The targeting of pro-Palestine student activists on campuses reveals universities' complicity in broader state repression in a time of war
The president of the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers, Grant Miner, was expelled from Columbia University on Thursday.
His punishment is part of a systematic crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists that includes arrests, expulsions, detentions, "self-deportation", and degree revocations.
Miner's expulsion occurred days after Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist, and expectant father, was abducted by US immigration agents at his university-owned apartment in New York City on 8 March.
A permanent resident, he now faces deportation by the Department of Homeland Security, though a district judge in Manhattan federal court has temporarily blocked his forced removal.
Either way, the Trump administration is ignoring judicial orders, as seen in the case of Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University.
On Tuesday, Khalil issued his first public statement since his unlawful detention, drawing attention to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the "quiet injustices" that many incarcerated people face today.
As a former graduate student and academic worker at Columbia University, I am disgusted but not shocked by the university administration's refusal to protect its students while embracing cops on campus.
Well before the Trump administration, Columbia - an elite corporate university - had long demonstrated its failures in upholding student and worker rights, ethical investments, and academic integrity.
They include anti-Black gentrification; apologism for sexual violence; student evictions; union-busting; financial investments in genocide, fossil fuels, and prisons; the casualisation and degradation of academic labour; the trivialisation of the humanities; and the criminalisation of political activity.
All of this takes place amid a celebration of past protest traditions - including 1968 and its legacies - culminating in an anti-intellectualism that imagines itself as intellectual. (more...)
Columbia crackdown exposes universities as tools of imperial power
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