Can Palestine solidarity activists shift the balance of power at American universities?

This article Can Palestine solidarity activists shift the balance of power at American universities? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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On Oct. 9, the esteemed historian Rashid Khalidi, author of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine,” resigned from his tenured position at Columbia University. In explaining his decision, he cited the way higher education has become just a “cash register — essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.” For pro-Palestinian organizers across the country, Khalidi’s remarks encompass the dilemma that is our current moment of defunded higher education, the repressed movement for Palestinian liberation and the unstable state of academic freedom in the classroom and on the campus. 

Khalidi’s resignation came on the heels of a series of attacks on pro-Palestinian speech, including the release, in September, of the Lippman Report, a 139-page investigation into supposed antisemitism on City University of New York campuses. Mandated by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the report systematically equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and calls for an “overhaul” of policies and procedures preventing and regulating what it deems antisemitic. Lippman’s findings have prompted New York’s City Council to hold hearings on the subject and have been understood by Palestinian activists within CUNY as a clear attempt to “criminalize and thereby silence any criticism of Israel.” 

In November, President-elect Donald Trump threatened to use federal funding to leverage a war against the radicalism and “wokeness” on campuses, gesturing to the encampment divestment movement last spring. On Dec. 12, New York University tenured professor Andrew Ross was arrested by the NYPD during a peaceful rally held by the university’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group, or FSJP, and issued a “personae non grata” status. Ross had already been accused of “egregious acts of antisemitism” — including speaking at Palestine solidarity rallies and founding the campus FSJP chapter — in a lawsuit filed against NYU by the group Students Against Antisemitism.

With over 186,000 Palestenians dead and 96 percent of children in Gaza facing imminent death, the fight for a liberated Palestine becomes more urgent everyday. Yet, the growing backlash Palestine solidarity activists face, particularly on American university campuses, raises questions about higher education’s role in perpetuating injustice — and how student, staff and faculty organizers alike can adapt and resist.

A history of hollowing out

In response to Ross’s arrest, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, put out a statement condemning the incident and the state of pro-Palestine speech on campus. In some ways, this is not new terrain for the nearly 100-year-old association. Repression of academic freedom has historically occurred when calls for liberation on campus have been at their strongest and most threatening — as was the case in 1915, when AAUP was first founded, in response to the silencing and firing of radical faculty. This included anti-capitalist thinkers such as Scott Nearing, who was denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School for his outspoken views on child labor and inequality. 

Historian Andy Hines argues that pioneering educators in the early AAUP were met with a now-familiar tension: whether to understand themselves as part of the professional or working-class, and whether the AAUP ought to be a vehicle for the former or latter. Academics differed from their professional-class counterparts in one crucial way: They were not independent practitioners, but employees. AAUP leadership, led by founding President John Dewey, made a compromise: Faculty gained professional rights — most notably tenure and a certain cultural purchase — but deprioritized class-based worker control. 

The AAUP’s initial 1915 Declaration of Principles, outlined principles of academic freedom, shared governance and tenure. In the past decades, as faculty have gradually lost governance over their universities and their wages have decreased in relative terms, the substance of these formal privileges has been steadily emptied out. To Hines, the decrease in available tenure-track jobs and more general state disinvestment has hastened this process of hollowing. Contingent staff — who compromise 76 percent of teaching on campuses — often make less than the minimum wage. Even tenure-track faculty, like Maura Finkelstein at private Muhlenberg College, are susceptible to firing if their political expression is not in line with the amorphous dictates of the administration and their funders. These conditions explain the recent call for professional rights on campuses, particularly from staff and non-tenured faculty, and extend beyond the pro-Palestine movement.

The compromises AAUP members made in 1915 proved consequential in the heated political juncture of the late 1960s. The Soviet-sized specter of socialism and decolonial struggles abroad, the erupting domestic social movements of the oppressed and increased concerns over radical thinking made the U.S. university, as a scene of knowledge production and social struggle, a particularly heated landscape. According to Hines, these political pressures prompted another compromise: Universities were forced to accept new social groups into their demographics and establish academic fields, but curtailed any explicit communist dimensions.

Through the following decades, the birth of neoliberalism eroded public protections, increased austerity on campuses, promoted the disciplining of far-left thought and continued to weaken the efficacy of the 1915 compromise. During this period, we saw a dual force: On the one hand there was the starving of university budgets, jeopardizing entire fields of study. On the other hand, there was a full-out culture war against the left, which included a targeted counterinsurgency against the “physical and intellectual vandalism” of campus social movements through increased course requirements, academic disciplining and tuition. 

High tuition, and the resulting dependence on loans, can be understood not just as a mode of financing but as a pedagogical tool. The idea was, according to academic Eli Meyerhoff, that “envisioning a future of indebtedness would retroactively inform a student’s view of themselves in the present,” limiting their imagined possibilities of liberation. High tuition and debt increases the stakes to make one’s degree lucrative, squeezes future wages and the competitive academic pressures of more “professionalizing” disciplines does not give students the space to take political risk. Barbara Ehrenreich called this tragedy the “fear of falling.”

