Introduction
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Free Palestine! Occupation No More! Divest Don’t Arrest!
Demonstrators shout these chants during protests to end Israeli genocide and oppression of Palestinians. Students at over 120 US campuses are demanding an end to university collaboration with Israel through investments, military research, and co-sponsored research. Students in France and England have also erected encampments and occupied buildings. Administrators have sent in police to arrest and beat students and faculty, revealing the myths of academic freedom and free speech. Militant Zionist groups have also harassed and threatened protestors as they falsely spread lies that the anti-Zionists hate Jewish people despite their involvement, including Jewish Voice for Peace.
Students have catalyzed and inflamed many struggles from opposing the war on Vietnam and South African apartheid to supporting the civil rights movement. The editors of this blog salute our newer comrades who are risking injury, jail, expulsion, and deportation if they lose their student visas. They are showing true working-class anti-racist solidarity, not just narrow identity politics. An injury to one is an injury to all!
It is important to analyze the roles of universities and their Boards to understand who our friends and enemies are.
This article will discuss the role of the university under capitalism, its leadership, ideology, labor conditions, and ability to tolerate dissent. It also cites support statements from related groups and ways to fight back with union partners.
Before we dive into the nature of academia, let’s consider our goals, strategies, and tactics. Our blog promotes the abolition of capitalism and its wars, exploitation, racism, gender discrimination, prisons, and poverty. That requires unity among students and workers, organization, planning, and commitment. Struggles against the war in Gaza and on the campuses test strategies and tactics and reveal who our friends and foes are. From previous student movements, we learn that we need to:
Address racism. The 1968 Columbia U strikers fought not only against the Vietnam War but against the University’s expansion in the Harlem neighborhood that would destroy African American’s homes. This generated bonds and community support.
In 1970, the police killed two black Jackson State University students unrelated to the war. This outrage was eclipsed by the murders of the four white Kent State students and was barely acknowledged (and still isn’t). The police. continue to kill over 1000 people a year, disproportionately black, Latin and Native. The same racist government kills Gazans and non-white Americans.
Unite with workers. Workers have the power to shut down business. Longshoremen refused to load ships with weapons for Vietnam and can do so for Israel. Manufacturing workers can refuse to produce weapons and other tools of war. Campus workers can unite with students to close the universities to demand an end of relations with Israel and other aggressors. Students can unite with campus workers who suffer low pay and abusive working conditions. University of Maryland housekeepers, primarily black and Latina, earned $10 per hour in the 2010s and they belonged to a union! Students and white facility workers rallied around them to demand higher incomes and safety.
Many university workers also work in university run hospitals where students can offer support. Developing relationships and inviting workers to meetings and actions can begin the alliance. Students can support off-campus unionizing and strikes from Starbucks to teachers and railroads. Students can also get jobs in key industries like communication, sanitation, IT, and transportation to spread anti-imperialist politics and learn from workers about life in industry.
Organize Against Racist Ideologies. Expose and oppose ideas of inferiority taught on campus, such as the intelligence differences between whites and blacks. Students picketed the classrooms of Banfield, Shockley, and Herrnstein who promulgated such theories during the 1970s. Today, some scientists try to explain health and social outcomes by genetics.
Reject nationalism. Continue to build alliances among all student groups. In the same way, advocate for multiracial and multiethnic solidarity throughout the world, not nationalism. A united working class needs to run society and not collaborate with the capitalists of one’s particular group. Arab and Jewish worker unity is the only way to establish a just and egalitarian state in Palestine. It won’t happen soon, but we can start promoting it and forming organizations to achieve it.
Now, let’s look at the schools….
Who Rules the Schools?
The richest owners of industry and finance run the world, 10% at the top amass 76% of the world’s wealth while the lowest 50% earn 2% (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/global-income-inequality-gap-report-rich-poor/). They set wages, determine what is produced and consumed, and engage in wars to secure their power over the workers and resources of other nations. They control the government which, in turn, manages the police, military, legislature, and judiciary. However, the vast majority of people are workers and play indispensable roles in making the system function or defending it in wars so we are able to apply pressure and create change. Yet, racist and nationalist ideas split our unity. The media and political leaders focus on our differences instead of our commonalities.
