Where There are No Universities (Guest Post)

Sacramento Faculty Lobbying on April 11, 2008 

by David Lloyd

During the encampments established and maintained by courageous students and faculty, whose ethical integrity in naming and resisting Israel’s recently resumed genocide in Gaza disgraced the complicity and collaboration of their administrations, activists held firm to the simple exhortation, “All eyes on Gaza.”  Though they aimed to disrupt business as usual at institutions that are deeply invested in Israel’s war machine, embroiled in research partnerships with the Israeli universities that design the weaponry, train the personnel, and program the genocide, and ideologically in step with the settler colonial ideology of Zionism, the students were concerned that media focus solely on their protests would distract from the atrocity unfolding with ever increasing violence across the killing fields of Gaza’s concentration camp. Even as their institutions, violating their duty to protect and foster all their students, called in heavily armed phalanxes of police at the behest of Zionist lobby groups and Republican and Democratic politicians alike, or tolerated the vicious assaults of right-wing vigilantes who recognized a natural affinity with their Zionist allies, the students continued to remind us that they were there, on their own campuses, because Israel had systematically destroyed every university and every school in Gaza in its ongoing campaign of cultural genocide that has now extended to the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Within the first months of their relentless assault on Gaza, Israel had demolished every institution of higher education in Gaza, sometimes with calculated mining of buildings, sometimes with targeted shelling and airstrikes. They murdered with deliberate intent administrators, professors, and students, even as they continue even now to destroy hospitals and target medical personnel. Their invasion aimed at the complete destruction of the capacity of Palestinians to reproduce either their biological or cultural life. Now, as Gazans have availed of the short-lived ceasefire that Israel was bound to violate sooner or later to return to the ruins of their homes, among the first things they have done is to reestablish schools and try to recreate a system of education. Education and the freedom to learn has always been a deep commitment of Palestinian society long before the land’s occupation by Zionist forces and Israel’s systematic attacks on Palestinian learning, from the theft of whole libraries and archives in the Nakba and beyond to its isolation and siege of universities on the West Bank. But here, as in so many other areas of civil society, Palestinians persist and professors in exile continue to offer classes to students in Gaza over the fragile internet connections that are intermittently available.

Capitulation

Meanwhile, in the United States, the question is whether there are any universities left, not in Gaza, but here. The hapless, often willing capitulation of university leaderships, even at the most richly endowed institutions in the world, to the inroads of the Trump administration’s “all out war” on higher education has already, within weeks of Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders, been a spectacular betrayal of their duty to protect the educational and social missions of their universities. Despite Palestinian student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil’s appeals to Columbia’s administration for protections against doxxing and harassment, and his self-evidently well-grounded warnings that threats by Columbia faculty members against him would lead to his detention, no help was extended and the university effectively left the door open to ICE to disappear him and, subsequently, to conduct further warrantless raids on other students’ rooms—thus allowing access to law enforcement agencies that had been denied by previous administrations at the very moment when those agencies, unleashed by Trump’s fascistic sidekicks, have gone more rogue than ever before. As Khalil states in his letter from detention in Louisiana, Columbia “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”

Chilling as Khalil’s case is, and much as it stands as a harbinger of the repression of dissent that is manifestly to come, he is right to maintain that what appears as an instance of brutal overreach by Trump’s authoritarian regime has to be seen in a longer trajectory of university capitulation to Zionist pressure and collaboration with US state interests. It is no less the case that above and beyond the intense and even eager repression of student dissent on the part of university administrations nationally since October 7, 2023, and regardless of the Trump administration’s recent amping up of the pressure on them, American universities have been engaged in a long campaign of self-destruction fueled by a malevolent combination of forces and organizations dedicated to the capture and containment of higher education at least since the late 1960s.