Geosciences graduate student and organizer Sofia Menemenlis underscored this dynamic at Princeton University, saying, “Students in science and engineering programs face heavy demands on their time and little professional incentive to engage in political activity. In Palestine solidarity work, to embrace the call for divestment from Israel’s genocide is also to organize against many of the same companies that finance university research and hire science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) graduates.” 

UC Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield referred to this commercialization of universities since 1980 as the “the Great Mistake.” In the words of UC Berkeley adjunct professor Khalid Kadir, “We went down the low road of self-preservation. As opposed to standing up and making the case for the value of higher education as a public good, we decided to save the university in the context of the neoliberalization occurring around it, by increasingly relying on financialization to solve the problem.” As universities have increasingly corporatized, the primary way they can distinguish themselves from other corporations and justify public funds is through teaching. However, the shift in economic priorities from teaching staff to management positions has weakened faculty governance and concentrated power to administration. 

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This leads us to our present moment of crisis. Aditi Rao, an organizer and classics graduate student at Princeton University, aptly described it as a feeling of “precarity and unsafety, which the university has brought upon itself by gradually turning more and more into a corporation.” Rao points to the doxxing trucks with digital billboards that have targeted Ivy League campuses and come twice to Princeton’s campus in the past year, as an example of how the university has put itself in a vulnerable position by attempting to avoid financial liability. These trucks display the names and faces of people on campus (from students to deans) associated with the pro-Palestine movement. “The trucks that have come to campus are extremely violent,” Rao said. “If they keep coming around, someone will get hurt, and the university is fine with it. I’ve always known that they don’t care what I teach, but I did not realize they were willing to sacrifice the several millions my life may be worth in lawsuits to hold onto 10 percent of its donors.”

Across the country, Kadir describes how the deficit of UC Berkeley has made the university increasingly vulnerable to its wealthy benefactors and to the orders of the regents (the University of California’s board of trustees), who were the ones to crack down on the spring encampment. The new chancellor, a professor from the Haas Business School, seems — according to Kadir — invested in continuing down the “great mistake” of privatization, promising to secure millions in VC funding. “But how can you guarantee high returns?” Kadir asked. “And if you can, would you not prefer to make that deal with the state, so that the public can reap the benefits?” 

According to Newfield, the solution to the decrease in funding was to replace “academic methods with business strategies that respect students as consumers and that treat parents, the public and loan companies as investors.” It’s this very notion that has made Rao fearful of her students, saying, “I am scared of my students. On the first day of class, I took off my keffiyeh, and I won’t do anything to give them any opportunity to discredit or report me.” 

In the contemporary contest for control over the university and academic freedom, an under-considered aspect is the role of students as foot soldiers within a wider surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. Students, situated so often as clients in the neoliberal university, leave reviews and lodge complaints just as they might for Uber drivers and Doordash delivery services. These reviews and complaints, even in the minority, stick to faculty, shaping their working conditions, job security and job prospects.

This is the case even for tenured faculty, though particularly so for adjunct faculty who lack job security. These university “watchdog” groups have “provided attacks on tenure disguised as advocacy for the student consumer.” Hines, who has detailed the repressive mechanisms of prestigious universities, sees this connection between precarious adjunct faculty and gig workers, saying, “Contingency is a mode of counterinsurgency.” Disorganizing, precariousness and susceptible to surveillance and discipline: These are the conditions of knowledge-production in the modern university. 

Palestine solidarity on campus

The Palestine movement makes clear that democracy, free speech and liberation are not possible without a free university. How can we respond to this moment, reshift the balance of forces, and negotiate greater academic freedom, particularly in the context of Palestine? The task becomes the development of vehicles of struggle, modes of organization, capable of engaging with the gravitational forces of financialization. 

To Kadir, the first step is making time for in-person community-building and political education. “We all grew up in a neoliberal environment, and have lost the ability to gather and fight for things beyond our personal interest,” he said. “Are people going to fight for something if they don’t understand it? Can we build together if we don’t trust each other?” 

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For Ali Noorzad, an organizer at San Francisco State University, one of the main goals of this past semester was to educate and bring new students to the movement, through flyering, holding public democratic general assemblies and planning a cross-campus popular convention for Palestine in the Bay Area. “The people I’m closest to and I strategically spend as little time together as we can, because the majority of our efforts should be towards getting to know new people and organizing them,” Noorzad said.

Students at CUNY are taking a similar approach; reaching out to students and having one-on-one conversations about the issues that impact them on campus and developing small agitational campaigns. In late November, the Princeton undergraduate body voted to divest from weapons manufacturing. A coalition of progressive student groups won this campaign through tabling, flyering, reaching out to peers and holding teach-in’s on the importance of military divestment for Palestine. 