So where does education fit into this capitalist structure? As discussed in Zionism in Education on this blog, education indoctrinates students with the dominant ideas of society. Israeli schools teach that Jewish people are superior to Arabs, who are anti-Semitic terrorists. They lie that early Zionists took over an empty land denying any evidence of the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba (1948) (https://multiracialunity.org/2024/04/10/fighting-zionism-in-education/).
US schools teach a racist history that justifies the slaughter of Native Americans and excuses anti-black discrimination; many other groups are marginalized and ignored. No universities want faculty to teach opposing histories that generate dissent or who act against racist guest speakers and curriculum. Contrary to popular thought, there is no protection of free expression on campuses; universities have fired tenured faculty for speaking out. Recently, CUNY fired long time Professor Danny Shaw for teaching Palestinian history.
University Boards of Directors
Boards of Directors often represent major corporations and banks. Many trustees run private equity firms. Here are several examples from universities experiencing protests (from University Board of Director websites)
Columbia University
Over 50% of trustees represent private equity firms and corporations. Others run media companies.
- President Minouche Shafik, an economist and a baroness, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, official at the World Bank and IMF ((Counterpunch, 4-25-24)
- Robert Kraft, owner, the New England Patriots CEO
- Mark Gallogly, investment banker and former member of Blackstone
- David Greenwald, former legal advisor at Goldman Sachs
Harvard University
Over 50% of the trustees are bankers or corporate representatives, including:
- Vivian Hunt, innovation officer, UnitedHealth London
- Raphael W. Bostic, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
- Philip Hart Cullom, Vice Admiral (retired), U.S. Navy
Yale University
Approximately 70% of trustees represent corporate and financial institutions.
- Michael Kavanaugh, president of Comcast
- Joshua Bekenstein, advisor to Bain Capital and director of companies in business sectors
- Maryana Iskander, oversees Wikipedia
George Washington University
Seventy percent (70%) of the trustees manage corporate and financial institutions.
- Jeffrey Flaks, President and CEO, Hartford HealthCare
- Michael Hoffman, Co-founder and Chairman, Palamon Capital Partners
- Todd Klein, Partner, Revolution Growth
University Products
No wonder universities are so eager to please big business and the government. Major universities also influence US foreign policy, with leading faculty members who rotate in and out of government. Harvard housed some of the most brutal policy makers during the Vietnam War, from Samuel Huntington who caged Vietnamese people in barb-wired fences to Henry Kissinger who bombed Hanoi and crafted US imperialism around the world.
These research institutions ram racism down our throats and into books they publish. Richard Herrnstein, Walter Shockley, E.O. Wilson and Edward Banfield, all professors at major universities, published books purporting to prove black inferiority. Columbia University participated in the racist Violence Initiative that postulated the genetic basis of violent behavior in black children.
Today, universities conduct research to serve military needs. In 2022, the Department of Defense funded $195 million in awards to 28 research groups (https://defense.gov). Ideologically, they create and promote stereotypes of human behavior, such those mentioned above about racialized inferiority, violent behavior, crime, and drug use. Media are instrumental in disseminating these phony constructions of reality.
University research often transfers potentially profitable products to the private sector while the university takes a cut in the intellectual property as well. For example, the technology transfer association, AUTM, reports:
“… before 1980, fewer than 250 patents were issued to U.S. universities each year and discoveries were seldom commercialized for the public’s benefit. In contrast, in fiscal year 2016, AUTM reported that 7,021 U.S. patents were issued, 7,730 new licenses and options were executed, 16,487 U.S. patent applications were filed, 1,024 start-ups were formed, and 800 new commercial products were developed (https://autm.net).”