In the first place, the ongoing capitulation of Columbia and other institutions to Trump’s spurious investigations, which are turning the Department of Education under Linda McMahon into a ludicrous if hyperaggressive smack-down arena, have a longer and equally shameful history. To go back no further than the administration of accused accessory to war crimes, Joe Biden, his attacks on the encampments and baseless insinuation of the violent conduct and “disorder” of these orderly, disciplined and pluralistic protests scarcely differ from the rhetoric of Republican politicians and Zionist operatives. Biden’s statement in May 2024 that “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked” established the same premise as informs the Trump DoE’s letter to Columbia that claims that the university had permitted “an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.” With regard to support for Zionism and defamation of students who oppose its genocidal program, hardly a hair separates the rhetoric of Biden from that of the Trump regime.

Executive Director of Columbia’s own Knight First Amendment Institute, Jameel Jaffer, forthrightly condemned the DoE’s letter as part of an effort to "subjugate universities to official power”. But it was the embarrassing performance of disgraced former Columbia President Minouche Shafik at Congressional hearings last April that threw the door open wide to such politically motivated inroads on the relative autonomy of higher education. Not only did she eagerly collude in Republican congressional repesentatives’ vilification of members of her faculty on the basis of statements cherry-picked without context, threatening to terminate the employment of one of them, she also permitted to pass without dissent the ignorant claim that “from the river to the sea” or “long live the intifada” are genocidal chants when a few minutes study, not to mention knowledge of her own first language, would have easily allowed her to refute such calculating stupidity.

Not that Shafik’s performance in this was any worse than her peers, the Presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, in December 2023. None seemed willing to contest the premises of the egregious opportunist Congresswoman Elise Stefanik when she absurdly “equated calls for an intifada as a call for a global Jewish genocide.” Like Shafik, UPenn’s Liz Magill’s and Harvard’s Claudine Gay’s heads soon rolled, but not for the reasons they should have. It was not any robust defense of academic freedom and first amendment rights, knowledge and research, context and nuance, but their failure to bend even further over backwards to the ignorant rantings of the congressional kangaroo court and their foot-shuffling inability to push back that left them and their comfortable, overpaid jobs vulnerable to further pressure from concerted Zionist activists, pro-Israel lobbyists, and conservative donors. 

As further university “leaders”, including the University of California’s Michael Drake, preemptively deliberate the path of no resistance, abandoning DEI programs and introducing disciplinary regulations on student protest and even curricula in advance of the arrival of a clown-cart of DoE Joint Task Force “investigators” on some 60 university campuses, one is left in the embarrassing position of having to invoke the memory of a U.S. Defense Department lawyer, Joseph Welch. Welch famously brought down Senator McCarthy after his long series of red-baiting hearings, merely by asking “Have you no decency?” But the corruption and intellectual debasement of the US universities and their leadership has descended to the point where it proves impossible for a single university president to call out the ignorance and stupidity of the politicians that harass them and whose project is by no means the protection of Jewish students, many of whom were among the encampments, but the erosion of higher education itself. That not a single one of these leaders of some of the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions in the country, supposedly the intellectual hubs of the nation, could summon the courage to defend the importance of knowledge, ethics,  and thought, or to condemn the genocide and the scholasticide ongoing at that very moment in Gaza, awareness and defiance of which were fully on display at their own students’ encampments, is both a symptom and a cause of the destruction of the university in the United States. Calculating connivance in stupidity, whether of politicians or of donors, consolidates the tropism towards intellectual vacuity and moral posturing that has long been the tendency of the corporate university's leadership. The greater the wealth and prestige, the less the ethical courage, comes to seem the basic principle of the university’s intellectual bankruptcy.

 Collaboration

Prior to around 2009 and Israel’s first all-out war on Gaza, which slaughtered around 1400 Palestinians, systematic repression of pro-Palestinian speech on US campuses was relatively rare: the general “common sense” of the university as of the US public was implicitly if not explicitly pro-Zionist, persuaded as people were that Israel was “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that the Oslo Accords had instituted a peace process from which Palestinians constantly walked away, and that—especially in the wake of 9/11 and the second Intifada, Palestinians were terrorists in any case. Grotesque racist cartoons of Arafat and other Palestinians, close kin to Nazi anti-semitic caricatures, appeared in every mainstream news outlet with mind-numbing regularity.  Understanding of Israel’s apartheid, of the reality of what passed for an “occupation”, of the conditions for Palestinian prisoners, of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, and of the draconian slow genocide of the siege on Gaza were confined to a minority. Under such an effective news blockade, censorship and repression were unnecessary.