The second step is to encourage vast factions of university campuses to align with workers and strive to strengthen the labor movement’s organizational infrastructure. Historically, the AAUP has been at its strongest when it participates in collective bargaining with other, more contingent campus groups. “As a graduate student instructor,” Rao said, “I try to intentionally position myself as a worker. Because to me, anyone who has class consciousness feels moved to action on Palestine.” Noorzad agreed that to get the broader campus community to commit to this struggle, “People need to understand U.S. aid to Israel as directly connected to tuition hikes and classroom cuts. Students’ political and economic status is threatened because the government will not stop funding genocide.”

Already, there are a number of inspiring examples of organized labor exerting material threats to “business as usual” on campuses. In the spring, NYU grad workers went on a grading strike to protest student repression and censorship, the CUNY on Strike contingent of the staff and faculty union held a sickout in response to student arrests. The University of California also held a system-wide academic strike in support of the pro-Palestine protests. 

The moral imperative to resist the astonishing violence of Israel’s Zionist regime can also lead to deeper understandings of the hypocrisies of liberalism and financial logics on campus — and through that, the development of a class consciousness. The ideals of human rights, the right to autonomy and free speech and the sanctity of international law are shown to be smoke and mirrors obscuring a machinery of death, administrative bloat, debt and precarious labor conditions. In contrast, the relational and communal work of protest and movement work, can allow the class majority to reassert the university as a public good and divest the university from its material and ideological complicity in the genocide and occupation of Palestine. 

The tasks ahead

On April 22, 1969, a group of Black and Puerto Rican students took over the South Campus of the City College of New York campus in Harlem. They held it for two weeks, preventing classes from occurring, launching a “people’s university” and forcing the school president to resign. It only came to an end when a proto-militarized police force intervened at the behest of the mayor. 

The protesters presented the school’s administration with the now-famous five demands, calling for radical equity and democratization of the school’s curriculum and demographic composition. They demanded that both the student body and the subjects taught (and, importantly, how they are taught) would reflect the Black and Puerto Rican communities of Harlem. Of particular focus was the training of teachers, and the need for them to be versed in the historical and cultural contexts in which they would teach. Over the next few years, these demands were largely met: The future educators CUNY was training were required to learn Spanish and take courses in Black and Puerto Rican cultural history; students were brought more fully into course design; Urban and Ethnic Studies departments were formally established.

In contrast to this history, on April 25, 2024, a group of over 200 CUNY students, amidst a nationwide eruption, occupied the quad on the north end of the same campus. They too put forth five demands: 1. divest from Israel; 2. an academic boycott of Israel; 3. proclaim solidarity with Palestine; 4. demilitarize CUNY campuses; and 5. constitute a People’s CUNY. Both the format and the substance of these demands self-consciously tethered this encampment — named the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — with the occupation of a half-century earlier.

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The encampment was brutally dismantled after only five days, with 170 people arrested and many others pepper sprayed and beaten. Many of those arrested are still facing felony charges. In the weeks after the encampment, CUNY announced a new emergency $4 million contract with Strategic Security Corp, a private security firm with ties to Israel. Gov. Hochul also launched the “antisemitism” investigation into the CUNY system. 

The differences in these two CUNY encampments can encapsulate how much we have lost. Simultaneously, though, they can speak to the strength, resilience and determination of the campus front for Palestine in spite of the growing complexity and coordination of campus repression. The class contradictions have never been sharper, and because of that, it has never been more urgent or clear to fight for what ideas are allowed to propagate on campus, by whom, and in what fashion. 

As labor organizer Ben Mabie explained, “Universities are sites of dense overlapping layers of the working class that cut across differences in immigration, race and education status. Students and staff are at the center of this large-scale capital accumulation and thus play a catalytic role.” Grounding our movements in the rich and inspiring history of the campus movement, including the 1969 encampment, is important but insufficient, as conditions have changed drastically. We must continue to renegotiate the appropriation of resources, fight for true academic freedom and protect our right to protest and dissent. We must ultimately win back what we’ve lost and then, always, win more. 

Around the world, universities have been and remain sites of robust participatory democracy, freedom and life-making. They have not always been these financialized, marketized, securitized sites of siloed job-preparation. The encampments of last spring showed that this capacity of the university to foster resilience and liberatory knowledge production is not relegated to the past.

Yet, forces hostile to this possibility loom stronger than ever. It seems our current task is twofold: On one hand, we need to keep alive this flame of the university and the campus as a space of deep democracy and transformational knowledge production. On the other, we must also soberly assess the conditions and forces that contain and threaten to extinguish that flame, and work towards contesting them. 

This article Can Palestine solidarity activists shift the balance of power at American universities? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/01/can-palestine-solidarity-activists-shift-the-balance-of-power-at-american-universities/