Dear Oracle,

I’m a proud alum of Hamline, and former Oracle reporter, proud to see my alma mater has a group of students questioning where our tuition money is going. To all – students, faculty, administration, alumni – reading, I ask: what do you think you would have done during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in the US? What do you think you would have done during the 1940s in Germany? What are you doing now? Here is your answer.To the brave students – I am so, so deeply proud of you. I am with you, and so many of us are with you. To the handful of professors willing to sign your names to support the students – I am so, so deeply proud of you. I am with you, and so many of us are with you. I want to particularly acknowledge the risk that non-tenured professors and students attending Hamline on scholarships are taking by putting their names forward. To the tenured professors who have not spoken up, what are you waiting for? To the administration trying to wait this out, what body count in Gaza will be high enough? Which atrocity will push you to speak? In twenty years, will you host a first-year symposium titled, “The Gaza Genocide in Poetry?” What is “post-colonial” theory in the face of colonial genocide in our time?
How can any alumni support their alma mater if it is cowardly? How can any of us be proud of our university if it stands for nothing, really, when it matters?

– Britta Moline, alumni