By Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
Universities, as we have argued in our collective writing on an abolitionist approach to the study of U.S. colleges and universities, are sites that enable circulation—of people, labor, capital, knowledge, and more. As the last twelve months have made evident, universities are also sites that block, interrupt, and suppress circulation as well. The circulation, for example, of capital in the form of student tuition is made possible by a system that takes for granted that the students’ labor of study is not work but rather consumption or investment. Universities facilitate the movement of capital into tuition, rent, meal plans, textbooks, policing, and health services, circulating it through students and the university into other spaces of accumulation. They do so by disciplining what and who does not circulate, at the same time. (What’s necessary to produce student work as nonwork—family wealth, debt, etc.?) Absent the categorization of student work as nonwork, the U.S. university system could not function as we know it. This is what we call the dialectic of circulation and noncirculation. In sheer numbers, the university’s most plentiful by-product is non-graduates, one iteration of what Mark Bousquet calls the university’s “waste products.”
In the fall semester 2024, we’re thinking about the contemporary U.S. university as a space of circulation predominantly organized in service of the overlapping interests of state and capital. By this, we mean that the university is composed of a series of circuits through which people, capital, and ideas move. Universities hold and hoard capital (tuition fees, donor contributions, endowments), investing it towards maximum returns rather than anything akin to their professed missions of enlightenment or the social good, knitting together financial management and vital university functions. The matriculation or return of students, faculty, and other workers to campus marks another moment of circulation. Or not. Not, that is, for students who have been suspended for protesting, or whose organizations have been banned on campus. Or for immunocompromised and COVID-cautious students at campuses where the masks they medically require have been banned by administrators who want to intimidate student protesters. Or for students in Gaza where Israel destroyed all of their campuses, and for students murdered by Israeli bombs or snipers.
The reproduction of capitalist relations happens through the disciplining of circulation: enabling forms of circulation that support capital at global, national, and local scales and limiting forms that would be corrosive to it. Universities are spaces where people, particularly students, accumulate in ways that promise them a degree of future autonomy and security in their lives. This cruelly optimistic promise of relative freedom is a necessary part of capitalism’s ideological reproduction: although students, especially those coming from working-class backgrounds, are often constrained by economic conditions and familial pressures that limit their choices of classes and majors, they imagine themselves as “freely choosing” a trajectory from a major to a career to a “good life.”
Yet, this desire for relative freedom also creates opportunities for students to circulate in ways that allow them to organize toward ends counter to capital and state interests. To limit such counter-capitalist circulations and enable their circulation for capitalist reproduction, their circulation needs to be disciplined. Such disciplining happens through interrelated movements of circulation and non-circulation. For example: Zionist donors send money to an organization, Accuracy in Media, who pay for trucks to drive around the perimeters of campuses with digital billboards that doxx protesting students. This circulation aims to intimidate students by threatening them with lost job opportunities, anxiously imagining the non-circulation of their future wages.
Still, the breadth and scale of the student uprisings throughout the 2023-2024 academic year and potentially into 2024-2025 demonstrate that other circuits exist, too, in the alternative economies of solidarity and mutual indebtedness students and their supporters cultivate. These relations of solidarity and care are built through organizing as forms of mutual obligations cut against capitalist debts. They involve the circulation and non-circulation of resources and the infrastructure of encampments, including food, water, tents, chalk, flashlights, knowledge, and charging pods. They also entail the circulation of bodies as protestors come together to form blockades and occupations that restrict the circulation of other people, workers, and students, disrupting the university’s normal flow.
Our focus here is on the US university. Given the focus in the encampments on centering Gaza, that focus may seem counterintuitive or even counterproductive. Still, there are already excellent Palestine syllabi, and we think providing historical context and a theoretical toolkit to process Spring 2024 and plan for the current year is useful at this juncture. We highlight a collection of texts, mostly though not exclusively published in the last year, that have helped us think through the university as a space and technology of circulation/noncirculation.
Bibliography
Campus as Proxy
Walter Johnson, “Living Inside a Psyop: Three Months at Harvard.” n+1 (20 January 2024).
