George Nicholas was supposed to run.

It was the winter of 1985, and the Big Ten champion — a former Olympic Trials contender and one of Ohio State’s most decorated track athletes — was entering his final season. But instead of stepping into the blocks at that weekend’s indoor meet, he walked away from the starting line.

When the national anthem played inside the French Field House, Nicholas turned his back to the flag and knelt. While his teammates stood in silence, he remained on the sidelines — refusing to compete.

It was a protest, sparked by a front-page article in The Lantern revealing that Ohio State still held $7.1 million in investments linked to companies operating in apartheid South Africa. University officials, including President Edward Jennings, had responded to student concerns with a flat rejection: divestment was off the table.

“That upset me,” Nicholas said. “So, I decided to make a statement.”

He did. And within weeks, he had helped build a coalition that stretched from graduate students to union organizers, from law students to state senators. What started with one athlete kneeling at a track meet culminated in a confrontation far from campus — at a remote Board of Trustees meeting held at an off-site university facility.

They hadn’t put the students on the agenda, so Nicholas and hundreds of others showed up anyway, crowding the meeting room with flyers, chants and prepared statements. When the trustees tried to gavel the meeting to a close, students locked arms at the exits in peaceful resistance — blocking the doors and refusing to let the university walk away from the issue.

“We had rehearsed it,” Nicholas said. “We weren’t being violent. But we made it clear — no, you’re not just going to end this meeting and leave.”

Police tried to remove them, he said. They held the line.

What began as one man’s act of protest became a university-wide movement. And in the months that followed, Ohio State — under mounting pressure — voted to fully divest from companies connected to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

“We were strategic,” Nicholas said. “We were informed, and we weren’t kidding about it.”

Forty years later, the script has flipped, while Nicholas watches from afar. 

As Ohio State students demand the university cut financial ties — this time with companies linked to human rights violations in Palestine — they face a new set of roadblocks. Despite echoing many of the same principles and strategies from 1985, students leading the charge for Palestinian divestment have encountered strong support for Israel from state and federal officials, an increasingly fractured coalition resulting in lack of community support, and state laws barring the university from taking any action. 

In recent years, the Undergraduate Student Government has seen multiple resolutions calling for financial transparency and divestment, most recently in 2021 and again in 2024. Calls for divestment were loudly heard at several campus protests last year.

At the state level, legislators enacted a law in 2017, with the goal of strengthening economic ties with Israel, which ensured state funds can not support entities participating in a boycott. Another law enacted in 2022 expanded the scope of existing anti-boycott laws by explicitly defining state institutions of higher education as government entities. 

When Ohio State officials, including university spokesperson Chris Booker are asked about  investments and endowments, inquirers are met with Ohio Revised Code, Section 9.76 – listed as one of the pillar key issues on the university’s Office of Marketing and Communications website – stating that it “prohibits the university from divesting any interests in Israel and prohibits adopting or adhering to a policy that requires divestment from Israel or with persons or entities associated with it.”

The key issues elaborate even further, stating that the university “utilizes a diversified investment strategy” by investing in funds – not individual companies – which “ are trade secret and therefore not public,” according to the website. 

In Washington D.C., the United States remains Israel’s largest military and diplomatic ally — complicating demands for divestment and prompting universities to tread carefully.

The parallels to 1985 are similar: students questioning where their tuition dollars go, calling for accountability in investment policy, and facing institutional resistance. 

In 1985, student activists and state lawmakers moved in tandem. House Bill 22, which barred Ohio’s public universities from investing in South African companies, passed in the legislature with bipartisan support. Union leaders and community organizers joined campus protests, and the Board of Trustees ultimately complied.

But for today’s students, support from elected officials hasn’t just disappeared — it’s turned against them.

“There were bipartisan letters written to USG the night before the referendum,” said Pranav Jani, an associate professor of English and member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. 

He worked with student organizers in reference to a proposed 2016 referendum in Ohio State’s Undergraduate Student Government urging the university to divest. 

“One of the people who wrote it was Joyce Beatty,” Jani said. 

The two letters – received a day apart in March of 2016 and authored by Democratic House representative Joyce Beatty and Republican representatives Tim Brown, Steve Stivers and Patrick Tiberi – urged USG not to allow a vote on divestment to move forward. University administration followed suit, canceling the vote just hours before it was set to begin.

