From the Ivy League to community colleges and from coast to coast, politicians and university administrators are proudly collaborating to militarize and repress the very spaces that we pay to stand on and learn in—those which are supposedly democratic terrains of free speech, free expression, and free inquiry.
By the Editorial Board
APR 29, 2024
On Thursday, April 25, a student protest encampment at Northeastern University established a liberation zone of our own, demanding that our administration disclose its financial investments, divest from Israeli companies and institutions that are funding the Gaza bombing campaigns, and denounce the ongoing genocide that has killed close to 40,000 Palestinians.
Northeastern’s solidarity encampment on Centennial Common followed this month’s encampments and sit-in protests at at least 100 college campuses across the country, with Columbia making initial headlines as its University President Minouche Shafik authorized the violent NYPD arrest of over 108 peaceful student protesters. At NYU’s first encampment, the NYPD pepper-sprayed and arrested 120 student and faculty protesters; in response to the administration’s subsequent construction of a plywood wall around Gould Plaza to prevent anti-war protests, the students, faculty, and community members—including the United Auto Workers Union—returned stronger than before. USC and UCLA sent in the LAPD to point assault weapons on their own students; Cal Poly Humboldt students forced out riot police from their own building sit-in; at Indiana University, snipers assumed position on the roof of campus buildings; in the south, Emory and Ohio State are the latest videos showing everyone from students to tenured professors being thrown to the ground, tased, and violently arrested by riot police for the anti-genocide demonstrations. Make no mistake: from the elite Ivy League to community colleges from coast to coast, politicians and university administrators are proudly collaborating to militarize and repress the very spaces that we pay to stand on and learn in, that are supposedly democratic terrains of free speech, free expression, and free inquiry.
Only about 48 hours after the set-up of our encampment, and despite Boston mayor Michelle Wu’s comments from the day before that the Boston Police Department wouldn’t be involved, the Northeastern administration invited state police in riot gear to arrest over 100 students and allies at the Gaza solidarity camp under the persisting conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. For this brief but powerful moment of time, hundreds of Northeastern students bore witness to the development of a community here on campus within the transnational Palestinian liberation movement. In addition to peacefully demanding an end to Northeastern’s contribution to the Israeli apartheid regime, student organizers and community members shared food, danced, taught each other about the intertwined histories of settler-colonialism and empire. Most importantly, and with much gratitude to student organizers, we learned to protect each other.
As student organizations, faculty, and witnesses from that night—including ourselves—have already echoed: the participants of the encampment have never tolerated and explicitly directed against antisemitic hate speech of any kind. What Northeastern’s public statement as well as what the Boston Globe and the Huntington News referred to as “antisemitic slurs” were instead propagated by counter-protesters from the scene. But the facts don’t matter to Northeastern’s vice president of communications Renata Nyul, to the dean of students Chong Kim-Wong, or to the rest of upper admin.
The facts become obsolete as the veil of U.S. higher education institutions become lifted again: they are not truly concerned with the educational struggle for truth, nor with supporting the revolutionary histories advertised in their brochures and academic conferences. Students at Columbia have been proving to the entire world that while their university has long flaunted its history of learning from the 1968 anti-Vietnam War protests and capitalizing on the legacy of postcolonial scholar Edward Said, the administration is quick to repeat history in violently working with the state to suppress student mobilization. As the Columbia Spectator editorial board writes, “What is the role of the University if not to advocate for—and protect—its students?”
How are we expected to return to campus knowing that our administration has authorized the police to forcefully arrest our students, friends, comrades, and professors for peacefully protesting an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, which our university leaders remain supportive of? When the riot police first appeared on the first day of encampment, in broad daylight with crowds of bystanders watching, we linked arms and chanted, “We’re just students, what are you afraid of?” In other words: when the immediate impulse of the university—and every university suppressing student expression across the U.S.—is to bring in militant forces upon students calling attention to a televised genocide, what is it they are truly afraid of?
More than ever before, it should be painfully clear to everyone that neoliberal logics and representations of diversity will not save us from the structures of white supremacy and empire. This has already been made clear after the racialized murder of George Floyd in 2020 inspired corporate America’s $50 billion commitment to “racial justice” and the $8 billion profit-making DEI industry, merely reinforcing the nation-state’s capitulation to capitalism and commodifying non-whiteness under the liberalist veneer of diversity. It does not matter how many people of color are represented in spaces of power so long as they remain committed to upholding the transnational imperial project—this goes for our upper administrators at Northeastern and elsewhere, for Mayor Wu, for the bodies of cops that have entered our campuses in these past few weeks.
And more than ever before, this should serve as a reminder to students everywhere that your institution will not protect you—even if you are not a protester on the ground, even if you remain silent. Your indifference, or perhaps the distance you feel—whether to the violence on your college campus or to the ongoing violence in Gaza—will not save you; it will merely blind you until you realize you are disposable as soon as you fail to fall in line with the academy’s neoliberal values.
illume magazine 
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