How Leadership Institute training helped one U of Michigan student break student gov gridlock caused by anti-Israel activists

The University of Michigan’s (UM) Central Student Government (CSG) seeks to “enhance student welfare and the Michigan experience for everyone.” But student welfare was held hostage for political reasons when anti-Israel activists took over the student government. 

The Shut It Down party, which previously had 24 of its members elected to the CSG, made no secret of its goal: repeatedly vetoing budgets that were meant to fund student groups and activities until UM divests from Israel. The party is affiliated with the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, which has been accused of antisemitism, and which works to hurt the Jewish state economically. 

Though the school administration stepped in to help provide the funds to keep the CSG running on at least one occasion, it was clear the student government could not function properly over the long term with such obstruction. 

UM student Alex Richmond, who wrote a petition that resulted in a proper student budget that overcame the Shut it Down party’s attempted filibustering, spoke to Campus Reform about how the training he received at the Leadership Institute Student Government Leaders Retreat helped him break the gridlock. 

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“That’s the main thing that we learned: When you’re going into these situations, you need to know everything. You need to be well versed in what you’re going into. You have to remain composed, and you have to be eloquent in the way that you convey your arguments, especially in the face of heavy opposition or intimidation, and you’re not supposed to let those things deter you from what is right,” he said. 

More specifically, one presentation that made an impact on Richmond was a discussion on “how to combat confrontation, and how to combat people who disagree with you, and how to actually work with people who disagree with you.” 

He spoke about  how students want common sense solutions to their problems, such as “housing affordability” or “parking on campus” and other day to day aspects of campus life–issues, among many others, that were being ignored because of Shut It Down’s campaign against the Jewish state. 

Richmond told Campus Reform how he and other students who wanted to see things go back to normal worked together to put the CSG back on track. 

Richmond described how he had written a petition to pass a Wolverines’ Budget Act so that CSG operations could continue as normal, and worked with his colleagues to gather the requisite 1,150 signatures from students to have it considered at the CSG. 

The Shut It Down party countered with its own budget–one that would have sent more than $400,000 to Birzeit University, a West Bank-based school that has been repeatedly accused of having ties to terrorism. 

Though Richmond’s petition resulted in a budget that would actually help UM students instead of foreign universities, it still needed enough votes to overcome those of the anti-Israel activists. Richmond described how, unfortunately for the Shut It Down party, several of its members repeatedly refused to show up for CSG meetings, leading to several of them being recalled. With their ranks now thinned, the Shut It Down members were not able to stop the 21-15 vote in favor of the Wolverines’ Budget Act.

But Richmond didn’t have much time after the vote to celebrate the victory.

The successful passage of the student budget triggered an outburst of hate from the anti-Israel activists present at the meeting. 

“Once they started getting up out of their chairs and yelling, we . . . knew we had to pack up,” he said. “They [were] already being aggressive. You don’t really know what’s going to happen next. So of course, you want to get out of there but you also want to make sure everyone’s getting out of there safely, especially the people who are being more targeted by this group, especially the Arab American students and Muslim and Middle Eastern students that we have within our assembly that were called up by name throughout the meeting.”

Regarding the Muslim and Middle Eastern students who did not back the Shut It Down party, Richmond said they were “doxed and they’ve been harassed and targeted and threatened all the time.”

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He described how he and his colleagues were “swarmed,” and continued: “I was seeing people getting in people’s faces, and people were saying racial epithets, and people were calling people race traitors and these types of things.” At one point, one of the activists spat on Richmond. 

“Police had escorted us away to keep people from being verbally harassed and followed to their cars . . . They were being chased to their cars. It was terrible,” he continued. 

Richmond also condemned the Shut It Down party’s consistently fiery rhetoric against their opponents, which “incited” and “encouraged” their members to “harass and intimidate students and” to doxx them. 

The vote at the UM student government and consequent harassment and threats against students are merely one part of broader disturbances that have been taking place at the school. 

On the one-year-anniversary of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 massacre of Jewish civilians, UM protesters graffitied the residences of several UM administrators. Before that incident, several Jewish students at the school were physically assaulted.

Despite several universities’ passing of new regulations trying to limit tent encampments and other disruptive protests, it looks like the disruptive student protests and anti-Semitic violence is set to continue into 2025.