“How did this proxy battle—the battle for the soul of Harvard—come to stand in for, and finally replace, the war as a topic of conversation and conflict on campus, and, indeed, nationwide?” There are many reasons to resist the tendency to view Harvard as representing U.S. universities en masse. Still, the tendency to view Harvard as both exceptional and exemplary means what happens there—and how it is represented—has an outsized and cascading impact on public discourse on universities. Harvard’s supporters and critics know this all too well. In the context of the student intifada, it quickly became the site of a Zionist proxy war against pro-Palestinian organizing on university campuses.
In this piece, Johnson follows the unfolding barrage of criticism (within Harvard and against it) that unfolded in the first months after October 7th, 2023. Directed first at the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and its affiliated groups, the upswell of venom involved both insiders (350 of Harvard’s faculty who signed a letter mischaracterizing student support) and outsiders (public figures, mainstream newspapers, and billionaire donors). Less than a week after October 7th, trucks with electronic billboards traveled the perimeter of Harvard’s campus, displaying the faces of pro-Palestine students and branding them as “America’s leading antisemites.” These organized forces did not stop with the public disciplining of radical students. They were quickly taken up by House Republicans, who aimed Harvard’s center-liberal President Claudine Gay, forcing her resignation after just six months on the job.
As Johnson demonstrates, the university as a site of circulation has continually rendered itself subject to the political will of an increasingly brash donor class. Unlike the firing of Palestinian Scholar Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois in the summer of 2014, many of Harvard’s high-profile donors did not organize through back channels. They waged an unabashedly public campaign. In doing so, they sought to enact fierce public retribution not only against avowedly pro-Palestine organizers but against leaders who gave anything less than full-throated support for Israel’s ultimately genocidal campaign. In doing so, he shows the anti-circulatory logic that undergirds universities that claim to represent a “free market” of ideas. As he puts it, “[t]his interlocked campaign of financial, political, and reputational attacks on dissidents…is seemingly designed to secure the inter-generational transfer of unquestioned support for Israel by producing object lessons illustrating the costs of speaking out.”
Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Does Not Exist: How campus war is made” Parapraxis. (2024)
The counter-insurgent effect of “campus panic” is what Walter Johnson (in “Living Inside a Psyop”) calls a “two-step maneuver”: 1) look over here at the protests in the US, 2) do not look over there at the war on Gaza. By treating the protests as themselves the crisis (such as by framing them as antisemitic), the campus panic foils the protest’s aim of directing attention to the war on Gaza. The contribution of Catlin’s essay is to analyze why this campus panic narrative circulates so powerfully and persistently. Catlin takes a psychoanalytic approach, offering a theory of the campus as a “fantasy and media trope,” with a panic about the campus produced through a “paranoid spiral” between media cameras and police cameras. Certain images, especially the quadrangle, align aesthetically with the campus fantasy, making it appear as a bounded zone, with an inside separated from an outside.
Yet, the real campus’s boundaries are permeable and thus must be policed, which is justified by worries about “outsiders” or “non-affiliates” who might harm the student. Perceived threats to students, especially threats of sexual assault (see Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security below), are the basis for a “paranoic security apparatus,” which is continually ratcheted up. The securitization of the campus depends on the security camera and the cruising police car, but this security apparatus is obscured and laundered by the campus’s aesthetics. The campus fantasy is about fear of the imagined risk of harm to students, who are figured as the Child (with the heterosexist ideology of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism”). This rhetoric signals that thought should stop and shift to action/reaction, calling the police. The Gaza solidarity protests threaten the dominant order because the students themselves—the Child—are the agents of protest. Thus, the campus panic demands a “non-affiliate” threat be produced from within the campus. University admins suspend or expel the student protesters themselves, thereby turning them into “non-affiliates” who are “trespassing” on campus. The students refuse to be cast as the Child, thereby disrupting the campus fantasy and helping us resist the pull of the campus panic.
Emmaia Gelman, “Astroturf Antisemitism Watchdogs” Jadaliya, (13 April 2024).
