The Values that Govern Campaign Restore Hope
- Love: First and foremost, this campaign is governed by a great feeling of love for justice, liberty, equality, humanity and peace. Millions of people are suffering from oppression and violence in the region and we seek to make sure that our university does not cooperate or unknowingly assist in this suffering. This value must be reflected in everything we do. We reject hatred, animosity, or violence of the spirit. Thus, under no circumstances is it permitted to be aggressive or offensive towards those who seek to misinterpret our goals, or to ignore and divert people’s attention from the suffering we seek to divest ourselves from, even if they confront us in ways that feel offensive, emotional, or aggressive. We need to compassionately do our best to respond to falsehoods with truth, and untrue accusations with patience and direct action in support of human rights.
- Truth: We consider truth to be both means and end.
Taking truth as means, or policy for our movement, we are committed to honesty and serious academic research. We strive to embody truth in thought, speech, and action. We resolve to be open to learning from our mistakes, and challenging our assumptions.
Truth is also an end goal of this campaign. We want to continue educating ourselves, and to increase our community’s knowledge as well. We want to have open debates and discussion, and we want to challenge misperceptions, cynicism, and the assumption that this issue is too difficult for Stanford students to deal with. We will work to learn more from this experiment in order to engage more fully with important issues and campaigns in the future. This is a learning experience.
- Courage and Perseverance: Contrary to what living at Stanford may lead us to conclude, working for human rights and equality in the world is not easy. We need to maintain our courage, and work very hard to succeed. A lot of special interest groups will begin pouring a lot of money to stop us, or to make the issue seem much more complicated than it is. Hence, our success demands courage and perseverance.
