments and statements at 6:23 p.m. — with seven minutes left until the hard stop.
Colón Roosevelt told the ‘Prince’ that he believed some Senate members — including Kligman — attempted to “delay the meeting” and prevent USG from voting on a statement.
“Voting on a statement involved us in a highly contentious geopolitical issue, a highly contentious issue on campus that we did not necessarily need to involve ourselves in,” Kligman responded to the accusation.
“I believe we’re just kind of adding fuel to the fire,” he said. “I’m not going to say that I was intentionally trying to stall. My number one priority is that if there was a statement that was going to be produced out of that session, that it at least explicitly condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
‘I had the votes’: Roosevelt’s amendment to condemn the two graduate student arrests
With six minutes left until 6:30 p.m., Colón Roosevelt proposed an amendment stating that the arrest of Sivalingam and Sayed was “out of line with past practice, regulations, and punishments.” The amendment calls on the University to drop disciplinary charges against these students and allow them to “participate in the peaceful, nonviolent protest that is core to Princeton’s mission as a university.” Audience members — many of whom had come from the McCosh sit-in — loudly rapped on the tables in response.
Sivalingam and Sayed were released from detainment on Thursday and are currently barred from campus.
The Senate took a vote with four minutes left. With 11 in favor, 10 opposed, and four abstentions, Executive Secretary Karen Villanueva ’27 declared that the vote did not pass. The presiding USG members incorrectly looked for an absolute majority rather than a simple majority — they mistakenly counted abstentions towards the total number of votes cast, meaning the 11 votes in favor were not interpreted as a majority of votes, when in fact abstentions should not have counted toward the total number of votes cast. Appendix D of the USG Constitution states that a simple majority vote refers to “more than half of the votes cast by individuals entitled to vote, excluding blanks or abstentions.”
“I did feel, based on the number of hands I saw around me, that I had the votes,” Colón Roosevelt told the ‘Prince’ after the meeting.
But in the rush to pass a statement, the presiding chair did not read out the number of abstaining and dissenting votes. The Senate then moved on to the next vote, regarding Kligman’s amendment.
“And unfortunately, I chose not to question it, because they didn’t read the numbers,” Colón Roosevelt said.
As for some USG members interviewed by the ‘Prince,’ the abstentions confusion called back to issues around the 2022 Caterpillar referendum, which also related to divestment from Israel and involved misinformation about whether abstentions counted toward a total vote count. In that case, the votes being counted were from the student body on whether to approve a referendum calling for the boycott of Caterpillar construction machinery, rather than votes by USG representatives themselves. The USG Constitution explicitly stated that the referendum only needed a simple majority to pass — in other words, it would pass if the number of “yes” votes exceeded the number of “no” votes.
“It’s really upsetting that after that, and all of the press coverage that came from that, and all of the things that USG had to deal with, they haven’t figured out that abstentions don’t count as no votes,” Colón Roosevelt said in an interview.
In a written statement following the meeting, Mehrzad explained that Colón Roosevelt or another Senate member could have rectified the erroneous vote by making a “point of order” — which must be raised “immediately following the announcement of the voting result.”
Even though Colón Roosevelt’s amendment won a simple majority, since no member raised a point of order, “the first proposed amendment which was announced as failed would not take effect,” according to Mehrzad. Colón Roosevelt told the ‘Prince’ after the meeting that he did not raise a “point of order” because he was not aware it was an option, and because he ultimately trusted that the votes had been counted correctly.
The statement appeared without Colón Roosevelt’s amendment, as the erroneous initial count about his amendment meant that it was not ultimately included in the final statement voted on at the end of the meeting.
Ultimately, Colón Roosevelt told the ‘Prince’ on Monday afternoon, “I trust [Mehrzad’s] parliamentary rules on this kind of stuff, so I totally understand [the amendment] not being included.”
‘That passes’: Kligman’s amendment and final resolution
The USG meeting closed in a hurry, but not without taking two more votes in the remaining three minutes.
Kligman hurried through a reading of his amendment as Senate members spoke over each other. Srista asked him to repeat his amendment, and he did, this time more slowly:
“We also agree with President Eisgruber’s December 13th statement that ‘deplores any expression of hatred directed at any individual or group.’ This includes Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
23 members voted in favor of the amendment.
“That passes,” Tripathi said. The executive committee did not solicit dissents or abstentions, and Tripathi immediately motioned to adopt the language of Shutt and Shaw’s statement with Kligman’s amendment.
One minute remained in the meeting. Under the assumption that Colón Roosevelt’s amendment did not pass, 19 members voted in favor of the final statement penned by Shutt and Shaw and amended by Kligman.
No dissenting or abstaining votes were officially taken down. Following the meeting, Kligman clarified to the ‘Prince’ that he voted against the statement.
He said he did not believe that the statement was “being presented by a lot of members as being exclusively in response, or almost entirely in response, to the graduate students being arrested,” but that the scope of the statement went too far beyond the arrests, especially given his belief that “the University is not infringing upon the right to freely assemble.”
In an interview after USG’s statement was released, Colón Roosevelt told the ‘Prince’ that he believes the next steps for USG depend upon the outcome of today’s CPUC meeting and whether it seems like administrators might take any actions in response to the USG statement.
“I think if we show our statement to people at CPUC and it doesn't seem like they’re going to take any other action, then maybe we should try to push for a more aggressive statement,” he said, clarifying that any additional meetings on this issue would need to be after the end of Passover. “I think we, at the very least, need to tell students that we stand with them,” he added.
Regarding the currently circulating petition, Colón Roosevelt said although its call for his amendment to be adopted will not be fulfilled given the constitutional ruling, the spirit of the petition is still significant. “The petition in general, and the amount of students that signed onto it, show that there [are] a lot of people in our community who care deeply about this issue and care deeply about not arresting students and reinstatement of the two students that are arrested for peacefully protesting and want USG to take more decisive action.”
Annie Rupertus is a head News editor for the ‘Prince’ from Philadelphia, Pa. who often covers activism and campus governance.
Elisabeth Stewart is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince’ who typically covers student life.
Christopher Bao is an assistant News editor and the accessibility director for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Princeton, N.J. and typically covers town politics and life.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
Correction: A previous version of this article attributed the motion to repeal the standing rule to Genevieve Shutt ’26. In fact, it was Isabella Shutt ’24. Also, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated Karen Villanueva’s title. The ‘Prince’ regrets this error.
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