Such opponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement say these efforts violate state policy and could risk millions in public funding. 

State Rep. Tim Brown, R-Bowling Green, wrote in his letter to the governing student body that the 2017 state law “prohibits any state agency from entering into contracts with companies that participate in the BDS movement against Israel,” stating the legislation was put into place to “support our nation’s strongest ally in the Middle East” and emphasizing bipartisan support. 

“It doesn’t matter whether it wins or not,” Jani said. “They won’t even allow a referendum. The state says it’s illegal.”

In a separate letter, U.S. Reps. Joyce Beatty, D-Columbus, Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Township, and Steve Stivers R-Upper Arlington, wrote “efforts to politically, economically and culturally isolate Israel breed discrimination and hate, and are not reflective of the values that we as Americans hold dear,” emphasizing their belief that “BDS efforts are counterproductive to reform” due to the “divisions [they] create on campus and inhibit constructive dialogue among diverse parties seeking to work together to achieve peaceful solutions to a complex issue.”

Jani has supported the student movement for years, and said many of the current barriers were shaped by deliberate political choices.

“Even people who are progressive, when it comes to Palestine, they get quiet,” Jani said. “There’s this climate where criticism of Israel is seen as anti-Semitism, which it isn’t.”

He said the pressure campaigns against students often mirror those used during anti-apartheid protests.

“It’s the same playbook,” Jani said. “The difference is, the South Africa stuff was highly politicized also because it won. And now it looks like, of course, we shouldn’t support apartheid South Africa.”

Jani added that student movements today face obstacles beyond campus.

“There were bipartisan letters written to USG the night before the referendum,” he said. “It’s not just one side. It’s systemic.”

Despite that, he remains hopeful.

“There’s a long history of students being ahead of the curve,” he said. “That’s how change starts.”

Mubarak said they pursued two paths to bring the resolution to a vote: a campus-wide referendum and a General Assembly vote. Both efforts met major resistance.

“Mid-process, we saw the election rules change to raise the signature threshold from 300 to 5,000,” he said. “They promised us a digital signature form, but it was never delivered.”

In 2016, Mubarak pushed a resolution forward in the USG. This time, the resistance came from Congress.

“This was the first time ever we saw the United States Congress interfere with student affairs,” he said. “They urged senators to vote no.”

In 2017, things escalated. Mubarak was profiled by Canary Mission — an anonymous website that tracks and publishes information about individuals and organizations that are pro-Palestine and involved with the BDS movement – with the stated goal of “exposing individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the United States, Israel, and Jews.”

“My profile got published and it labeled many of us as anti-Semitic and terrorist sympathizers,” he said. “It was a goal to smear our names and harm our future careers.”

Despite the backlash, he says, the experience shaped him — and the movement.

“Even though we didn’t win, we believed it was part of something bigger,” he said.

Coco Smyth, who helped lead OSU Divest between 2014 and 2018, said organizations like Canary Mission have created a chilling effect on activism – highlighting the effects of modern technology and social media that give way to more “digital blacklisting.”

“You’ll find people on there who simply voted yes on a resolution,” Smyth said. “USG members, not even SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine]. We were labeled and profiled to hurt our futures. The goal was to intimidate us into silence.”

Smyth said the internal pressure has been just as intense as the legal opposition.

“We always had to ask ourselves: How do we reach people? How do we get them to hear us out?” Smyth said. “It wasn’t just institutional resistance — it was smear campaigns, public slander, blacklists.”

For Nicholas, the core motivations haven’t changed. He said he still sees divestment as a moral imperative — one grounded in justice, not politics. But the barriers today are steeper.

“When I protested, I had students and the state behind me,” Nicholas said. “These kids today? They’re getting hit from all sides.”

While the 1985 campaign leaned on clear legislative mandates and broad-based support, the Palestine movement has splintered, burdened by accusations of anti-Semitism and deeply polarized discourse.

Ferguson said that polarization — alongside legal barriers — has left student government stuck.

“Ohio State has never been good at dealing with controversy from students,” he said. “They’d rather keep it quiet and not deal with it.”

This story has been updated to correct that multiple resolutions calling for divestment were introduced, not passed and to include the correct spelling of a source’s last name.