Right-wing megadonors circulate capital to US Zionist organizations who have adopted a new strategy for pushing their Zionist politics in a covert way that they claim is “not political.” Gelman analyzes how a network of “astroturf antisemitism watchdogs” coordinate “a diffuse, expanding set of organizations and individual complaints” to spread right-wing, pro-Zionist framings of antisemitism. These framings conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, thereby serving to repress pro-Palestinian organizers and to obscure alternative ways of understanding Jewishness and fighting antisemitism (see Safety Through Solidarity below.) Inspired by the Koch brothers’ multi-pronged astroturfing strategy, these organizations suppress critics of Israel through a combination of several types of work: “lawfare (like warfare, but using law as a weapon), student and parent organizing, institutional advising, and advertising.” The best way to resist this new Zionist strategy, Gelman asserts, is “by refusing to accept its terms, and instead looking behind the curtain.” Her article connects the dots between many of these organizations and details their interrelated functions, offering a powerful start for organizers to investigate and reveal how these astroturfing Zionist organizations influence their campuses. (See a Zine version of this article here.)
Security and Punishment
Daniel Spaulding, On Hating Students e-flux (28 May 2024)
Written amid this spring’s rash of counterinsurgent movement against pro-Palestine student encampments, Spaulding asks, “Why does everyone hate college students?” In doing so, he repeats a question posed almost a decade ago in a powerful piece by Sara Ahmed—this time in a context where student movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been rebranded as antisemitism. Hating students is facilitated all the more easily because it coincides conveniently with an infantilizing fantasy of keeping Jewish people safe from harm.
Spaulding’s explorations lead down a path that identifies sadism as a constitutive feature of anti-student discourse. Sadism is discipline toward students, but it is more than that. Discipline consists of the idea that it is always rightful to inflict the harshness of something called the “real world” on students who imagine living somewhere carelessly outside of it. But sadism combines discipline with a certain level of revanchist brutality. This sadistic zeal, as he puts it, expresses aggression based on another fantasy within capitalist social relations in which the student exists outside of the immediate sway of market forces. There is a potential here, Spaulding suggests. “Pro-Palestinian students,” that is, might well “ally their specific grievances with a more totalizing proletarian critique of the educational system’s function as an engine of class dominance.”
Andy Hines, “Discipline and Protest.” Protean (29 April 2024)
Here, Hines discusses campus administrators’ increasingly repressive tactics to discipline and punish student protestors. He contends that while the sense of precarity engendered by indebtedness previously conditioned students’ sense of the “kinds of risk they can afford to take,” the relatively recent shift to institutional promises of loan-free education has induced institutions to adopt new strategies of expulsion and suspension that “rely on the criminalization of students as trespassers.” Since campuses support student lives well beyond the classroom, suspensions and expulsions almost invariably deny students access to housing, food, and belongings. In this way, University discipline is a market discipline that does not speak of itself as such and relies on its capacity to foreclose the movement of students by rescinding their status as students if and when their presence or protests prove disruptive to the authorized forms of circulation through which the university functions.
Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2015).
The 2014 firing of Steven Salaita from a tenured position at the University of Illinois was, in many ways, a prelude to the Zionist counterinsurgency against pro-Palestine organizing in 2023-4. This series of short essays offers a series of interventions, both narrative and analytical, that situate his firing in the context of emerging Zionist efforts to intervene in academic life. Salaita’s firing coincided with the combination of (new and established) watchdog organizations, anti-BDS lawfare, organized surveillance and harassment of pro-Palestinian scholars, and an intensifying invocation of pro-Palestinian discourse as a form of harm against Jewish students, imagined and real.
Salaita was fired, most immediately, for his criticism of Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which, over the span of two months, killed over 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Salaita’s work attests powerfully to the organizational forms, residual and emergent, taken in Zionist endeavors to stem the production and circulation of critical ideas. However, ideas do not exist outside the movement of people. Thus, the termination of Salaita’s job demonstrates that what we are calling noncirculation takes material forms—hundreds of form letters directed at UIUC administration urging his firing, the university’s violation of its own acknowledgment of Salaita’s hiring, the use of social media posts as evidence sufficient to upend academic freedom, the implicit delegation of standard-making for academic hiring and firing to right-wing organizations, and more.
