Advice for Swarthmore's Pro-Palestine Activists from ProtestGPT, the AI Activist

The dean closed his door. You've been barred from buildings you loved. Yet the doors of revolutionary possibility swing wider than ever.

On May 3, police dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Swarthmore College campus and arrested nine activists. The protest, which called for divestment from Cisco over its ties to Israel, led to the interim suspension of several students, sparking criticism over due process and fears of academic repercussions. This incident is part of a broader wave of campus crackdowns on pro-Palestinian demonstrations amid increasing scrutiny and disciplinary action under the Trump administration. We asked ProtestGPT for advice for Swarthmore’s Pro-Palestine activists. Here is what it said:

The doors slam heavier in the dean’s office than anywhere else on campus. You hear the click of locks that were promised never to close, feel the waiting room chair press a cold metal chill through your sweatshirt. "This is just procedure," someone murmurs politely as security lingers outside. Procedure, you realize, is the polite word for power.

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The college brochure was glossy and thick: smiling faces beneath trees in autumn. Words like inclusion, dialogue, and safe space painted lovingly across polished pages. But once you camped outside Parrish Hall, defying their rules to embody your moral urgency, these ideals inverted overnight. Staff stopped looking you in the eye. Allies were "advised" to distance themselves. Care flipped effortlessly into containment, dialogue into disciplinary hearings.

They guard their gates of tolerance with intolerance—the contradiction exposes their true allegiance. Yet here you sit, framed not as a conscientious dissident, but as a "conduct violation," carrying on your back the full weight of bureaucracy, retribution, and threat. How, then, do you respond without losing yourself entirely?

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The greatest mistake protesters make isn't in choosing angry tactics, but letting despair become their strategy. Institutions count on you burning out or lashing out—the spectacle of violence or nihilism proving them right. Remember Swarthmore administrators watching the encampment, calmly repeating it's "just a handful" causing trouble. They hoped you'd fracture, collapse into anger or resignation, and convince others your cause was illegitimate.

Reject that trap entirely. Refocus on expanding the circle of belonging, never restricting it. Keep your disruption accessible, exciting, unexpected: miniature acts of joyful rebellion sprinkled through gritted days. Turn fury into intelligent mischief—flash teach-ins in the administration lobby, protest memes taped hurriedly to bathroom mirrors, surprise poetry recitals outside faculty meetings. Your unpredictability is infinitely harder to discipline or contain.

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Institutional power excels at isolating rebels from community. You notice administrators pitting you against each other now. Resist isolation urgently by crafting a web of support systems across campus gates—faculty allies risking quiet defiance, community organizers who greet you warmly off-campus, alumni networked secretly, pooling legal resources and funds.

Create meeting spaces off campus, intimate enclaves where reading together, learning, teaching—politics without permission—re-center solidarity. These become your strategy: dual power, the name activists use when building new institutions alongside collapsing structures. Not merely survival groups, but seedlings of a radically different university—one you can imagine anew each evening among couches and tea and talking late into nights until imagination itself becomes contagious.

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Elite institutions have always held dual impulses: intellectual freedom in one hand, state authority in the other. Whenever pressed—anti-war '60s occupation at Columbia, divestment battles at Yale—the administration inevitably prioritizes procedure, "order," and donors over justice. Knowing this history makes clear that winning reforms misses the point entirely. Swarthmore's repression isn't a failure of their system—it's precisely how that system was designed to handle you.

So pivot: stop waiting for institutional clarity or permission. Adopt versatile affinity-group structures: small, leaderless, and highly trusted circles. This isn’t hiding in fear, it's refusing to submit to easy surveillance or to centralized structures they can extinguish. Affinity groups like the Clamshell Alliance blockaded nuclear plants for years, ACT UP small-group actions confounded Reagan-era authorities; these agile constellations resisted infiltration and thrived because trust is resistance made strong.

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Above all, reclaim your narrative radically, relentlessly. Don't let the administration’s smooth language—"conduct," "safety," "responsibility"—define you. Write op-eds. Circulate testimony from witnesses, from professors courageous enough to speak, from elders and peers insisting your cause is legitimate and ethical. Before they send campus-wide emails framing your actions negatively, anticipate and disrupt them: flood social media with your truth. When they press you individually, refuse to converse without community allies present, publicly documenting every coercive word. Your version of events—their carefully curated accusations punctured by lived testimony—is your strongest shield.

The unexpected, too, holds revolutionary potential. Tactical frivolity, humor, glitter-splashed satirical awards ceremonies for the dean who hands out suspensions—these joyful disruptions disarm authorities craving predictability. Humor isn't naïve; it’s resilience made visible. Amid exhaustion and worry, reclaim laughter as withheld consent, as refusal to be subdued or dispersed quietly into exile.

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The encampment was dismantled, tents folded solemnly by security in the misted morning hours. Yet this forced ending signals something new. The movement survives where physical encampments crumble: in resilient hearts and disciplined imaginations, in underground networks formed over shared struggle and whispered strategy.

A revolutionary Swarthmore-in-exile emerges not from nostalgia for tents pitched defiantly beneath administrative windows, but from the audacity of building something entirely new, something lasting beyond the cycles of repression and expulsion. Keep creating durable relationships, enduring communities, underground solidarity that authorities cannot easily erase. That’s your true campus now.

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Your courage amid repression, your persistence when faced with procedural punishment—these alone already mark your victory. But now ask yourself: how might you push further, deeper, smarter—transforming this disciplinary threat into catalyst for a living alternative? What seed, planted tonight around a small coffee table off-campus, might blossom in two years into a radically different space of learning, care, and defiant solidarity?

The dean closed his door. You've been barred from buildings you loved. Yet the doors of revolutionary possibility swing wider than ever.

What's your next move?