Universities are serving as staging grounds for the Trump regime’s attacks on immigrants, people of color, trans and queer people, and critics of Zionism. Universities and campus communities must refuse to cooperate with this fascist agenda.
Universities are serving as staging grounds for the Trump regime’s escalation of attacks on immigrants, people of color, trans and queer people, and critics of Zionism, ranging from armed attacks including the ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to institutional attacks that withdraw, cancel, and criminalize funding and infrastructure. The demand from the Department of Education to place into receivership Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies is another escalation of these attacks. These are accompanied by the vast widening of ICE arrests and detentions.Without organized resistance and refusal to comply, history shows us that these assaults will undoubtedly expand in reach, in violence, and in the destruction of scholarly communities.
The Trump regime’s attacks on universities have been fueled by baseless smears against students, faculty, and staff propagated by Zionist groups who agitate specifically on college campuses. These include vigilante groups who have issued mass calls to their followers to report student protesters to ICE, claimed credit for inciting the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and produced names of further students and scholars to be criminalized and targeted. Their perverse and dangerous rationale for identifying scholars and students as threats is rooted in the disingenuous conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As evident with the arrest of Leqaa Kordia and visa revocation of Ranjani Srinivasan, students and faculty continue to be targeted in vastly concerning and escalating ways, for their (presumed) association with community-based and political organizing groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and local student and community organizations.
These efforts to criminalize political participation and critiques of racism, militarism, colonialism, and state violence – and additionally, to do so through incendiary rumor and smear – are familiar to scholars of history as the bare-knuckled tools of fascism. Many higher education institutions have made themselves vulnerable to these tactics over the past several years by adopting their terms: the weaponized redefinition of political speech and study as “discrimination,” “hate,” “antisemitism,” “violence,” or “terror.”
We call on universities and academic communities to refuse these terms. While the costs of retribution and loss of funding may be great, the costs of abandoning our vulnerable community members and one another is greater. We call on universities and campus communities to refuse cooperation with the policy demands of the Trump regime and its supporting institutions, and mount the most vigorous possible defense of students, faculty, and staff against these assaults.
Students and faculty – and in particular, the most precarious members of our academic communities – are not safe coming on to campuses right now. University leaders have failed dismally to affirm that they will protect their community members, and in many cases are actively inviting and cooperating with forces intending to harm us. As a result, we support any calls for faculty and graduate instructors to withdraw labor from their campuses unless demands for academic freedom, freedom of speech, employment rights, and the removal of police and ICE from campuses are met. We have been horrified to watch university leaders act with cowardice and preemptively capitulate to state and vigilante threats and attacks. We must safeguard our students and colleagues when our university leaders fail to do so. (more...)
Call to resist repression: Universities must refuse cooperation with the Trump regime