But the launching of public campaigns for BDS and in particular of the campaign for academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions called forth a heightened degree of censorship and repression now that the hegemony of the Zionist narrative could no longer be assured. Initial Zionist willingness to debate advocates of BDS, in the cocksure belief that, having held the dominant narrative for so long, they would easily prevail, rapidly waned as defense of Israel’s regime became increasingly fraught. Argument was displaced in short order by lawfare, a strategy that has developed and expanded in time with the brutalization of Israel’s own methods of repression and genocidal warfare. In warfare and lawfare, the failure to overcome resistance leads inevitably to retrenchment and amplification rather than recognition of the injustice of the cause. Here again, Khalil's case is exemplary: lawfare having repeatedly failed to break Palestinian solidarity in the courts, whether in cases brought against the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 or Fordham University’s efforts to ban its SJP, the Zionist agenda is now being enacted in extralegal ways by an authoritarian state apparatus in the hope that gross violations of civil rights will produce a de facto transformation of the law, much as Israel’s violations of international law, as Noura Erakat has shown, have had the effect of producing new and brutal legal norms.

University administrations have not been shy of collaborating with the censorship and repression of Palestinian solidarity in synch with a wider political agenda that has seen the passage of House Resolutions condemning BDS, the banning of BDS by state contractors (including universities) in numerous states, and, most recently, actions like the direct interference of the Governor of New York State Kathy Hochul, who removed a job listing at CUNY’s Hunter College for a Palestinian Studies Scholar, on the grounds that the inclusion of the well-established scholarly terms and empirical or legal descriptors of Palestinian and other colonial conditions—apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism—when applied to well-documented Israeli practices constituted antisemitism. University repression has tended to proceed under the familiar mask of institutional neutrality but has not stopped short of outright censorship—as with the banning of student-led Palestine solidarity organizations (including Jewish ones)—and prosecutions. 

Although, as Palestine Legal reports, university repression has escalated markedly under Zionist pressure over the past 18 months or so, it has been so widespread since 2009 that a handful of examples will have to suffice. The rash of prosecutions of student protesters that have taken place since the breaking of the encampments by police force last spring had a forerunner in then-Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, Michael Drake’s initiation of a disciplinary process that in 2010 led to the prosecution of the “Irvine 11”. Palestinian and Muslim students had disrupted a speech by then Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, whose invitation to campus at that moment was clearly provocative in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. The Orange County prosecutor relied on Drake’s sanctions to charge the arrested students with misdemeanors. The recent firings of Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke and Yale International Law professor Helyeh Doutaghi were notoriously preceded by that of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois in 2014. University presidents have almost univocally condemned the academic and cultural boycott despite overwhelming and well-documented evidence of the complicity of the Israeli universities with which they maintain close financial and research collaborations in Israel’s war crimes and violations of human rights.

That 100 US university presidents should have condemned the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 came then as no surprise. Why would it have? Such are the presidents of institutions, like former UC President David Gardner, whose refusal to divest from apartheid in the 1980s fueled the student-led divestment movement that eventually brought many colleges and universities to do the right thing, which, indeed, they now celebrate on their websites. At that time, supporters of South Africa argued that “South Africa [was] freer than most African countries" and that it “was scarcely the only country in Africa systematically to violate human rights”.  Fed by a well-funded South African propaganda campaign, they questioned the readiness of black Africans for democracy and argued for “increasing all forms of contact” under the rubric of “constructive engagement.” Then, too, university administrators unleashed the police on demonstrators, dismantling the “shanty-towns” that were their encampments. 

