“To be honest, I’ve felt very depressed over the past six months, because of the genocide, and the situation on campus. I felt unsafe as a Palestinian student,” Maryam Alwan, a Columbia University undergraduate, told me in late April as we sat in a tent on the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Three days later, armed riot police would descend onto her campus with tasers, batons, flash-bang grenades, and live ammunition. Sitting in the tent, I could hear music by Palestinian pop singer Mohammed Assaf playing over the speakers and a drum circle in the distance. Alwan said, “But I feel safe again and happy again for the first time in this encampment,”and expressed hope that the administration wouldn’t shut the whole thing down.

Students at more than 125 universities and colleges where encampments were erected this past year have faced vilification, academic discipline, and police repression not seen on U.S. campuses in decades. With the war crimes in Gaza showing no signs of waning and students committed to escalating the movement through the fall, the repression will continue to tighten. I spoke to 50 students and faculty at a dozen universities over seven months, traveling to five encampments in the spring. I saw that the movement for Palestine will have to grapple with the collusion among the academic and political elite and law enforcement, and better understand the shared material and ideological stakes of a military-industrial-academic complex.

Academia and Law Enforcement in Lockstep

The encampments were so peaceful that even while calling students Hamas-loving terrorists, the media complained that they were too camp-like to be taken seriously. In fact, a study by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data of 553 campus demonstrations for Palestine held this spring found that fewer than 20 resulted in violence (defined as more than pushing or shoving) or property destruction (such as breaking a window), and almost half of those instances were the result of police intervention or counter protests.

Yet students at more than 70 universities were met with arrests and force: hundreds of riot cops, K-9s and mounted police, chemical weapons and batons. Administrators have subjected the young people ostensibly under their care to suspensions, arrests, injuries, and more. Hadeeqa Arzoo, a 20-year-old sophomore at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, told me that in breaking up a building occupation, campus police beat and pepper-sprayed students and supporters. Two hours later, New York Police Department riot police moved in and brutalized protesters, leading to concussions, broken bones, knocked-out teeth, and hijabs ripped off Muslim women.

At Indiana University (IU) and Ohio State, snipers surveilled students from rooftops. Aidan Khamis, a Palestinian American sophomore at IU who was arrested and subsequently barred from campus for one year, said: “They would start shoving us with riot gear, they’d pick off people, put them in chokeholds. Some students had knees in their back. They were using batons to hit people.” When he was arrested, he told me, “I was being held down, and a couple other SWAT were quick to come over and raise their pepper-bullet weapon at students who were trying to help.”

Universities are directly sharing information with law enforcement officers, who have been a steady — and intimidating — presence on campuses since October. At Columbia University, a leaked memo reported that the administration was “coordinating with NYPD and FBI.” The memo also mentioned bringing in “external security firms.” Meanwhile, a group of donors in a WhatsApp group reported that Mayor Eric Adams was “OK if we hire private investigators [deployed to campuses] to then have his police force intel team work with them.”

By cracking down on campus protests and encampments, administrators attempted to undermine students’ power, and therefore their demands for divestment. “Arrests are feeding into [students’] disciplinary proceedings,” explained Shezza Abboushi Dallal, a staff attorney with the nonprofit legal organization Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility. “And conversely, information coming out in disciplinary processes or that they have obtained about their students on campuses are being shared in turn with local and federal law enforcement agencies.” At Cornell University, for instance, second-year undergraduate Nick Wilson told me that he was called into a disciplinary meeting (and consequently suspended) after liaising with the police on behalf of students at a protest. “When the police report was read to me in the disciplinary meeting, I was told that I had received a write-up because I was flagged as a ‘potential organizer.’”

The collaboration of school administrators with law enforcement is by no means a new relationship. Dallal told me that there is “a robust and demonstrated history of collaboration and information sharing between academic institutions and relevant law enforcement agencies — local police departments and also federal agencies like the FBI.”

The emergence of modern campus police — starting in the 1940s and ’50s as university enrollment grew and expanding in response to the antiwar and civil rights movements in the following decades — created direct channels of communication between campus police and local police departments through shared personnel, training, and operations. Students today have complained about joint police and administrative surveillance through cameras installed on university campuses; at public middle and high schools, school safety agents typically work directly for local police forces and can access school surveillance footage.

In other instances, university administrations are passively compliant. In the decade after Sept. 11, the NYPD monitored Muslim students at six CUNY schools and another dozen schools throughout the northeast. The CUNY administration, according to faculty who were involved at the time, refused to disavow such police actions or reassess the “memorandum of understanding” stipulating that in non-emergency circumstances, police can enter CUNY campuses only with the permission of CUNY officials. Administrators at Queens College, also a CUNY school, admitted to working with the NYPD during the fall semester to investigate the Muslim Student Association.

