Student protests are exposing our whole system

They threaten the power structure — that's why they're under attack

I never thought I’d see anyone say “Students at U.S. colleges are Hamas.” But here we are. The responses to students protesting genocide and calling for their schools to divest from the war machine have fallen into two main camps. One is glad to see these students uphold the long, proud tradition of protest on college campuses, and glad to see kids work towards peace in Gaza. This camp sees the wave of Palestine solidarity encampments as a righteous and needed push, both in a society where universities invest millions in the arms industry and an apartheid regime and more broadly as a wake-up call in a country that is the single entity most responsible for shielding and enabling Israel’s genocide. On the other side people are not only condemning students for speaking up, they’re saying stuff like this:

Bill is a billionaire who has relentlessly attacked school administrators for refusing to punish students opposed to genocide and Zionism since October. He has endlessly conflated Judaism and Zionism, and helped stir up a deceptive crusade against the president of Harvard and others. Now, he’s equating American students with Hamas.

Of course, not everyone condemning the student protests against Israel’s genocide is going quite that far. Some are making less malicious but still ill-informed critiques like “they’re just doing it to be cool” or the timeless “these kids don’t know what they’re talking about.” All of these takes are wrong, and as a rule of thumb people who deflect away from Israel’s atrocities, and instead try to make the conversation about the student protesters, understand that they cannot in fact defend Israel’s actions. Meanwhile, the students at these encampments have made their case immensely clear. They are demanding that their schools divest from genocide, apartheid, and war. Ignoring that means talking disingenuously about this moment.

Unfortunately, everyone from powerful politicians to university presidents is feeding into dishonest narratives about these campus protests. Some statements are framing a handful of antisemitic comments made by people outside these colleges as representative of students, others are still equating slogans for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism, and some are simply not pretending to care about the substance of the protests at all. House Speaker Mike Johnson and numerous other Republicans, as well as some Democrats, are saying the National Guard should be sent in for students protesting genocide. And numerous university presidents have been all too willing to initiate violent repression. Notably, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik called the NYPD onto the Ivy League campus simply because students were camping on the green. The police arrested 108 people, and multiple students at Barnard and Columbia have been suspended and banned from campus. In the wake of her rash decision, a hundred other Gaza solidarity encampments have popped up around the country and the world, and cops have been called on many of them by other college administrators. Students and faculty have been arrested, tased, and generally brutalized. At Indiana University and Ohio State, police snipers have even been sighted at the protests.

The natural question is, of course, why are university administrations calling snipers to overlook campus protests and calling cops to brutally attack their students? At one school after another, administrators have followed in the footsteps of Columbia University and brought in police who invariably arrest students and even faculty, tear down Gaza solidarity encampments, and assault people. The primary exceptions have been when students and professors and other community members bravely stand together, lock arms, and resist. In those cases the cops have sometimes been driven away from protests, and it’s important to see how people are resisting repression. But it’s also important to note that college campuses should never have been turned into battlegrounds in the first place. Student protest is a veritable institution in this country, discussed as a vital strategy in helping end the Vietnam War, a significant part of the Civil Rights movement, and a lauded element in the history of the very schools now hurting their own students and engaging in intense repression.

Like so much of American history, a lot of people claim to see the past clearly, but can’t see what’s immediately before them right here and now. The stakes of supporting protesters when we discuss history are much lower than the stakes of supporting them with real action in the present. But why do university administrators not only fail to see the importance of standing with their students and siding with the movement for liberation, but actively want to oppose it? The answer lies with the nature of the neoliberal university.

The demands students are making right now expose the modern university’s ties to the military-industrial complex, the structure whereby these institutions are controlled by the wealthy and powerful, and the fact that students are increasingly secondary at these establishments. As Sarah King, member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, told Democracy Now, the student demands are divestment, amnesty, and financial transparency. Now, that seems like it should be pretty easy. Take your money out of death-dealing and apartheid, stop attacking your own students, and be open about where the money goes. The fact that schools are refusing to do this is immensely revealing. Continuing to invest in war and Israel, going after students, and hiding the money takes priority over these reasonable demands.

That’s the way these universities are set up. The private ones are controlled by the rich, and the public ones are controlled by political appointees. Obviously many good things happen at colleges across the country, from learning to research to fantastic community events. But the overarching power structure means the ruling class controls the institutions in the form of board members and billionaire donors. That reality is always present. For example, Columbia is the largest private landlord in NYC. But this moment brings that often obscured reality hurtling to the forefront.

Yet colleges and universities are, in many ways, just reflective of society at large. The ruling class prefers investing in war to investing in healthcare, housing, or the people of this country at large. And that is largely why we’re in this moment. The U.S. government and the interests it represents would rather spend a trillion dollars on war every single year than invest that money in the people of this country. The military-industrial complex serves both to siphon money from taxpayers to the super-rich and works to maintain the U.S. imperial, capitalist world order. On January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell speech in which he said: 

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

And he was right. We have let the military-industrial complex develop into a massive and disproportionately powerful force. America’s top 5 weapons contractors made $196 billion in 2022, just to give you a sense of the scale of the problem. These rich and powerful people will go to great lengths to protect their investments and their wealth, including, but not limited to, refusing to stop backing a genocide. And many universities both invest in these companies and have relationships with them. The image below is from Northeastern University:

This is why college students doing something as simple as camping is exposing the whole system we live under. The same class of people who control most universities in this country have a whole lot of control over our government. The ruling class has created a system where the vast majority of powerful institutions are under their sway, from colleges to arms dealers to the police forces that violently maintain this violent status quo. While some people peddle conspiracy theories, the simple and openly available truth is that .001% of the population has hoarded unfathomable wealth, and with that comes unfathomable power. Because their greed and lust for power knows no end, they have extended their control and influence into all areas of society, with no intentions of stopping and no concept of enough. What that means, among other things, is that threatening one segment of their realm threatens the whole thing. College students demanding that universities divest from the war machine threatens to expose their whole scheme. It threatens to show the world that the greed of the ruling class has turned schools into hedge funds and society itself into a profit-extracting juggernaut that will participate in genocide rather than alter the flow of money and power.

Make no mistake, the U.S. refusal to stop participating in Israel’s genocide is about maintaining the imperialist system, much like the insistence on quashing student anti-genocide protests is an effort to not have that system exposed and threatened before the world. But in attacking campus solidarity encampments, the system indicts itself. The whole system premised on placing power and profits over life itself is indicted at this very moment. It is a sign of great weakness and fear from the ruling class that they cannot tolerate college students calling out their complicity in genocide. As we speak encampments are moving beyond college campuses, as we see in New Orleans, Scotland, and beyond. People are pulling hard on the threads that tie this system together. They’re seeing how the tapestry of this society is filled with through-lines of violence and corruption that must be uprooted. They are seizing this moment and seeing that not only must we demand a ceasefire, but we must also demand an end to imperialism and capitalism, and this whole power structure that would rather crush our youth than oppose a genocide. So all solidarity to college protesters, all solidarity to everyone standing with Gaza. You are exposing the system for what it really is, and helping us all get closer to freedom. Don’t stop now, every day we struggle brings us one day closer to real liberation, one day closer to a Free Palestine, and one day closer to a better world.

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