By Max Sárosi and Sophia Azeb
On May 1, 2024, hundreds of University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) students, workers, staff, and faculty gathered for a campus march in honor of May Day. By day’s end, the UCSC Gaza Solidarity Encampment had been realized, with some dozens of students committed to organizing, working, learning, communing, and sleeping in the camp for as long as it would require for their administration to respond to their demands to end the university’s active complicity in the Israeli genocide and ongoing occupation of Palestine. In the very early hours of May 31, the UCSC Gaza Solidarity Encampment was violently destroyed, and the campers and their community, staff, grad workers, and faculty allies were brutalized by some 500 police officers in riot gear called in by at least 17 different precincts in northern and central California.
Interview transcript edited for clarity.
Sophia Azeb (SA): Max, you were essential to organizing the People’s U and much of the programming from the very start. What was your vision for the People’s U? How did you imagine it within the framework of the encampment as a political collective? How did you approach realizing this vision?
Max Sárosi (MS): I was following a lot of the different encampments that established People’s Universities in the weeks leading up to the launch of our encampment on May Day and I was really fascinated by these formations, especially as someone whose interest in the power of education emerged from learning about the Third World Liberation Front and their struggle to create what is now Ethnic Studies. I found these People’s Universities to be a part of the legacy of the TWLF and the struggle of realizing an education that transcends institutionalized, domesticated, and metaphorical notions of freedom, and that was really inspiring.
I remember in that first planning meeting for our encampment, I asked if we could establish a People’s U, and everyone was like, “I don’t see why not!” This whole year prior to the encampment all of us and our respective organizations, have held countless teach-ins. In fact, in every action that we have held, education has always been a central piece because in our desire to create a new world, we know that we must understand how the people who came before us did that, dreamed that, and struggled for that.
But it’s a daunting project…it was difficult in the beginning to balance both our desire to learn about these kinds of transnational histories of solidarity and struggle with the need to learn the skills required to exist in the encampment.
For example, I remember, in the initial days, having to cancel a lot of teach-ins that were more scholarly to prioritize things like tear gas training, and this grounded me a little bit. I realized that we had to make sure we were learning how to be safe together and taking care of ourselves first. That we must figure out the food tent before we have a People’s U! You can take pretty rad classes at UC Santa Cruz, but the institution is not guaranteeing you housing, food, or safety. We at People’s U quickly realized that we were actually undertaking the development of an educational space that did what our multi-billion-dollar public institution does not and claims it cannot.
Our encampment really tried to foster the holistic living conditions that are required to learn, kind of like the impetus for the Black Panther’s free breakfast program: you can’t learn if you’re hungry, right?
SA: What struck us, as faculty and grad workers, was how committed you all were to the fact that you can’t do any kind of political organizing or education without care and food and a safe place to sleep. So, the skills-based workshops and more scholarly, sometimes theoretical, teach-in spaces are built symbiotically off one another. This is Black feminist practice!
So I’d ask
you now, as the camp’s needs evolved and it grew, simultaneous to the growing administrative repression against the encampment, how did the People’s U rise up to contend with this shifting landscape?
MS: As for the administrative repression, which involved a lot of private security and police surveillance, there was definitely a lull in People’s U attendance, maybe two weeks into the camp. The administration was escalating with campus-wide e-mails, disinformation, the fire marshal, and we had been passed printed sheets of potential crimes we had committed for being a part of the encampment. So fear definitely played a role in the lull in attendance, but ultimately, we ended up more committed to keeping it going.
Burnout was also a factor. There were a lot of People’s U teach-ins with more people from outside of the encampment in attendance than from our comrades in camp. That was wonderful but also difficult, because it would have been amazing for the people in the encampment to be able to attend these sessions that they had input on, but a lot of us had to prioritize attending the safety or food tent meetings, taking our senior seminars, napping, or eating!
It was also hard to learn, given the university hired 24/7 private security for the encampment, which at times came in undercover, and so we had to contend with the reality that there were always cops in our classrooms.
SA: You indicate a few things that university administrators have been really eager to obfuscate, which is people in these solidarity encampments weren’t out skipping their classes or sabotaging their labs or wreaking general havoc: they’re doing their homework, they’re taking their exams, they’re trying to keep centering the reason this camp is here in the first place, which is Palestine, and doing so by living up to UCSC’s unofficial motto, “The original authority on questioning authority”! And yet, when this group of students takes that seriously and practices the very intellectual and political imperative that the university markets itself with…
Something I did observe from leading a couple open classrooms and attending a lot of the People’s U programming was that folks took a lot of joy in getting to experience the intellectual breadth that they may not have had access to in their everyday university learning experience. So our students who invested so much time and energy and lost sleep to make the encampment work and create and sustain this community of care also enacted the People’s U as a space of joy and conviviality in the commitment to organize collectively for Palestine, for divestment, for Cops off Campus, for housing stability…
How do you see this kind of model of political education, commitment, and care that the People’s U established within an institution of higher education moving forward?
Because the encampment lives on despite the space having been stolen away. We saw this in the People’s University Commencement ceremony, where the bonds of struggle and putting to practice what you learned of new ways of knowing together were still so vibrant in a moment of celebration.
So what grounding do you see the People’s U having laid?
Image 4: A scene from the People’s Commencement, which was for graduating comrades from the encampment, some of whom were barred from their official commencements
MS: In terms of the university’s hypocrisy in how they market themselves, I’ll never forget that just days after bulldozing the encampment—quite literally bulldozing the People’s University—they painted “your voices will change the world” right on the barn wall that faced the People’s U classroom, the same wall our People’s U banner had hung just days before. It really rotted my brain. They had just sent 500 riot police to beat the students whose voices will change the world!