Campus police have also coordinated with the FBI, which claimed to work with more than 30,000 campus public safety officers across thousands of colleges and universities through initiatives the agency developed in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11. The FBI website states that Joint Terrorism Task Force agents “reach out regularly to campus police and school administrators — sharing threat information, offering presentations, providing training and lists of threat indicators, etc.” The FBI did not respond to questions about how many campuses it currently works with through these initiatives.

Apart from official collaborations, the FBI communicates with campus administrators whenever it deems it necessary to national security interests. In 2019, for instance, several university leaders reported that the agency asked them to monitor the research of Chinese students at their schools. “It’s not a question of just looking for suspicious behavior,” Fred Cate, then vice president of research at Indiana University, told NPR at the time. “It’s actually really targeting specific countries and the people from those countries.”

Internal and external law enforcement measures work hand in hand with universities’ rules, channels, and bureaucracies to prescribe limits on allowable speech. Following the explosion of student protests in the 1960s and 1970s, university leaders developed these means to control student activism via restrictions on the “time, place, and manner” of speech before it got out of their control.

The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, which included university administrators, attorneys, and police, was formed in 1970 in response to the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State by the National Guard and local police, respectively. The words and tone of the commission’s report foretold countless statements issued by university presidents this year. It distinguished between “legitimate” forms of unrest and actions that are disorderly, disruptive, violent, or terroristic and specified that “protest is disruptive when it interferes with the normal activities of the university.” Meanwhile, “violent protest” ranges from bloodied noses, cracked heads, and death to “willful destruction of property by vandalism, burning, and bombing” — thus conflating property destruction with dangerous, even mortal, physical harm. Administrators have toggled between loosening and tightening university restrictions, first relying on campus police before calling in law enforcement when internal measures fail to return “normalcy” to university life.

Domination at Home and Abroad

The seamless convergence of administrations, politicians, and the mainstream media points to a shared commitment to maintain current financial and military investments in Israel and to keep students in their place — staving off any precedent that establishes student agency on campus. The ruling elite’s interest is both ideological and material, rooted in American military domination.

After World War II, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anchored a burgeoning military-industrial-academic complex, where grants from the Department of Defense funded research and supported alumni who founded companies that could work with the military. The Lockheed Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and other companies connected to the war industry put down roots within Stanford’s Industrial Park. There, they utilized academic, business, and defense connections to get a foothold in the burgeoning Silicon Valley.

The antiwar movement of the 1960s pushed back on these alliances, but they resurged with the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s. The reigning fiscal and political conservatism strengthened schools’ financial ties to the defense industry and the militarization of campus security. Public funding for universities was whittled away, and academia’s finances became synonymous with ballooning endowments run like hedge funds, individual mega-donors, and administrators functioning more like real estate owners and business managers than educators. Students were seen, at best, as clients, while faculty turned into an increasingly precarious workforce.

In part, the solidarity that developed on campuses among students, staff, and faculty over the past nine months flows from a rejection of the neoliberal university. Eman Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago, told me that while such solidarity is rooted in a shared outrage about Gaza, “it’s also been bolstered by a deep frustration with how the university is going.” There’s a hostile relationship, she explained, “between university administration and everyone else.” She added, “People are mad as hell, they feel underpaid, their programs are getting cut, and the best things about a liberal arts education are being actively destroyed, increasingly by these corporate actors, some of whom don’t even have an academic background.”

The U.S. military relies on university research carried out by academics to develop sophisticated military technologies and funds it accordingly, the writer Harry Zehner reported in The Nation. Johns Hopkins, for instance, receives more money from defense contracts than tuition and fees, MIT holds over $1 billion a year in defense contracts, Penn State was awarded a $2 billion contract from the U.S. Navy, the University of Texas at Austin has a $1.1 billion contract with the Department of Defense, and on and on.

When I asked Cora, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at the University of Michigan, why its administration refuses even to meet with students, she answered, “Money, it’s just money.” She continued, “They want to protect their jobs and their businesses and their investments and their relationships to people who have money and power.”

While university endowments are just one thread in a web of financial interests, they are substantial and growing. In total, U.S. college and university endowments hold around $1 trillion worth of assets, highly concentrated among 20 of the wealthiest universities.

The University of Michigan, for its part, has a nearly $18 billion endowment. A report published by the campus’s TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led movement advocating for divestment, found that the university had approximately $37 million invested in Israeli shekel futures in 2022, and at one point it had almost $8 million invested in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, though it’s not clear if it still does. These make up relatively small percentages of an overall mammoth endowment. Yet many more companies invested in defense contractors and Israeli companies are tied to the endowment through more opaque intermediary funds, controlled by private equity and hedge funds — hence the demand that universities disclose their myriad investments.

Beyond endowments, universities have a significant financial stake in keeping donors happy. Donors to places like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania have publicly threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars and successfully pushed for the resignations of university leaders who didn’t crack down on protests with what they judged to be sufficient force. At other universities, the threats have come through private conversations.