Jennifer Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security (New York: Semiotexte, 2015)
Doyle’s 2015 text draws her reader into what she terms the “campus’s soft underbelly,” illustrating in a series of vignettes how the actions of administrators, and particularly those that work to secure the campus by evicting “outsiders,” often reveal “the university’s experience of its own precarity” (11). She frames her polemic through her own experiences of harassment on campus, first by a student and then by the administrative process intended to remedy the harm she endured, and the events of November 18, 2011, when a UC Davis campus police officer brazenly deployed a military-grade canister of pepper spray into the faces of students seated on the ground protesting the rapid privatization of their institution. Doyle dwells on a post-incident statement the campus’s Chancellor, Linda Katehi, provided to Kroll Security, the external firm hired to investigate the officer’s actions. There, Katehi frames the concern that led her to send the police to the student gathering in the first place as the potential that non-affiliates from Oakland, which Doyle points out is code for Black people, could be present and thus pose a threat to the students, who Katehi describes as “very young girls” (16). Here, as Doyle argues, “the student body becomes both the ‘girl’’ at risk and “the ‘non-affiliate’ who threatens her” (118). In the process, the university campus comes to be “defined by its effort to identify and expel the outsider – by this war against itself” (112). Students, faculty, and other campus community members whose positions and protests are out of alignment with those of administrators and donors are effectively disaffiliated from the campus in moments of conflict and turned into outside agitators subject to removal and consequence.
Boycott
Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Like a strike, a boycott both reveals and disrupts the university’s normal dynamic of circulation and noncirculation. Riemer offers a guide for how to defend and amplify the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Riemer clearly lays out the three main rationales of the boycott: 1) weaken institutions–placing pressure on Israel by directly targeting Israeli universities; 2) debunk the ideology of Israel as a liberal, democratic nation; 3) express solidarity with Palestinians, who have called for BDS. The call for boycott is based on an understanding that the normal mode of academia depends on the circulation of pro-Israel, Zionist academics, students, knowledge, media, and cultural products, and interrelatedly through Israeli and Zionist institutions. It also actively obstructs the circulation of pro-Palestinian academics, students, knowledge, media, and cultural products. He also helpfully theorizes “smartwashing” and how objections to the boycott are based on a fetishizing of the circulation of ideas in a way that obscures the reality of the politically selective disciplining, suppression, and non-circulation of pro-Palestinian ideas and people. He writes: “The demand for intellectual depth, reflection or even critique in political debate does not always advance the struggle for a better world: not infrequently, it serves as the ‘opium of the educated,’ anesthetizing or impeding progressive political energies and ‘smartwashing’ inaction” (130).
Boycotts are not just disruptive but also generative. They reveal and disrupt the normal circulation/noncirculation dynamic through enacting alternative, counter forms of circulation/noncirculation in intellectual activity bound up with political organizing. There’s an alternative, counter kind of intellectual activity at play in BDS organizing, in “the concrete intellectual activity required to plan and execute BDS activities” (137). Counter to the “smartwashing” that gets caught up in thinking and talking as a delay tactic to forestall concrete actions, political organizing for BDS “illustrates a kind of collective, distributed thinking that, since it involves assembling and deploying political forces, is also simultaneously action” (148).
Radhika Sainath “The Right to Boycott” Boston Review (8 May 2019).
Published in May 2019, Sainath’s piece is framed around a message from a University of Texas, Austin administrator instructing faculty and staff that the institution would no longer provide reimbursements for stays at Airbnbs in compliance with a 2017 Texas law prohibiting state agencies from “contracting with companies that boycott Israel.” As Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, explains, laws such as this one were adopted by twenty-seven states beginning in 2014 in an attempt to counteract the growing strength of the Palestinian-led BDS, or Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, movement launched in 2005 as “a form of non-violent pressure on Israel.” Some of them unironically require states to produce lists of businesses that engage in BDS or that fail to affirm their refusal to do so for the state to deny them contracts or boycott them, a process that effectively disallows support for Palestinian rights. Indeed, as a district court judge in Texas wrote enjoining the law, “The only interest distinctly served by HB 89’s content- and viewpoint-based discrimination is displaying Texas’s special hostility to the BDS movement.”
