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| UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018 |
The new CFO, Stephen Agostini, appointed in 2024, wasn’t working with the Senate in established ways. A new chancellor, Julio Frenk, had arrived in January, was to be inaugurated on June 5th, and seemed okay with increased opacity. The Senate chair, Kathy Bawn, must have been worried that something much worse than shared governance could get locked in by the new administration.
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| No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line |
One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.” Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.
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| Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025 |
This would be a great way to further degrade the entire sector, and must be blocked.
A bit of background: When you are the weaker party as a long-term cultural cold war becomes a hot institutional war, you must create a public understanding of who you really are. It should include something like the following elements:
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| UC Irvine on May 8, 2018 |
This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university.
This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down, and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.
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| Dublin Bay on June 17, 2025 |
It's sometimes yes on the first question, but the public versions so far suggest not fight but capitulation.
Today’s example is Minnesota--with condolences and heartfelt solidarity to everyone affected by the recent political assassinations in the Twin Cities.
The AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities put together a presentation for faculty about their administration's budget announcement. They cite their administration saying, “a financial model that relies on maintaining academic programs and activities at current levels is not sustainable, nor is attempting to be great at everything.” This suggests both downsizing scale and diluting quality.
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| Sacramento Faculty Lobbying on April 11, 2008 |
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.
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.
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| Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018 |
I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt.
In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching.
I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.
I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.
When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation.
The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting.
My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.
The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying.
But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.
That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate.
I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.
What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.
 |
| University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018 |
by Dylan Rodríguez
Professor, Dept. of Media and Cultural Studies
University of California, Riverside
Police Restoration at the University of California
Collective movement against antiblack policing has proliferated among University of California (UC) faculty, employees, and students since the summer months of 2020. Influenced and led by the practices and frameworks of Black radicalism—specifically, Black diasporic, Black feminist, and Black queer and trans abolitionist organizing—a growing number of people affiliated with the UC system are challenging the university’s complicity in the normalized state violence that kills people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Korryn Gaines, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Tyisha Miller, and so many others.
The formation of the abolitionist Cops Off Campus campaign led by the UC systemwide group UCFTP (of which i am an active member), emergence of the Divest/Invest collective at the UCLA campus, and statements of commitment to abolitionist principles by the University of California Student Association are just three prominent examples of recent mobilizations that have drawn from campus-based groups, including contingent faculty, labor unions, student organizations, mutual aid organizations, and even some research centers.[1]Almost inevitably, this surge of activism has been accompanied by dozens of public statements from UC departments, university administrators, and police chiefs expressing varieties of concern, outrage, sympathy, and disgust over police killings of Black people.[2]
The administrative response of the UC system to revolts against antiblack police violence and “systemic racism” mirrors the broader national drift toward a reformist restoration of law-and-order, political stability, and respectable policing. Relying on the triage and public relations model of administratively appointed “campus safety task forces” (in which university police are core members), UC administrators exemplify a process of institutional consultation, auditing, and piecemeal reform that installs the reproduction of police power as a premise of deliberation.
Campus safety task forces are not merely inadequate to the task of slowing, interrupting, or ending the asymmetrical terror produced through modern campus policing—including but not limited to gendered antiblackness, Islamophobia, queer and transphobia, misogyny, ableism, white supremacy, and racial violence. Beyond this fundamental and unsurprising inadequacy, these task forces work to sustain and re-legitimize police power while extending the parameters of policing as a layered infrastructure of state and state-condoned violence. To echo UCFTP’s January 2, 2021 statement, “Task forces allow universities to preserve and protect the violent institution of policing…. Declining to serve on task forces… recognizes and exposes task forces for what they are.”[3]
Audit, Wash, and Repeat: The UCOP Task Force on Universitywide Policing (2018-2020)
Former UC President Janet Napolitano—who served as Secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama—exemplified the logic and function of such police reform task forces in the creation of the 2018 UC Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing. While it is beyond the intent of this short contribution to thoroughly detail the content and outcomes of its full report, it is worth emphasizing that the Presidential Task Force was solely concerned with improving the UCPD’s internal efficiency and restoring its institutional legitimacy in the aftermath of multiple, prominent incidents of police violence against students during the 2010s. While Lt. John Pike’s pepper spraying of UC Davis students during a nonviolent demonstration in 2011 was the most notorious such spectacle, examples of the UCPD’s proclivity for physical and chemical violence against campus and community members abound.[4] Yet, of the task force’s twenty-eight recommendations, none alluded to this archive of violence as cause to reconsider the campus policing paradigm. Instead,
· 15 recommendations focus on data “transparency” and the rationalization of processes for filing and investigating complaints against the UC police;
· 7 recommendations address “use of force” protocols and police training for “procedural justice, implicit bias, mental health, de-escalation, cultural sensitivity, sexual orientation and trauma-informed interviewing” as well as “educational and awareness presentations for students, staff and faculty;” and
· 5 recommendations outline the need for campus based “independent advisory boards” alongside measures to improve the UCPD’s “community engagement.”[5]
(The 28th recommendation is to create the implementation plan itself.) While Napolitano’s task force completed its work in 2019, it seems clear that the variously titled UC “campus safety” task forces created since June 2020 have drawn from her administrative blueprint.