Research dollars granted to faculty also enrich the schools with money for overhead including rent and cover salary expenses for the professors winning the grant. It keeps faculty on a precarious footing since their annual contracts depend on their research coverage, which is increasingly difficult to achieve and must support the interests of the government or industry that supports it. This pressure to receive grants stifles creativity since the funder identifies the project, leading to repetitive studies that only reinforce or describe the status quo. When research does occasionally suggest a pro-worker result which would cost the system money, it is almost always ignored. For example, numerous studies confirmed that people’s health improved once families received an adequate cash payment. Dream on!
Free and Cheap Labor for Campus Bosses–High Prices for Students
Universities are sites of low paid, insecure workers, from campus housekeepers to untenured faculty. Higher Ed Labor United, HELU, is a new organization organizing academic workers against these labor conditions. It calls for increased job security, policing reforms, increased wages, and classification of student workers as employees in order to receive benefits (https://higheredlaborunited.org/media/2021/09/HELU-Platform.pdf).
Student graduate and undergraduate employees, whose average pay is often under $20,000, are winning unions at major universities. At UCLA and other CA universities, 48,000 student and graduate workers went on strike in 2023 and increased their pay and benefits (https://uniontrack.com/blog/student-workers-forming-unions). U Tennessee union members won an extra $9,000, commuter benefits, and childcare. Yale finally unionized after decades of organizing along with students at Harvard Undergrad, Duke, and Johns Hopkins (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/04/college-workers-organize-labor-unrest-00081182).
Conclusion
If we wish to pressure universities to alter their political policies, pay decent wages and tolerate student and worker activism, we must build a movement that unites workers and students. Students should consider taking jobs in industry, which allows them to have more power than working in NGOs. Students who continue into professions and academia must build alliances with their students and co-workers at all levels. The fight against racism and nationalism is essential everywhere and forever to build strength to fight for fundamental social change.
STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT
Many organizations have issued statements in support of current student demands and actions. Here is a sample.
Higher Ed Labor United, HELU:
…We must stand together in solidarity with one another: students, faculty, staff, alumni, and our communities. When we come together in peaceful dissent against injustice, we build solidarity, strength, power, and community. It is imperative that we support one another in this moment (https://higheredlaborunited.org/2024/04/26/higher-education-workers-condemn-college-university-crackdown-on-peaceful-protestors/).
Columbia University Librarians:
As library workers, we oppose the escalated and violent suppression of speech, as well as increasing crackdowns on the free exchange of ideas—two pillars of our academic community that Columbia claims to uphold—that have come to define the 2023–2024 academic year. Locked campus gates, whether against our Harlem neighbors or members of our university community, are a disturbing symbol of the anti-democratic and anti-intellectual climate the current Columbia administration is attempting to make the new normal.
We endorse Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s six demands (https://cuad.org/).
We reject anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. We reject the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as thoughtfully articulated by the April 10th Jewish faculty op-ed in the Columbia Spectator (http://tiny.cc/h7juxz).
We stand in solidarity with students, faculty, and staff seeking unfettered access to our libraries, archives, and special collections https://cu-librarians-free-palestine.cargo.site/.
Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees, Birzeit University, Ramallah, Occupied West Bank:
As intellectuals and academics working in occupied Palestine, we have to use our words, however futile they may feel in such critical times. We also have faith in the bold souls of our people, our resistance and the triumph of freedom, and in our inalienable rights. We recognize and proclaim that at this critical and urgent historical juncture, we shall overcome – justice shall overcome. We are not your passive victims; we have been murdered, maimed, and displaced by a setter state driven by an ideology of insane hatred and bloody violence, but we will not be silenced. Our resistance shows us the path forward, and we remain steadfast, and we shall triumph (Mondoweiss, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/birzeit-university-union-we-are-all-palestinians-in-the-face-of-colonial-fascism/).
SOLIDARITY:
ARAB JEWSH BLACK LATIN NATIVE WHITE
WORKERS AND STUDENTS UNITE!!!
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