The Student Intifada has laid the university system bare. Whether through the dispossession of indigenous land or the propagation of genocide in Palestine, the university has always been a keystone of empire. Today arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and genocidaires occupy its highest ranks as trustees. In order for us to remove the imperial university as a roadblock to the struggle for Palestinian liberation, we must dismantle its structure — starting with these Boards of Butchers.
After October 7, 2023, as students witnessed the acceleration of a decades-long genocide against the Palestinian people, they mobilized en masse to protest their universities’ material ties to the Zionist entity. This coordinated response built on decades of Palestine organizing on campus and peaked in Spring 2024 when encampments were established across campus grounds first nationally in the U.S., then internationally. Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians in Gaza had been displaced into tents, where they have since been subjected to relentless bombardment and forced starvation. The Student Intifada used the encampments as a form of direct, material intervention to address this, raising the political consciousness of both our fellow students and the public at large.
Students largely pursued three demands: full disclosure of university investments, an academic boycott of Zionist institutions, and divestment from the Zionist entity. The encampments served to mass-mobilize people around these demands and acted as spaces for popular education, coalition work, base-building, and, notably, escalatory direct action.
The Student Intifada created a crisis for universities across North America and exposed that real power does not lie in the hollow facade of bureaucratic, neoliberal “democratic” structures, nor in the glorified managerial positions into which students are funneled to maintain the capitalist-imperialist economy. Rather, the students identified these structures as sanctioned illusions of “democratic” participation which shield the university’s actual mechanisms of control.
Universities cracked down in response. Administrators called on police to brutalize and arrest students. This made it increasingly clear that the university is not an incubator of ideas, but instead an ideological extension of the state that requires police in order to maintain the neoliberal status quo.
While the encampments succeeded in mobilizing the masses on campus, unfocused action and an over-reliance on popular support prevented students from building on these wins to effectively target the university. Students struggled to focus their efforts. Some kept their attention on student governments, while others engaged with defunct mechanisms offered by their universities as forms of pacification, such as task forces and meetings with administrators. Others took to repetitive direct action that failed to exploit contradictions that had already been exposed.
This only served to burden SJPs and send them underground in response to repression, sometimes alienating their base. Many focused on administrators themselves as the antagonists. However, administrative staff are mouthpieces of a larger university bureaucracy, not those with the actual power to implement change. Our efforts have been blocked at the highest level by the Boards of Trustees. The outright refusal of university boards to divest from genocide and honor the will of the students unveiled the institution as a critical tool of imperialism.
The Boards of Trustees, often composed of corporate and state actors, represent the ruling class on our campuses and are extensions of imperial power, capitalist accumulation, and the police state. It has become clear that student resolutions and shows of support can only take us so far.
In order for us to advance our struggle on campus, we must move past building popular support as its own end. The Board does not uphold popular sentiment, it upholds imperialism. Any action we take must be strategic. We must harness popular support to systematically target and dismantle the Board of Trustees.
Who Rules Our Campuses?
In its earliest forms, the university operated as an overtly bourgeois institution meant to “culture” bourgeois youth and foster a sense of class solidarity. By the 1970s with the rise of neoliberalism, the university had become a petty-bourgeois pipeline. It now serves to funnel students into the managerial class by promising positions at Google or Lockheed Martin. While the structure of the university has been malleable, its function is not. In all its iterations, the university has served to reproduce the capitalist-imperialist system that continues to fuel the genocide and occupation of Palestine.
Universities use the banner of liberal education to conceal their role in imperialism. But the Board of Trustees is not concerned with the university’s academic affairs. It instead ensures university operations work in tandem with capitalist interests. Boards of Trustees members are often the direct financiers and profiteers of Zionism, imperialism, and genocide.