The mandate for a renewed, public-facing round of campus police reform seemed clear in July 2020 when the UC Regents announced their selection of Michael V. Drake to succeed UC President Janet Napolitano. [6] During the late winter and early spring, under the authority of Chancellor Cynthia Larive, the UCPD had violently repressed the graduate student-led wildcat COLA (cost of living adjustment) strike at UC Santa Cruz. In June, the Los Angeles (city) Police Department prevailed on an agreement with the UCLA administration to convert Jackie Robinson Stadium into a temporary outdoor jail for people arrested during mass demonstrations throughout Los Angeles after the police killing of George Floyd.[7]
At the time of Drake’s appointment, widespread condemnation of UC administrators’ history of sanctioning law enforcement violence seemed to mesh with the incoming UC President’s poignant account of his own encounters with police harassment: “It’s been a part of American life for all too long, and it’s something that needs to stop and we need to find better ways of being able to keep our communities safe.”[8] (Widely acclaimed for his impressive academic and administrative credentials, Drake is also the first Black President of the University of California.)
To “Reflect Our Values”: The UCR Campus Safety Task Force (2020-present)
During the latter part of 2020, Chancellors at individual UC campuses convened various task forces and advisory boards as part of an urgent administrative attempt to navigate the crisis of police legitimacy. Upon forming the UC Riverside Campus Safety Task Force in September, UCR Chancellor Kim Wilcox described its purpose as a “review of our overall campus safety efforts, focusing primarily on operation of the UCR Police Department and its relationship to other entities on campus and throughout the community.” While Wilcox offered the Task Force wide latitude “to prioritize topics that they believe to be more important,” he took special pains to address what he considered to be the limits of its charge:
I am not asking the Task Force to opine on the issue of whether we should maintain a police force. We are better served as a community by having our own police force, which reflects our values and reports to the campus. Without our own police, we would fall under the jurisdiction of the Riverside Police Department and the Riverside County Sheriff.[9] [emphasis added]
Two parts of Wilcox’s qualifying statement clarify the assumptive premises of the UCR Task Force’s convening. First, while it is a common rhetorical convention for elected officials, police chiefs, and other institutional executives and administrators to invoke a universalized notion of “our values” in the course of narrating their policies and decisions, such pronouncements avert sober consideration of the ethical premises of the university: What if “our values,” read as the institutionally enforced priorities of the university, effectively (though tacitly) encompass systemic, discursive, normalized antiblackness and antiblack policing at the very same time that they fetishize notions of Black student “success” and graduation rates?[10]
Posed another way: How does the policing of Black people, Black presence, and Black (intellectual, cultural, and social) life form the historical conditions of possibility for “our values,” which in turn cohere institutional notions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” especially when they are applied to the work of university policing task forces?
Second, Wilcox’s preemptive dismissal of abolitionist forms of campus safety as a concession to the jurisdiction of the city police and county sheriff is a red herring. This is because of the longstanding practice of “concurrent jurisdiction.”[11] Put simply, city and county police already have shared authority with the UCRPD on campus and campus-owned property, and such is a common arrangement for campuses that employ their own police forces.
Under concurrent jurisdiction, a campus administration creates a mutually recognized agreement (memorandum of understanding) with city police and county sheriff’s departments that allows the university/college police to operate with relative autonomy on campus grounds (or, in the UCPD’s case “within one mile of the [campus’s] exterior boundaries”).[12] Importantly, there is no inherent prohibition on the possibility of a university negotiating concurrent jurisdiction with external police departments in the absence of a campus police force, provided alternative forms of security and safety are instituted in place of the UCPD.
