Students are often the first to remind the rest of the university that classrooms and campuses are not rehearsal spaces protected from a “real world” but are the very site at which to world-build against capitalism and coloniality. The current student intifada activates the horizon set by radical student activists in the 1960s as women, people of color, working-class people, and veterans were admitted into universities in mass numbers for the first time. They formed global anti-colonial Third World student coalitions against white supremacy, empire, and war, including pan-Arab student organizations concerned with decolonial politics of the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. As student protestors argued, if educational institutions claim to mediate state and civil society, then the university must address the material and epistemological disparities between minoritized educational needs and the distribution of educational resources. The students were arguing that universities are institutions of social good; as such, those community members historically withheld from university resources should be prioritized for redistribution to abolish the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
The student-led movements of the 1960s yielded the knowledges that empower the current student intifada, but unlike the earlier radical student movements against white supremacist distributions, this one struggles against the hegemonic power of global capitalism. In this stage of capitalism, state, capital, and institutional power express bureaucratically through the neoliberal language of diversity, multiculturalism, equity, safety, and inclusion. As Jodi Melamed and Roderick Ferguson have argued, difference is no longer excluded by the institution but included and incorporated. Reformist languages of DEI and representation absorbed abstracted discourses of difference and launched what Olúfémi O. Táíwò terms elite capture: the weaponization of the language of identity politics according to elite interests in preserving resource concentration. The reformist approach depended on and sustained the global ecology of capital that shifted away from political governance and towards privatized distributions and operations of the state. At the neoliberal university, DEI functions not for people’s liberation but to save the state, Rinaldo Walcott stresses.
Today’s student intifada seems to have abandoned the DEI project as efforts for a free Palestine (even the meager demand for a call for ceasefire) have laid bare education as both ideological and repressive state apparatus. The US presidential order issued January 2025 to terminate DEI efforts might explain why students have resigned from the institutionalized language of justice-based work DEI claimed to provide for higher education. But in my experience teaching at a university in Canada, I witnessed how student movements restrategized five years ago during the international George Floyd uprisings of 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Ignited by the mass murders of Black people by the settler colonial state and the movement for Black lives, students at the university where I work argued in their 2020 anti-racist petition that the university’s insistence on “student safety” effectively censored their critiques. Their analysis—that the language of safety protects not the most vulnerable members of the community but rather the well-resourced—foretold the strategy universities would employ in the age of livestreamed genocide. Educational institutions have never been places where we feel safe, Sumayya Kassamali asserts, as she questions vapid administrative claims to false balance in the name of a diversity that values all lives.
On the flip side, education that examines state power is repressed in the name of safety, or rather security, as I will outline later. Much of last year’s 180+ student encampments were labeled as a threat to safety for exposing how war profits and the mass killing of Palestinians were entangled with institutions funded at least in part by taxpayers and student tuition. Though Stanford University students organized the first encampment on October 20, 2023, which lasted over one hundred days, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University established April 17, 2024 set afire solidarity encampments at campuses around the world. Furthermore, countless numbers of students on social media, in petitions, et cetera decoded how university investments and endowments work and called out universities for demoting education to a side hustle.
The documentary The Encampments (2025), directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker and co-produced by Macklemore, tracks the rise of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment as escalation strategy developed by Columbia University student groups, who had for months demanded academic boycott and divestment from weapons and war profiteering. In response, the university suspended lead student organizations and organizers acting against genocide, restricted public expressions of dissent on campus, and surrendered to counter-protest pressures from US Congress, NYPD, and politicians and their billionaire friends, as well as pro-Israel donors and other community affiliates. The film narrates how the trustees, as the governing board and the owner of Columbia University, and billionaires working in concert with New York mayor Eric Adams, pressured university administration to send the brutal police raids that beat, maced, and arrested students at the encampment. Genocide Gentry, an anti-genocide data collection and research project, exposes the placement of CEOs and board members of Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Elbit, and General Dynamics at the boards of cultural and education institutions. Genocide Gentry argues that, as “modern-day gentry” and “members of the ruling class,” these members of the business elite hold special interest in the governance of cultural and educational institutions as influential power over local community policies and priorities.
