Kennesaw State’s Students for Socialism (SFS) partnered with the local Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) to protest recent administrative plans regarding campus cultural resource centers.
Last week, the university announced that several campus resource centers, including the Global Village, the Women’s Resource Center and the LGBTQ Center, among others, would be altered in order to comply with federal anti-DEI mandates handed down from President Donald Trump.
These orders are seeing organizations like the Global Village, shifting from a focus on international students, to one on out-of-state students.
The Students for Socialism (SFS) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) organized just to the right of The Green, holding signs meant to show their opposition to the Trump administration, and the impact that his anti-DEI order has had on the campus.
Around 20 minutes into the protest, administration officials accompanied by police officers informed the group that they couldn’t protest on The Green as they did not have a reservation.
Following this, the protesters marched around The Green and to the school’s main entrance on Chastain Road, where they were flooded with supportive honks from passing cars.
Student empowerment stood as the main message of the protest with the groups chanting things like “When students’ lives are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” and “Whose school? Our school! Whose street? Our street,” among others.
The protest hosted a variety of speakers, a mix of students and organizers. Satya Vatti, a PSL organizer said that the KSU had “fallen in line” with the Trump administration’s “far right, billionaire” agenda.
She said that DEI initiatives were being targeted across the country as a way to undo the progress made during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 1970s.
She also accused the KSU administration of intentionally waiting until the end of the semester to announce these changes in order to weaken potential student pushback, a sentiment shared by several other protestors.
Grace, a student at KSU and member of both the SFS and PSL, described KSU’s plan for the future of cultural resource centers as “a discriminatory attack on resources for marginalized students and a restriction of free speech.”
Noting that faculty and administration had been vague about their plans, she pushed back against calls from the school for students to take up the mantle of some of these organizations and create registered student organizations to fulfill the former purposes of these cultural resource organizations.
“[Administration and faculty is] pushing a lot of responsibility on the students, saying ‘create RSOs,’ but they don’t know where they’ll be protected in the future,” she said.
Registered student organizations are one of the most popular ways for students to build resources for causes they’re passionate about, but they require a much greater commitment of time and effort than is expected from students in Kennesaw State’s resource organizations.
Jasmine Williams, a community member and PSL organizer spoke about the importance of campus resource centers,
“These students rely on these programs…they use these resources to be able to feel like themselves, so that they can engage in their study in a full way, as their full selves.” Williams said.
She described KSU’s conduct as “selling out their students for a couple bucks,” and said that changing these cultural resource organizations will ostracize minority students.
Another organizer, Kofi, offered similar sentiments,
“…When you take away a lot of these resource centers, what you’re doing is taking away students’ ability to advocate for themselves…” Kofi said.
An official announcement from the university outlining more specific details about what is to happen to these resource centers is expected in the coming weeks, but regardless of the exact changes, major overhauls are expected.
The Kennesaw State community made its dissatisfaction with these changes loud and clear at this protest, and more actions from the student body should be expected in the coming future.