The spectacle of the UCR Task Force’s one hour virtual “town hall,” held on November 12, 2020, evidenced the administrative leadership’s lack of preparation, research, and seriousness in grasping their topic. This was despite the fact that, according to Associate Chancellor Christine Victorino, it was provided with a “shared drive with scholarly work in the area of police abolitionism [sic] and racial profiling.” (Full transparency: this shared drive apparently includes at least one of my published scholarly articles on policing and police violence in the UC system.)
The hourlong town hall provided ample reason to conclude that the Task Force’s primary purpose—in resonance with the Chancellor’s protective pro-UCPD dictate—is to support and defend the existence of the campus police, while making non-binding, consultative suggestions to modestly revise some of its internal and public-facing practices.
While the Chair of the Task Force (a local attorney and UCR alumnus) assured the hundred or so audience members that the group was “open” to considering abolitionist alternatives to the UCRPD, the prominent (and rather defensive) presence of UCR Police Chief John Freese constituted an embodied rebuttal of the Chair’s generous claim.
In response to Freese’s description of the “diversity” of the UCRPD (“We have twenty-two male officers, three female, one Asian [sic] officer, two Black officers, seven Hispanic [sic] officers, and fifteen white officers”), i posed a written question to the panel: Is the Task Force aware that increased diversity of police personnel does not lead to less racist, less sexist, less transphobic, less antiblack police practices? The Police Chief’s rambling response to this rudimentary question further undermined confidence in the Task Force’s credibility and analytical rigor, given Freese’s central role in its deliberations:
We—like all police departments—we hire from the human race. It doesn’t matter what color our police officers are. Our police officers, just like any human beings, can have, um, feelings and things that are part of their lives and that they act on, sometimes subconsciously. As the leader of this department, I’ve always had a clear stance that we do not stand for any kind of prejudiced behavior from our officers…. [T]he best way I can answer that question, is that we do the best with hiring from the human race. I acknowledge that it doesn’t matter what color or the makeup of our police department or any police department, you’re, you’re uh, you’re dealing with human beings.[13]
Especially revealing is a passage from the minutes of the Task Force meeting held immediately after the Town Hall:
[UCR Police Chief] John Freese raised his concern about a recommendation for abolishing the police force; [Associate Chancellor] Christine Victorino suggested focusing on developing justified, well-founded, and implementable recommendations.[14]
While the Town Hall was nothing short of an administrative shitshow, the Task Force continued its work unabated, spurred by a January 2021 deadline to submit “recommendations” to the Chancellor. Serious questions about the Task Force’s credibility have persisted, due in part to administrative incompetence in the appointment of its members: at least two Black student appointees were not initially asked to consent to be publicly named as Task Force members, and one was no longer enrolled at the university at the time of their appointment (their name was still listed as a Task Force member in early January 2021). Yet, questions of credibility and competence ultimately have little to do with the Task Force’s most important purpose: to simply exist for a finite period.
Task Force As Police Power
The public ritual of the “campus safety task force” reproduces the legitimacy of police presence by inviting criticism of its excess, dysfunction, mismanagement, corruption, antiblackness, racism, misogyny, queer phobia, transphobia, ableism, and white supremacy (etc.). Such task forces are a production and performance of police power and are thus constitutive of, rather than external to it; their deliberations (including task force reports, white papers, and recommendations) extend the technology of policing to incorporate the ceremonial participation of critics, individualized and communal targets of police terror, and survivors of acute (and homicidal) police violence. These processes tend to not only incorporate the direct participation of police, but also extend the reach of domestic counterinsurgency as a defense of the fundamental legitimacy of police power (violence) and police militarization (domestic war). This counterinsurgency serves to protract and reproduce antiblack (etc.) state violence at the very same time that it solicits indignant outrage against it. Yet, the omnipresence of police reform task forces at university and college campuses also occasions an overdue reflection on the continuities of policing and police power beyond “the police.”
The university administration is police power, and university police are the direct expression of administrative power.
UCRFTP Statement on the UCR Campus Safety (Policing) Task Force is HERE
Signing page is HERE
[1] See UCFTP social media sites at https://www.facebook.com/UCFTP/, https://twitter.com/ucftp, and https://www.instagram.com/uc_ftp/ (accessed January 2021); UCLA Divest/Invest website, https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/abolition-repository/ (accessed January 2021); UCSA June 2, 2020 press release, https://ucsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/UCSA-Statement-Anti-Blackness-Police-Violence-6_2.pdf; and Thao Nguyen, “Coalition launches campaign to remove police from UC campuses,” The Daily Californian, September 4, 2020, https://www.dailycal.org/2020/09/04/coalition-launches-campaign-to-remove-police-from-uc-campuses/ (accessed January 2021).