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment’s demands for the disclosure of and divestment from wealth building and hoarding practices endorsed by the trustees put the protected concentrated wealth of the members of the genocide gentry at stake. “[Genocide] is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” as US Air Force airman Aaron Bushnell said in his final words before his self-immolation. According to this popular and populist analysis, students rose against a ruling class who responded with state-backed brutality for the protection of private property. Vancouver Island University and University of Toronto (among others) leveraged private property law to dismantle student encampments and label students as trespassers. Vancouver Island University took their own students to the British Columbia Supreme Court for damages, nuisance, and trespassing the campus as private property. University of Toronto sent a trespass notice to students, which, Katherine Bluin and Girish Daswani argue, designates the university as property owner and landlord.
In this stage of capitalism, the university is active participant in what Julietta Singh and Nathan Snaza call a “global climate of coloniality,” where extraction, expropriation, and accumulation shape the physical and affective landscapes of higher education. Maya Wind’s extensive investigation of Israeli universities exposes the crucial role they play in legitimizing Israeli extraction, expropriation, and accumulation. According to Wind’s thorough study, Israeli universities are built illegally on stolen territories and occupy the lands by apartheid societal organization and governance and by the reproduction of anti-Palestinian, anti-Indigenous, and Zionist ideologies of state security postured as research and teaching that repress and erase Palestinian life and knowledge. Israeli universities demonstrate the logic of native elimination that structures what Sandy Grande calls “the settler academy.”
The student intifada bared not only the prioritization of profit in higher education, but that the processes of the securitized anti-state state, from Turtle Island to occupied Palestine, expose that “the university is a colony.” Then we must see the administrative crackdowns on the encampments in the name of safety as a security mission of the settler state. University administrators operated as an arm of the state, as an “army,” Esmat Elhalaby and Maya Wind point out: “an army of administrators, from anonymous human resources personnel to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agents, manage the demands of faculty and students at the behest of a rotating ensemble of dens and provosts and vice-deans and vice-provosts.”
Reframing the student arrests, beatings, surveillance, suspensions, degree revocations, ICE detentions, and deportation orders as a security mission demands rethinking on the student intifada beyond solidarity practice. After all, encampment and camp are terms that originate from “campus.” Liron Mor contextualizes student actions for Palestine within the etymology of the Roman campus, where the camp functioned as an exceptional space marked outside of city limits (the official political space) for public political activities. From the Roman campus Mor traces two distinct spaces—the university campus and the refugee camp—to highlight the latent political energy of the camp. This energy may be exactly why the modern university campus, built at the edges or outside of the city, has historically contained and isolated students. The campus displaces, confines, and disciplines political energy. The encampments of the student intifada, then, must be understood as deterritorialization and reterritorialization: “Against the depoliticized view of the campus as a neutral ground, seemingly empty of power relations or ideology, encampments expose and perform the fact that any occupation of space is in effect a re-occupation, that no territorial occupation is originary, neutral, and apolitical.” Nasser Abourahme argues that the Zionist state project produced both colony and refugee camp at once. Whereas settler colonial projects of the Americas and Australia narrate state legitimacy within a temporality of conquest and colonization that “ends” with Indigenous dispossession, the Israeli settler colonial project is constituted by the inability to meet that end because of Indigenous dispossession, taking the form of the camp, was not produced “after” conquest. Therefore, Abourahme emphasizes, the camp manifests incomplete conquest, that is, the potential for the undoing of settler space and time, of unsettling. Like the campus, the camp holds the power to destabilize and politicize that which the state deems security risk. Like the camp, the latent counter-insurgent power on campus threatens security.