University of Michigan faculty members explained to me that many people on the university’s board of regents, which holds direct power over the president’s job, are also the school’s biggest donors. The regents’ outsize power has led student activists to call them out by name and protest at their homes to demand divestment.

The University of Michigan, like other prestigious, ostensibly public universities, is mostly funded through — and therefore accountable to — private dollars. “Now we see the outcomes of having public institutions that are effectively not public,” said Roi Livne, a sociology professor at the university. He explained that even if a majority of the population in the U.S. “would say, ‘Divest,’ it will not happen, because these universities are financially dependent upon a few people who are calling the shots.” Ideological subjugation is the price that students and faculty pay for this country’s lack of thoroughgoing and equitable public funding for higher education.

Students Radicals in Front

Financial stakes are not the only reason student protests threaten the military-industrial-academic complex. The paternalistic statements from college presidents offer a window into what has driven their contempt for the encampments: the need to assert their power over the rights of students.

University leaders issued statements that read like they were cut and pasted from templates, with a few notable exceptions (the presidents at Wesleyan and Evergreen State recognized the moral commitment of their students). Most administration notices boiled down to three points: (1) We fully (“vigorously!” “proudly!”) support freedom of speech. (2) Alas, freedom of speech has limits. (3) Those limits are defined by the arbitrary set of rules and procedures we have drawn up (sometimes days or hours before the infractions occurred) to limit “disruptions” to university life.

The administration at Cornell, which had announced in spring 2023 that the academic year 2023–24 would be “the year of free expression,” introduced an interim “expressive activity policy.” The policy stipulated that protests with amplified sound could take place only outside one specific building from noon to 1:00. It also regulated the size of signs that can be carried and the length of candles at vigils, among other things.

Administrators create such rules out of a recognition that student protests have historically shaken the broader society. “We know the history of student activism,” Abdelhadi at the University of Chicago told me. “And we understand that student activists are leaders in terms of moving institutions like the university but also in moving the American public.” As the writer Osita Nwanevu put it in The Guardian, “The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America.” Young people were instrumental to ending the war in Vietnam, winning civil rights and desegregation, and isolating the South African apartheid regime. Many of the students I spoke to were quick to point out that their university administrations are happy to celebrate the student radicalism of the past while calling on police to beat the student radicals of the present.

The structure of academia itself helps galvanize student activism. Students are immersed in critical ideas and history, often juxtaposing what they’re learning with the moral outrages in front of them. At non-commuter campuses, they are in close proximity to their peers, creating organic spaces to organize. They are also transitory, with relatively more freedom and fewer responsibilities than they’ll have later in life. While faculty and other workers have to maintain relationships with colleagues and bosses to preserve their jobs, pay their rents or mortgages, or raise their children, the pressures on students to compromise are weaker.

With the bottomless pit of horrors streaming in from Gaza, all this adds up to militant and radical action. As Khamis from IU told me: “Most of us have virtually no fear. Because the reality is we know that whatever militarized police we’re experiencing, whatever level of brutality is nothing compared to what is happening in Gaza right now.”

Administrators are faced with a dilemma. They can try to regain control of the campus by nipping radicalization in the bud. But criminalizing and vilifying students often backfires, eliciting a deeper and wider response; student protesters’ ranks have grown with each act of repression. “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be,” has been a popular chant on Columbia’s campus since the administration suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in November.

At the same time support is growing among campus staff and faculty who’ve witnessed the police brutalize their students, inspiring new Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine chapters across the country. Faculty have acted as liaisons with police, joined negotiations with administrations, done research, and put together political education events. They have organized housing for evicted or suspended students, sat in to support students at disciplinary hearings, and even put their jobs and bodies on the line, with some standing between riot police and the students behind them.

Finally, repression breeds support in the wider society, as families, neighbors, and friends grapple with seeing young people punished while calling out the names of the dead in Gaza or asking their universities to disclose their investments. At CCNY, one graduate student told me that many undergraduates are young Arab Muslims who still live at home with their parents and go home at night to make their curfews. “We’re watching CCNY and CUNY backpedal and do crisis PR management,”the graduate student explained. They are “beating up kids and arresting kids and are knocking kids’ teeth out [because they] don’t want a genocide to continue. That’s a really, really bad look.”

University leaders have risked the bad optics because they are weighing them against the dangers of allowing students to score victories. Administrators and students both understand the historical precedents. Ariela Rosenzweig, a Brown University student who went on a hunger strike, told me, “In the case of South Africa, it was civil society pressure in the form of divestment, which ultimately is symbolic.” She added, “The heavy symbolic weight of a university like Brown declaring that we find this to be morally reprehensible is something that I legitimately believe could change the world.” In 1978, Michigan State University was the first school to divest from South Africa, helping to inspire other universities. By 1986, that number had grown to more than 100 universities, and private businesses felt the pressure to divest as well. Finally, the U.S. government begrudgingly enacted an anti-apartheid law that year that imposed sanctions on South Africa, isolating the apartheid regime.