Absent from that moment, however, was the charge of antisemitism, that has been so irresponsibly and recklessly flung at social justice activists as to have become virtually content-free. No divestment activist was ever charged with anti-Afrikanerism, though Elon Musk and Donald Trump have sought lately to appeal to the wounded feelings of white South African racists. The weaponization of antisemitism by Zionism has offered the university authorities a new instrument with which to suppress calls for divestment from Israel and corporations that support its apartheid agenda that build on the experience of anti-apartheid campaigns against South Africa. Resistance to divestment and the preservation of university investments in corporations that systematically abet Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and assist the commission of genocide—from Hewlett Packard and Caterpillar to Boeing and Raytheon, Maersk and Chevron—is continuous with longstanding university complicity in the business of repression. Antagonism to BDS is intensified by its intersection with the rise of demands on universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations that have both accelerated and denied climate change and imperiled the future of the planet and of their students’ futures, thus exacerbating the contradictions that universities face between their putatively humanistic missions and their material as well as ideological embeddedness in a rapacious neoliberal order.

In some respects, then, the Zionist-led campaign against student activists and their faculty allies is parasitic on the longer history of efforts to subordinate the university to business interests or to those of the neoliberal corporate-state convergence. In its ever-more open embrace of fascist tendencies that has stripped away the democratic mask Israel has always sported, Zionism has seen its image in the mirror of global authoritarianism and found its real face there, to the alarm of whatever remains of that self-deluded category, the liberal Zionist. With unabashed alacrity, it has served as the leading-edge of a right-wing and corporate reclamation of the university whose aim is ultimately the destruction of an already hollowed out liberal institution. Appeals to protect the injured sensibilities of Jewish (read Zionist, since JVP and If Not Now clearly don’t count) students and faculty cynically mobilizes the last admissible remnant of the much-maligned campus DEI policies, ever caricatured and exploited by conservative media to generate a loss of faith in higher education that should have been laid at the foot of right-wing cuts.

At the same time, Zionist fear of such “woke” coalitions as that between Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movements has amplified right-wing antagonism to DEI and energized the Trump regime’s determination to abolish any vestige of anti-racism in the university. The conflation by Zionist organizations like the ADL of Palestine solidarity with antisemitism succeeds only in isolating the real struggle against actual antisemitism from genuine antiracist social movements. But the underlying aim is not to fight antisemitism but to defend an Israeli state predicated on Jewish supremacy which must make alliance with white supremacist authoritarianism to survive. The shared goal is to deradicalize our campuses at a moment when, as during the 60s, capitalism has lost its hegemony and finds that the majority of younger people lean socialist and the majority of the population favor government programs that by any other name would be social democratic, from universal healthcare to social security.

 

SUBORDINATION

Zionist organizations’ success in their campaign to shut down pro-Palestinian solidarity on our campuses accordingly finds its condition of possibility in a half-century right-wing campaign to transform the university in a direction that would subordinate it to the needs of the corporations. In 1971, Lewis Powell, later Supreme Court Justice, wrote for the American Chamber of Commerce a memorandum in which he laid out the necessity to take back the campuses and stem what he calls—in terms remarkably resonant with the language of the contemporary right—the “ideological war against the enterprise system and the values of western society” whose “disquieting voices” he found among the New Left. His portrait of the “minority” of left voices has become drearily familiar, as has his insistence on the lack of “balance”, “conspicuous by its absence on many campuses” and on the lack of “conservative or moderate” voices. Powell lays out a blueprint for taking back the American university which furnished the map for a concerted and long-drawn out right-wing campaign to regain hegemony, extending from the campuses to the media. 

Powell’s analysis and recommendations were amplified some years later by the conservative intellectual warrior Samuel Huntington (of “clash of civilizations” fame) in the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy of 1975, where he expressed alarm over “an excess of democracy” driven in large part by “a tremendous expansion in higher education.” Huntington expressed most clearly the anxiety shared by the Trilateral Commission that the result of the postwar expansion of higher education was “the overproduction of people with university education in relation to the jobs available for them,” leading to frustration and discontent with capitalism. The corollary of this perception was that “higher educational institutions should be induced to redesign their programs so as to be geared to the patterns of economic development and future job opportunities.”