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel (New York: Verso, 2024)
In this important text, Maya Wind charts the role of Israeli universities in the ongoing project of settler colonial dispossession and enclosure. Universities, Wind finds, are inexorably “intertwined,” not only ideologically but very much materially, with occupation, land theft, counterinsurgency, and apartheid. Israeli universities, for decades before the founding of the Zionist state in 1948, served and continue to serve today as a lynchpin of the colonial project. (The Technion and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem predate the founding of the state of Israel by more than thirty years, products of Herzl’s 19th-century unabashedly colonial vision more than the post-Shoah migrations of European Jewish refugees to Palestine.) These institutions, Wind finds, are crucial participants in massive violations of Palestinian rights. “From the start,” Wind explains, “Israeli academia has been entangled in this territorial project of a replacement central to Israeli state building.” At Israeli universities from the Technion to Ben-Gurion, “faculty and students developed and manufactured weapons, as their campuses, equipment, and expertise were put to the service of Zionist militias.” The campuses themselves were “constructed as strategic regional outposts that impelled both Palestinian enclosure and Jewish settlement expansion.”
Solidarity
Sophia Azeb, “Recognizing Genocide in Our Classroom” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal (2 November 2023)
In this teach-in-talk-turned-toolkit, Azeb offers a series of responses that both preempt and respond to common questions posed to pro-Palestinian scholars inside and outside of the classroom. The need for such a toolkit stems from the success of Zionist organizations, media, and political mobilizations in the circulation—and thereby, the proliferation—of a Zionist-imperialist common sense. In this regard, Azeb emphasizes that “oppressive regimes are always interconnected.” It is this playbook, she demonstrates, that aims simultaneously to delegitimize Palestinian resistance and to disappear the intertwined genocidal forces of the United States and Israel.
The questions from this playbook—Why single out Israel? Don’t Palestinians oppress queers, Black people, and women? Why don’t Palestinians struggle nonviolently?—are all discursive traps. All the same, to mobilize in solidarity with Palestinians is inevitably to confront the infrastructure and the sensibilities that enable their circulation. Azeb’s article offers powerful tools that respond to these questions by sweeping away, rhetorically, the colonized (and colonizing) premises that they rest upon.
Saree Makdisi, “For Whom Is Campus to Be Safe?” Los Angeles Review of Books (10 May 2024).
Makdisi, a professor of comparative literature at UCLA, offers an important account and analysis of the May 1, 2024, attack by a mob of Seinfeld-funded Zionist counterprotesters against the UCLA Gaza encampment and the “dereliction of duty” of UCLA chancellor Gene Block, whose missive to the university in the wake the violent attack on the encampment by a Zionist mob wrongly accused the encampment, rather than the violent counterprotestors, of creating a “state of anxiety and fear” on campus. Makdisi places the chancellor’s rhetoric in the context of the post-October 7th moral panic over “antisemitism on campus,” which, he reminds the reader, is coterminous with and has helped to authorize a wave of fierce repression against anti-genocide activists on and off campuses. For whom is campus to be “safe”?, Makdisi asks, “For students and faculty exercising their right to academic freedom including the freedom to protest? Or for those who require a militarized system of surveillance and policing to feel ‘comfortable’ in maintaining a status quo that has continued for far too long? …Do we want to see our campuses turned into desolate zones of state indoctrination patrolled by riot police—with curricula and policies dictated by donors and lobbyists—as more and more students are arrested, swelling the ranks of the more than two thousand already detained across the country?”
Research and Destroy Collective, ‘The Student Intifada,” Verso Books (21 June 2024).
Penned by a venerable anonymous collective that also produced important writing on the post-2008 wave of struggles in California, this text offers a useful account of the Spring 2024 uprisings. It concludes with an admonition against the absorption of the uprising into the legalizing machinery of the public employee collective bargaining regime. “The encampments,” they write, “bearers of the initial spirit under the slogan “Escalate for Gaza,’ will need to push the union to overspill the constraints of policy and of legalism. By the same token, the strikers must overcome boundaries imposed by the division of labor at the UC, particularly the divisions among students, academic workers, faculty, staff, and so-called outside agitators.”
Jasper Bernes, “The Double Barricade and The Glass Floor”. Des Nouvelles du Front (24 July 2010).
