Harvard University is withholding Belfast native Syd Sanders’ degree in response to his role in recent pro-Palestine protests on campus, according to a column Sanders published in the student newspaper on Thursday.
Sanders, a senior, also stated Harvard suspended him and barred him from Thursday’s commencement exercises at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university.
“There is a sour dissonance in that fact that The Crimson’s Editorial Board has asked me to write this op-ed as a ‘notable senior’ reflecting on graduation while Harvard withholds my degree until May of 2026 for fighting its investments in genocide in Palestine,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders is no stranger to protests or newspaper appearances.
The son of Belfast Mayor Eric Sanders and Daily Soup owner Courtney Sanders, Syd Sanders graduated from Belfast Area High School in 2020 as Maine’s first transgender valedictorian. Before graduating, Sanders led gun control and climate change walkouts, served on the city’s climate change committee and helped organize the city’s first LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
In 2023, Sanders, then 21, led a Harvard walkout and protest of more than 100 students calling for the firing of John Comaroff, a professor who had been accused of sexual and professional misconduct. Comaroff is still a professor of African and African-American studies and anthropology at Harvard.
Sanders has also been active in the university’s Student Labor Action Movement since 2021.
“That year, I learned that real change does not come from working within the confines of institutions like this school or our government, but from hitting the streets and dismantling those very institutions from the outside in,” Sanders wrote in The Crimson.
Last month, he helped construct Harvard’s pro-Palestine encampment. It’s unclear exactly what role Sander’s played in the three week protest or what led university administrators to include him in a list of 13 students whose degrees would be withheld. The Bangor Daily News wasn’t immediately able to contact Sanders.
“Each of these students has been found by the College’s Administrative Board… to have violated the University’s policies by their conduct during their participation in the recent encampment in Harvard Yard,” an online statement from Harvard said this week.
Even so, Sanders remains defiant.
“I sit here writing this with a middle finger raised to Harvard and the systems of oppression it perpetuates and depends on,” he wrote, “and with so much love in my heart for my organizer peers and the liberated world we fight for.”
At the end of the piece, he pledged to keep protesting and fighting, even without a Harvard degree.
“I don’t know when I will graduate, I don’t know what my next few days will look like, but one thing is for certain: I know we will never stop,” Sanders wrote.