Pursuant to Powell’s and Huntington’s logic, the following 50 years saw the steady decrease in state funding to higher education and the corresponding increase in university reliance on student fees and on wealthy and largely conservative donors to make up the shortfall, along with the increasing vocationalization of higher education. This has gone hand in hand with the shift from the notion of public education as a right (historically a right racially distributed, it must be said, primarily to white citizens) to the conception of education as a commodity in which to invest—and the corresponding transformation of the students themselves into commodities of varying value for accumulation. As Trump’s recent appointee to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon succinctly put it, reflecting the desperately impoverished conception of education that best serves capitalist culture, “Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.”

We continue to live in the shadow of these antidemocratic definitions of the crisis of democracy and the remarkable degree to which it was blamed on the radicalization of the campuses. At the same time, we retain a similar but inverse understanding of the university and its functions. For a decade or so after the end of the 1960s, the university continued to offer shelter to critical and even radical voices and continued to present that as an essential part of its educational mission. To some extent, the relative hospitality of the university to critique stemmed from the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of the university in late Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, for whom the university provided space for what Kant called the philosophical critique of the faculties—Law, Medicine, and Theology—that he saw as direct “tools of the state” (the contemporary equivalent would be the academic-military-industrial complex). They recognized that the university was, as Louis Althusser would later term it, an “ideological state apparatus”, but believed that critique could insure its openness to transformation and to the accommodation of new ideas. In some respects, Kant’s liberal idea of the university remains what we understand by a university and its meaning, an understanding that underlies the mostly under-theorized dismay on the part of faculty at the erosion of the humanities and the shrinking of the space in research or teaching for radical critique of the institution or of society. 

Through the 1980s, to a very large extent left critical thinking did exercise a considerable degree of counterhegemonic influence within the university, including antiracist as well as anticapitalist thought. In a sense, we would not be wrong to claim that within the university and through the teaching of generations of students, the left “won” the so-called culture wars as these played out in a gradual liberalization of social mores, from what the right now term “gender ideology” to the rise of social movements against globalization and of antiracist organizing, and even the emergence of a vigorous and theoretically informed Palestine solidarity movement that always understood itself in conjunction with other social movements. 

Such achievements, however, went hand in hand with a series of compromises with institutionalized modes of containment of critique. Thus “affirmative action”, attacked in courts and political initiatives, gave way first to “multiculturalism”, as the university sanitized the demands of the student divestment activists to end “apartheid on campus,” and multiculturalism, which responded to the student demand for diversification of the faculty, in turn succumbed first to the rubric of “excellence and diversity” (code for “diversity within the existing protocols of the university”), and finally to the fully bureaucratized DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The university succeeded in successive neutralizations of efforts to transform its institutional function as an instrument of racial capitalism. The bitter irony is that the left seems forever doomed to defend institutional policies imposed by the right in effort to contain genuine desegregation and which the same right then attacks as extreme and absurd.

No less important to the assault on higher education were the fundamental historical changes in the conditions of possibility of the postwar liberal university. That university was more precisely a Cold War university: ideologically, it needed to demonstrate a link between capitalism, democracy and freedom, including the freedom to dissent that the capitalist West found essential to hold up against “totalitarian” socialism. This fact did mean that the universities furnished to a limited degree exploitable political space for a minority of radical intellectuals, and even to the more extensive class whom Powell identified as ranging “from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend.” That space, which the Cold War university could not entirely close down, enabled critical intellectual work within the university and in coalition with social movements and student organizations. Inevitably, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a still incomplete project of the neoliberal “New World Order” in its wake obviated the need to maintain that space of so-called “academic freedom” and entailed its gradual but steady erosion, until now, only remnants remain. The steady downsizing of the “critical” disciplines of the humanities and interpretive social sciences that responds to capital’s growing demand for outcomes and skill-sets to produce a docile and malleable labor force, relayed in a drumbeat of full-throated attacks on university education in the Wall Street Journal, heralded the transformation of higher education into vocational training, a tendency justified precisely by its increasing cost as a commodity that must repay the investment. 