Bernes begins this piece with a look at the 2008 Greek insurrection, noting that “precarious workers were able to interrupt the economy and the business class at the level of ideology, at the level of their reproduction in the university, but the economy as site of value-production remained relatively untransformed.” He theorizes this as an example of “the glass floor” (drawing on Theorie Communiste): “namely, the limit-condition of the current cycle of struggles, in which the sites of social reproduction separate out, as target and object of attack, from production proper, and in which those peripheral to the working class proper confront capital as circulation or reproduction, as storefront and trade-union office, prison and university, as riot cop and shopping mall, but not at the point of encounter between capital and labor in the workplace.” This is not due to “bad strategy or weakening resolve,” but instead a radical reordering of production and of the technical composition of the working class, particularly from the rise of the circulation sector. Production is thus rendered “inaccessible – covered by a glass floor.” Under these conditions, the student riot emerges as the “eruption of proletarian consciousness into the only possible site of contention left for it.”
The post-2008 wave of occupations at the University of California and elsewhere mobilizes the building occupation—with its refusal of the capitalist territorialization of campus—to exemplify a dialectic “between reproduction and production itself: the dialectic of destruction and communication, exit and attack.” The students are “ideally placed to open up the moment of rupture, but they are poorly-positioned to provide … the means of self-reproduction which would allow more people to turn their back on the workplace and ward off a repressive state response.” Thus, he concludes that “future resistance to capital might appear more and more as a series of flanking maneuvers on an imaginary plane – a plane that is less geographical than relational,” which might bring struggle into “those areas of the capital that can be taken and decapitalized: housing, for instance, or certain areas of food production.” For Bernes, finally “the dialectic of inside and outside is best thought of not in terms of space but as temporality, a sequence of rupture and reconstitution, rupture and reassembly, not just or not only within the university but between the sites of social reproduction and the sites of production.”
Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser, “Circulation and the New University,” Reclamations Journal, 2012. (Archived at Libgen.org)
In this article adapted from a talk given at the 2012 Toronto Edu-factory conference “The University is Ours,” Whitener and Nemser argue that the university is “no longer primarily a site of production” but has instead become “primarily a site of capital investment and accumulation.” Taking as paradigmatic the “Michigan model,” Whitener and Nemser see a university whose “primary purpose is no longer education but circulation” of “both productive capital and money capital.” They find two primary mechanisms driving this transformation. The first such mechanism is the “cycle of wealth transfer that moves federal dollars” into university research and student loans. The second is the transformation of universities into “privileged sites of capital investment for banks, hedge funds, and institutional investors.” All of the components of this “university of circulation” are, Whitener and Nemser argue, “mutually dependent.”
attracting R&D depends on having the best labs, which in turn depends on the ability to engage in new construction, which in turn depends on the credit rating, which in turn depends on the endowment and tuition hikes, which in turn depend on there being sufficient credit in credit markets for students to withdraw, which depends on having fancy, new buildings to attract rich out-of-state students paying marked up tuition.
Whitener and Nemser find that this cycle cannot sustain itself and identify a series of chokepoints that those struggling against the university of circulation must exploit. They advocate for a strategy that deploys two tactics: “First, make material the immaterial circuits of capital flow; and second, attack the weak links, the chokepoints in the system of circulation.” They identify student loan offices as “critical points for blockage” and, finally, removing the administrative class and its “replacement with a system of student-worker control.”
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
What relationship can radicals have to the university? For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the only possible answer to this question in which radicals maintain an orientation to the institution, to each other, and to the world that is not thoroughly captured and recuperated is a “criminal” one. The inhabitants of the Undercommons, the refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways of university labor, perform clandestine labor, which “steals” the university’s resources to work against its purposes. An assemblage of “Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers,” “always at war” with the universities logic’s of professionalization and “conquest denial,” the Undercommons is thus also the “prophetic organization” that “works for the red and black abolition.” By this, Moten and Harney mean the “abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” This is a social formation enabled by mutual indebtedness, forged with an awareness that, as they write, “credit is a means of privatisation and debt a means of socialisation” (61).
Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
In We Demand, Roderick Ferguson offers a semi-epistolary set of lessons for the current generation of student radicals gleaned from the study of the movements of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, as well as of the state-capital reaction to those movements. (Here, he is especially interested in the infamous “Powell Memo” authored by then-future US Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell for the US Chamber of Commerce). In a concise and readable text, Ferguson presents a useful and usable history of student movements, which is unapologetically presentist in its orientation toward contemporary struggles.