Young people have the potential to threaten the United States’s imperial agenda in the Middle East, universities’ financial interests, and a social order that keeps elites in control.

Turning Up the Heat

In nine short months, students have helped to make divestment a mainstream discussion and have begun to force concessions from a small but significant number of university administrations. Students faced down doxxing, police violence, and suspensions, as they “stepped beyond the line that used to scare us,” as Samer Alatout, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said on a podcast. The war may well go past the fall semester, which students are preparing for. But they have much greater numbers, organizations, networks, knowledge, and resolve than they had a year ago.

The experience of the encampments has strengthened the political vision of those who participated. Abdelhadi called them “everything that the corporate university isn’t.” At the encampments I visited, I witnessed students and faculty milling about without the usual hierarchy. I observed people — whether enrolled in the university or from the community — huddled together under an awning in the rain for a teach-in on Hindu nationalism, learning for the sake of learning. I heard from students and faculty from a dozen schools about the collective experiences and solidarity that they forged, based on a common aim: ending the complicity of their universities in genocide. I saw art and flower gardens and children’s marches, and a political steadfastness that was rooted in moral clarity.

Abdelhadi said: “We got a glimpse of what things could be like. And I don’t think that goes away just because you raid the camp and put a bunch of tents and art into dumpsters. You can’t put our memories into dumpsters. We will remember the encampment. It’s only a matter of time before all of this catches up to them.”

Whether organizing creates more encampments or other forms of direct action remains to be seen. Quinn Perian, a student at MIT, told me, “Encampments were never the only thing” — they were “a sort of jumping-off point that energized a lot of people and helped spread our message. But that was just one step in lighting a lot of the fire behind [our organizing efforts].” The word that students across different campuses and organizations all returned to was “escalation.”

What that looks like will continue to be a source of debate. Which tactics help build pressure on administrations? Which build support among students? More building occupations are likely to follow, taking inspiration from Columbia students’ occupation of Hamilton Hall. Some students pointed me to a statement from the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, a radical organization formed in 2021, calling for a “revolutionary escalation” of the student intifada through actions to blockade government headquarters, embassies, the White House, and other off-campus buildings that finance the genocide in Gaza.

On the other end of the tactical spectrum, organizers at Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other schools also used campus-wide referendums to provide political education and to lower the bar of entry for students to make their voices heard without risk of repression for direct actions.

When the Brown Divest Coalition decided to take down their encampment on April 30 in exchange for the Brown Corporation committing to vote on divestment in October, some called it a significant win for the student movement. Others who saw the encampment as the students’ main point of leverage considered it a step backward. But as encampments throughout the country came down, whether at the hands of violent riot police or peaceful students as semesters wound down, it became clear that the question would be on what terms decampment would occur.

When I spoke to Rafi Ash, a member of Brown’s Jews for a Ceasefire Now, he argued that forcing a vote in October was an important victory, not only because the Brown administration had spent the year refusing to discuss it, but also because the concession created a concrete focal point for the next leg of the coalition’s campaign. “We won this vote. But having the vote is not enough. We need it to be a yes vote. So we have a very clear next four months of winning that vote,” Ash explained. 

Having a victory, however incomplete, is a step along the way because it brings more people into the fold. “People who thought the corporation’s never even going to vote on this are now looking at a corporation vote,” Ash continued. Winning concessions is “an act of building our movement and expanding the realm of possibility. Brown could be divested within the next four months. And I think that will inspire many people to join [the movement] and be invigorated.”

Staff, graduate, and faculty unions at universities around the country have been central in building solidarity with student encampments and protests, and the role of labor unions will continue to grow in importance. Most significantly, graduate students in the University of California system went on strike over unfair labor practices to protest the university’s brutal response to Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. More than a quarter of the UAW’s members work in academia, including 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, and other academic employees across the system’s 10 campuses. Tens of thousands of them went on strike at six campuses before a statewide injunction forced them back to work.

In some places, like the University of Michigan, the graduate student labor union has been a key part of the Palestine coalition and brought organizing experience from its 2023 strike campaign. Katya Shipyatsky, a founding member of JVP at the University of Michigan, said that the mix of graduate students with extensive organizing training and undergrads who have been organizing around Palestine in Southeast Michigan for years has created a strong coalition that was able to hit the ground running and mobilize consistently throughout the school year. Strategic and tactical questions will continue, as the promise of a cease-fire still remains outrageously distant. Once it does come, the movement will evolve. “A cease-fire isn’t an end to the genocide,” Quinn Perian at MIT said. “It’s just a break, really, in this round of violence.”