Even as “tenured radicals,” as the right liked to call them, were extending their limited cultural hegemony in a restricted sphere of the university, conservative forces, always the better Marxists, played the economic card, militating for cuts in public support of higher education that gradually reduced both state and federal funding to a small percentage of university budgets. Consequently, if not programmatically, universities’ dependence on corporate funding or billionaire donors, who can de facto determine the educational policy of the institutions, left them vulnerable to the ideological demands of their patrons. Powell’s prescription to the Chamber of Commerce, to take back the American university, has been all but achieved. 

Contradiction

Into that space of vulnerability of the university, a product of both its internal contradictions and of external economic and political developments, Zionism has stepped, drawing in its wake the extreme right white supremacists with their hatred of wokeness, DEI, critical race theory, intellectual life, student radicals and “Marxist” faculty. It has proven as adept at leveraging the power of donors to limit expression on campuses as it has in making common cause with fundamentally antisemitic tendencies, from Christian Zionists to right-wing extremists, including openly antisemitic leaders like Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the idol of CPAC. We should recall that the fall of UPenn president, Liz Magill began not with October 7, but a few weeks before in the efforts of Zionist donors and organizations like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee to suppress the Palestine Writes festival on that campus in September 2023, on the grounds that it hosted “provocateurs willing to spread antisemitism.” For all these organizations’ protestations that they respect freedom of expression, it is clear that the aim is to suppress any critical analysis of the state of Israel that causes discomfort to Zionists, much as the Republican legislatures in Florida and other states have sought to suppress the teaching of the facts of Black enslavement, Indigenous genocide, and US structural racism on the grounds that they disturb white students. To claim, as the AJC did, that “Events that gather writers, scholars, and artists to focus on a particular culture’s experience and its art are vital parts of the university environment on American campuses” while at the same time denying Palestinians or their allies the right to name in the terms that they choose the determining factors in that cultural experience, Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide, betrays the insurmountable contradictions in which the Zionist narrative consistently founders.

As Albert Memmi long ago pointed out in his classic text on settler colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized, every colonialist eventually gravitates into violent authoritarianism, driven there by insuperable contradictions. “Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom”, Memmi observed. The tendency of Israeli political culture towards an ever-more extreme and genocidal racism over the last couple of decades bears out Memmi’s logic, just as his equally trenchant remark on the ways in which those fascist tendencies return to exert their influence on the “mother country”, or the states that sponsor the settler colony. The rightward turn of Zionism, which has stemmed from its inability to maintain its liberal façade once confronted with a vigorous Palestine solidarity movement capable of communicating Palestine’s “particular culture’s experience” under Israeli domination, now exerts its destructive influence on the American university, seeking the silencing, the detention, the prosecution, the dismissal of those who make its contradictions and its crimes uncomfortably public. 

The common cause that Zionist organizations have made with the fascistic Trump regime in its similarly motivated antagonism to intellectual life and genuine education is not a merely contingent or opportunistic alliance. It belongs with the very logic that has informed Zionism since its inception and that was initially openly expressed: every colonial enterprise has to eliminate both the physical presence and the cultural and intellectual life of the indigenous population. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza destroyed every one of its universities but has not broken the spirit or the creative and intellectual will of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, cultural destruction tends to rebound on the perpetrator and Zionism's deepening antagonism to intellectual debate and creative life manifests all the mediocrity and spiritual rigidification characteristic of what Memmi dubbed "the colonizer who accepts", the willing agent of racism and dehumanization. 

It remains to be seen whether the administrations and trustees of American universities will muster the courage to face down Zionist pressure to close down what remains of free inquiry and expression in the US university and resist MAGA’s inroads under the spurious cover of investigations of antisemitism. The record to date of capitulation and preemptive collaboration makes it unlikely that they will find the will to do so. That may leave us the sole alternatives either of imagining and realizing a transformation of the university and its mission radical enough to constitute its abolition or of abandoning it to sink into the ruins it has brought down upon itself.