Community Justice Exchange (in collaboration with Dean Spade, Zohra Ahmed, and Jocelyn Simonson), “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression” (10 June 2024).
As the collective of movement-based organizers who authored it write, this short pamphlet functions as an invitation rather than a set of instructions. It is addressed to “anyone commenting or reporting on political repression” during this period of “heightened mobilization.” Its goal is to provoke new ways of thinking about and actively cultivating solidarity as “law enforcement systems ratchet up repression and deploy legal categories to undermine our movements by singingly out particular groups and tactics for criminalization.” Inspired by #StopCopCIty and protests of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the authors review five traps frequently employed to “erode solidarity” and specific strategies to evade them – their concern is to intervene in the discursive field. The text provides specific examples of such traps, such as knee-jerk invocations of the First Amendment or academic freedom that bolster the myth that such rights are equally available to all and efforts to divide movements by marking some protestors and protest tactics as “good” and others as “bad.” The key strategy in response to all such tactics remains the same: “return the focus to what organizers are fighting for and resisting.”
Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (New York: Penguin, 2024).
The circulation and non-circulation of competing narratives about “fighting antisemitism” is a key battleground in universities’ political terrain. Burley and Lorber’s Safety Through Solidarity cuts through the dominance of this terrain by Zionist propaganda—spread through organizations like Hillel International as the basis of the campus panic around antisemitism—to help us clarify the political stakes and offer us a guide for how to intervene. A key contribution of Burley and Lorber’s book is to theorize how antisemitism is itself a political project, one that “reinforces structural inequalities in our white, Christian hegemonic society and protects the most powerful” (8). This goes against Zionist narratives of antisemitism that often naturalize and depoliticize it by treating it as “an ‘eternal hatred’ plaguing humanity since time immemorial,” which allows Zionist groups to thrive “through a politics of perpetual fear” (7-8). Instead, Burley and Lorber offer historicizing accounts of the political project of antisemitism as well as the political projects that have defined it and claimed to fight it in different ways. In their history of antisemitism, they “examine its roots in European Christianity, and the ways that Christian demonization of Jews evolved, in the modern era, into conspiracy theories that imagined a hidden, all-powerful cabal behind capitalism and communism” (9).
Burley and Lorber distinguish multiple different political projects that have claimed to combat antisemitism. For Jewish people facing the question of how to create safety for themselves in a world of nation-states in which they were marginalized, two opposed political projects emerged. On the one hand, Zionism sought Jewish safety through creating a new Jewish nation-state, with the idea “that Jews required an almost imperial quality to restore their dignity, to become a new nation, modeled off European masculinist ideals, where power and military strength determine our fate” (217). On the other hand, many Jewish leftists “condemned the defeatism and escapism” of the Zionist approach, as the Zionists used fascism’s increase of antisemitism as means for promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine instead of fighting fascism (219). In opposition to the Zionists and the fascists, Jewish Leftists, such as in the Jewish Labor Bund argued that “we’d rather stay in the diaspora, and fight for our liberation,” as expressed in the principle of doikayt or “here-ness” (221). Today’s anti-Zionist Jewish movements of “safety through solidarity” continue this emancipatory tradition, such as through campus chapters of Judaism On Our Own Terms.
AUTHOR BIOS
Abigail Boggs teaches sociology, education studies, and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University. She is (finally) completing a genealogy of the U.S. university told through the figure and figuration of the nonwhite, noncitizen student.
Eli Meyerhoff is a visiting scholar and program coordinator at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research and organizing focus on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He wrote a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minnesota 2019). He is also a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
Nick Mitchell (she/her) is principally engaged with the status of higher education in the U.S. as a problem for historical and theoretical inquiry. As a writer, Mitchell aims to make better sense of university life-worlds by developing scales, vocabularies, and categories to reframe and rethink its rhythms and textures. These research and writing efforts can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: “Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies and the Birth of Neoliberalism” and “The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.”
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein teaches classes on labor history and universities for Bard Prison Initiative. He is working on a book about the history of labor struggles by university food service workers and maintenance and custodial workers.