Ronald D. Sugar, a member of the University of South California’s Board of Trustees, is also the former CEO of Northrop Grumman. Ohio State University trustee Gary R. Heminger served as the former CEO of Marathon Petroleum Corporation. In Canada, University of Waterloo board member John Saabas served as president of Pratt & Whitney, before moving onto working at Bombardier as the Head of Engineering and Technology and acting as chairman at defense company MagniX. The connections are endless.
The ruling class that oversees the university funnels its investments to sustain war economies, fuel systems of extraction from the Global South, line the pockets of the political and corporate elite, and sustain neoliberal accumulation. Under the supervision of the Board of Butchers, the university functions as a self-renewing pool of research and investment in Empire.
As the university becomes more deeply ingrained in maintaining capitalism and empire via corporatization, the prospect of divestment from key imperial endeavors, such as the occupation of Palestine, becomes a threat to its core premise.
The Role of the Student
Following the ideological advancements made during the encampments, students must continue to critically analyze the conditions on campus and exploit the contradictions present to strengthen the political capacity of their base. We must highlight the Board as the enemies of the students, faculty, staff, and the masses, and create a united front to delegitimize its power over the university. We must attack the Board on all fronts.
Facing struggles with divestment, many students have moved to community initiatives in order to elicit change. Forfeiting the campus as a battleground only helps the university, which can continue to abet the genocide unhindered. Other students have isolated communities outside the university in favor of the student movement. We must build coalitions and work alongside other sectors, not just rely on student action as the end in and of itself. We can learn from the encampments to construct a popular university through our coalitions and build alternate structures that consolidate power in the hands of the masses. We must strive to make our education collective, through both theory and praxis.
What is demanded of us in the face of heightened repression and dormancy is to innovate towards new and creative ways to dismantle the Board of Trustees and, thereby, the university. We must maintain faith in our struggle towards divestment for Palestinian liberation and demonstrate that commitment through our actions. The Gaza solidarity encampments were unique not only because they were the furthest the student movement had escalated since this current phase of the genocide began, but also because they reclaimed the university, a fundamentally Zionist institution, for the people fighting for revolution.
Towards a Popular University
The goal of NSJP’s Popular University campaign during the Spring 2024 encampments was to undermine universities’ legitimacy by constructing counter-spaces on campus. This was done through sustained popular pressure and disruption, repurposing the institution into a base for grassroots political education that could grow the struggle for Palestinian liberation both on and off campus.
While the encampments imagined the popular university as a physical space, its framework relies on the idea that knowledge should be moved from the people to the people in order to raise their consciousness and maintain our struggle. The martyred intellectual, Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian revolutionary and writer, was heavily involved in the original Popular University in Palestine, which revived the masses’ understanding of revolutionaries and acts of resistance.
In the context of our current fight against the Board, the popular university serves as an alternate structure that students can tangibly create as we struggle against the university’s proliferation of genocide. It acts as a model under which we can unite faculty, staff, and community to strategize on how to seize power from the Boards and put it into the hands of the masses.
In our campaigns calling out the Board of Trustees, we must consolidate power through our connections with each other and delegitimize university functions — such as the propagation of knowledge and the production of research — by countering them with our own. Through organizing ourselves this way, we can attack the university more precisely and effectively, turning popular support into mass power.
In order to remove the university as an imperial actor, its structure as it exists must be rebuilt. We must mobilize all sectors on campus—students, staff, and faculty — and work alongside the community to remove the ruling class from our campuses.
Only by dismantling the Board of Trustees can the masses expropriate the university’s infrastructure for the creation of a popular university as Bassel imagined it.
We will reclaim the university as a place for critical learning, political clarity, and collective liberation, born from the masses, built for them, completely divested from the machinery of genocide and oppression. The destruction of the university bureaucracy will cement divestment and prevent any half-promises that cut ties to genocide in one area only to reestablish them in another. The Student Intifada has torn open the floodgates for the campus to be permanently transformed.
This editorial appears in the nineteenth issue of The New York War Crimes, a special collaboration with the editors of The Written Resistancenationalsjp.org/twr.