In terms of students getting education they normally would not have access to, I have to say that the people who were most impacted by the People’s U were students in STEM—or just any kind of set of classes where this genocide should have rightly been discussed—coming to me after a People’s U event and saying, “Oh my God, none of my classes talk about these things.” “I’ve been waiting for my professor to mention Palestine.”
Those were the students that really felt seen by the kind of education that was happening at People’s U because they were not getting that otherwise. I honestly think that People’s U made everyone want to double major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), which is awesome. I literally can name five comrades who are now adding CRES as a major because of People’s U, and previously not knowing that this was available to them in our neoliberal hellscape.
On a more personal note, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lasting impact of the encampment and People’s U. And I think for me, as someone who was in the encampment and contributing to the People’s U, while at the same time being condemned by my own parents for doing so, I’ve been thinking a lot about Christina Sharpe’s essay, “Lose Your Kin.” In it, Sharpe quotes Saidiya Hartman’s observation that “slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship” to describe how slavery really forced the restructuring of kinship relations and then ends with a call to dismantle these violent kinship relations as part of the project of dismantling whiteness. But most impactful for me are her closing remarks: “Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpses of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice.”
And I’ve been thinking a lot about how the encampment and People’s U were, among other things, a project of rending and remaking kinship relations. People’s U was founded on the conception that we must “refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality” and instead learn and struggle to end such brutality by any means necessary… to “remake the world.” And the kinship relations that were formed because of it were centered on the notion that we must not perpetuate kinship that relies on “feast[ing] on the corpse of others” but rather kinship relations that insist the names of the martyrs in Palestine that were a part of our everyday educational programming are the names of our kin. And we must fight with our kin so that we may all be free.
It wasn’t like we were one big happy family in the encampment. There was strife, there were different political factions, but there was also the underlying effort to build a collective rooted in the desire for a free Palestine and a free world. I mean, I just remember the hours and hours of meetings that were devoted to really figuring out and addressing our differences, our needs, our disagreements, and harms that occurred in our space.
And this was all happening while many of our families, parents, and people back home were lashing out at us for daring to participate in such a project. I spoke with many comrades, particularly our Jewish antizionist comrades, who felt completely isolated by folks back home ever since they decided to speak up about this current iteration of genocide. There was even an effort at one point to create a support group for comrades cast out by their families because of their participation in the encampment and advocacy for Palestinian liberation.
So it was clear that comrades in the encampment and in the People’s U classrooms were looking for kinship that did not cast out the children of Palestine as worthy of death but rather kinship that centered struggle, liberation, and the ability to not only grieve our kin in Palestine but also do whatever we can to fight the forces that perpetuate their unfreedom, which of course are the same forces that perpetuate unfreedom here and everywhere.
I also think it’s essential to think about what Christina Sharpe is saying regarding how slavery and these logics of property really do structure kinship, and then to think about how that is related to the fact that the lawfare the encampment—a space that sought to rend the kinship narrative—was subjected to is based on some of the laws that were conceived in slavery: loitering, trespassing, private property, etc. All these laws that were levied against us, all these rotten kinship relations we grow up with— that in the words of Sharpe, “structure the nation” —come out of this longer history of oppression and with them a longer history of struggle.
SA: We also see that through every nightmare hour of this genocide how, Palestinians in Gaza have not hesitated to take in and care for so many children and elders and others who have suddenly lost everyone they had to U.S. armaments wielded by the Israeli Occupation Forces. So we are also witnessing a truly capacious understanding of what it is to be kin, what it is to be in the world with others, in a manner that allows Palestinians to grieve but also to survive together. It sounds like that’s kind of what you’re pointing to as well.
MS: Absolutely. The other thing I want to say was that People’s University also made space for grief, specifically grief for our kin in Palestine. One of the most impactful moments for me was that as part of our first encampment Shabbat, we spent nearly three hours going through the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s incomplete list of martyrs from this current iteration of genocide. And I just remember sitting there and realizing that 10 minutes had gone by and we were still hearing the same family name.
And so, while the encampment and People’s U is this opportunity to remake kinship, it also is very much grounded in the fact that our Palestinian kin was and is being lost at every moment. No number of teach-ins and protests, and grieving rituals we held at People’s U stopped the slaughter. And yet, the amount of care and thoughtfulness that was brought into the encampment in response to this hellish reality shouldn’t be left out of any discussion of People’s U, it was central to it. Campesina Womb Justice came several times to hold healing and collective grief rituals…that was People’s U, too. And that’s why I have been thinking about People’s U and kinship relations, because this all was so much more than taking classes.
SA: Where do you think People’s U goes from here?
MS: People’s U will continue into next year and beyond because it was never just about having radical classes outside. It is something more than that, it demands we care for one another, it demands we grieve for one another, it demands we build new sets of relations with one another, and it demands we fight for one another.
It also demands we do more. In the words of Mohammed El-Kurd, from his piece Are we indeed all Palestinians?, “this consequential moment calls on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible.” So, what next?
AUTHOR BIO
Max Sárosi (he/him) is a UCSC undergraduate majoring in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Agroecology and an organizer with Jews Against White Supremacy UCSC, the People’s University for Gaza at UCSC, and UC Divest. Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black studies in UCSC’s Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, a founding member of the UCSC chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and sits on the steering committee of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine National Network. In this piece, we discuss the People’s U founding, evolution, and continued manifestation at UC Santa Cruz.