[2] By way of example, see University of California Office of the President, “UC statement on protests, violence following George Floyd’s death,” Sunday, May 31, 2020, https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-statement-protests-violence-following-george-floyd-s-death (accessed January 2021); UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive, “Statement on George Floyd to UC Santa Cruz Community,” May 29, 2020, https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/05/statement-on-george-floyd.html (accessed December 2020); UC Davis Chancellor Gary May, “Chancellor’s Statement on George Floyd,” https://leadership.ucdavis.edu/news/messages/chancellor-messages/statement-on-george-floyd (accessed December 2020).
[3] UCFTP, “Against Task Forces,” public statement issued January 2, 2021, https://twitter.com/ucftp/status/1345460418714562560 (accessed January 2021).
[4] See Dylan Rodríguez, “Beyond ‘Police Brutality’: Racist State Violence and the University of California,” American Quarterly (Currents), Vol. 64, No. 2, June 2012, p. 301-313; Gabe Schneider, “UC Campuses Have Disclosed Virtually No Records Under Police Transparency Law,” Voice of San Diego, May 12, 2020,
https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/uc-campuses-have-disclosed-virtually-no-records-under-police-transparency-law/ (accessed January 2021); Tyler Kingkade, “University Of California Campus Police Have History Of Excessive Force Against Protesters,” The Huffington Post, December 9, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/california-campus-police-clash-with-protesters-ows_n_1125537 (accessed January 2021); Paul D. Thacker , ‘Shock and Anger at UCLA,” Inside Higher Ed, November 17, 2006, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/17/shock-and-anger-ucla (accessed January 2021); Lauren Hernández and Sarah Ravani, “Students protest UC Berkeley police arrests they say were racially motivated,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Students-racially-profiled-brutalized-by-13701947.php (accessed January 2021).
[5] University of California Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing Implementation Report, June 2020.
Michael V. Drake to become 21st president of the University of California
UC Office of the President
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/michael-v-drake-become-21st-president-university-california (accessed January 2021).
[7] See Summers, L., & Gougelet, K. (2020). Whose University? When Police Pass the Baton to Campuses, Society for the Anthropology of Work, https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.8cc96f6f, https://saw.americananthro.org/pub/whose-university-when-police-pass-the-baton-to-campuses/release/1(accessed January 2021); Nina Agrawal, “‘Violation of our values,’ UCLA chancellor says of LAPD’s use of Jackie Robinson Stadium,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-04/ucla-chancellor-calls-lapd-use-of-jackie-robinson-stadium-to-process-arrests-a-violation (accessed December 2020); “Statement on LAPD using Jackie Robinson Stadium,” June 4, 2020, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-a-violation-of-our-values (accessed December 2020);
[8] Teresa Watanabe, “UC President-elect Michael V. Drake knows firsthand about harsh police tactics,” LA Times, JULY 8, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-08/uc-president-elect-michael-v-drake-knows-firsthand-about-harsh-police-tactics (accessed January 2021).
[9] Chancellor Kim Wilcox, Campus safety task force announcement, September 14, 2020 https://insideucr.ucr.edu/announcements/2020/09/14/campus-safety-task-force-announcement (accessed January 2021).
Teresa Watanabe
African American students thrive with high graduation rates at UC Riverside
Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2017
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-uc-riverside-black-students-20170623-htmlstory.html (accessed January 2021).
[11] University of California Universitywide Police Policies and Administrative Procedures, January 7, 2011, p. 8. https://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000382/PoliceProceduresManual (accessed January 2021). Cited in UC Senate Systemwide Public Safety Task Force Final Report Submitted to the University Committee on Faculty Welfare (UCFW)
June 1, 2018, p. 71. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/SNW-JN-gold-book-task-force-report.pdf (accessed January 2021)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Task Force on Campus Safety Town Hall, November 12, 2020 https://chancellor.ucr.edu/task-force-campus-safety (accessed December 2020).
[14] Task Force on Campus Safety, UC Riverside Office of the Chancellor, https://chancellor.ucr.edu/task-force-campus-safety (accessed December 2020).