Thinking the camp and the campus together reframes gratuitous state violence across the incommensurate yet related sites as counter-insurgent violence. Scholasticide is the state’s response to the perceived security risks. Originally, Karma Nabulsi’s definition of scholasticide named the form of state-sponsored slow violence that has destroyed Palestinian education since the Nakba of 1948. Scholasticide describes a form of slow violence and type of war crime that enforces organized forgetting and historical amnesia; scholasticide normalizes genocide by the suppression and punishment dissent against genocide. No longer “slow,” the latest genocidal advance by Israel has accelerated scholasticide: all major universities in Gaza (twenty higher education institutions) have been bombed, Palestinian academics have been targeted and assassinated, imprisoned, disabled, and displaced. César Domínguez details this tactic as “academic lawfare” that strips Gaza’s population of civilian status and legitimizes the population as military targets. In the open letter published May 29, 2025, academics and university administrators in Gaza call for colleagues around the world “to help us resist the Israeli campaign of scholasticide.” The letter testifies to the military destruction of educational infrastructures and institutions of knowledge production and sharing as a deliberate and “blatant attempt to render Gaza uninhabitable and erode the intellectual and cultural fabric of our society.” The current scholasticide, as a component of cultural genocide, is framed as “deliberate continuous Nakba” that has destroyed the civic infrastructure “built by generations of our people.” Scholars Against War on Palestine have clarified the intensity and scales of scholasticide to include mass killing, assassination, injury, arrest, incarceration, harassment, intimidation of teachers, students, staff, and administrators; invasion, destruction, and looting of teaching and research structures, resources, equipment, materials, and supplies, and the use of them for warfare; disrupting or blocking Palestinian students and academics from entry to institutions and opportunities in occupied Palestine, Israel, and abroad. Education about Palestine confronts such warfare. As Sundos Hammad of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University explains, “when I see people there building schools and universities out of tents even while they are facing extermination, their resilience reminds me that education is a way to affirm your existence in this ugly world, where Palestinians are often treated like their lives are worth nothing. As Palestinians, we have long believed that education is our way out of occupation….If we are not aware of what is happening, then it will be easy for the Israeli occupation to expand and for Palestinians not to exist anymore. For 76 years Israeli settler colonialism has tried to weaken our collective identity through fragmentation and dispossession, but we strengthen it through education. By knowing our history, we can connect with any Palestinian anywhere.”
“Anywhere” has become the target. According to Henry Giroux, now scholasticide takes shape in two main ways: through structural including physical violence of educational institutions in Gaza and through the ideological suppression of free speech and academic freedom. As Giroux argues, these two forms of scholasticide are not isolated but “reinforce each other, serving a larger project of imposing a repressive state in Israel.” In fact, the ideological precedes the structural; scholasticide begins at the level of information, history, and dissent and “escalates to obliterating civic infrastructures like schools and museums.”
The administrative crackdowns outside of Palestine are extensions of the original scholasticide in Palestine. This claim that scholasticide crushes dissent and education not just in Palestine and Israel exposes that the subjects of Israeli repression are proliferating. The spaces that hold the kind of knowledge that inspires dissent and the sites at which processes of knowledge activation against state power take place—universities, hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, cultural centers—have been targeted by the state as grounds of counterinsurgency. Dylan Rodriguez stresses that the university has become an extra-military and extra-state arena of “asymmetric warfare,” which refers to the warmaking methods extraneous to military combat and capacity that have become “an accepted, normalized facet of state operations and curricula, especially when attempting to neutralize forms of autonomous grassroots movement and revolt that directly challenge the form and legitimacy of state power.”
We are in a moment where 1) the state is identifying Palestinian educators as enemies of the state and education about Palestine as security risk; and 2) the university is operating as an arm of the settler state. The struggle for Palestine is baring the reform of the university as stage agent. It’s time for us, as educators, to restrategize how to do our work in this urgent moment.
Cover image: Rehab Nazzal, Al Zahra Girls High School in Jenin in the West Bank, February 2025.
