Universities in service of imperialism

 

The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has activated and brought together people around the world in a solidarity movement that stretches back decades, but has gained new momentum since October of 2023. 

Palestinians have long made it clear that the obstacle to their liberation is not just Israeli settler colonialism, but the broader network of Western states and institutions that support and profit from Israel’s actions. In places like Canada, then, taking a stand for Palestine often involves recognizing and challenging the ways that local institutions like banks, bookstores, and universities are linked to settler-colonial occupation, violence, and genocide abroad.

Canadian universities have become a major node in this broader struggle. In the spring of 2024, student solidarity encampments appeared on campuses across the country, bringing visibility and political leverage to students’ strategic demands. Like the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, student groups demanded their universities cut ties with companies and institutions that support and/or profit from Israel’s 76-year settler-colonial occupation and current genocide in Palestine.

Rather than meeting students’ demands, most universities responded to the encampments with various repressive actions, including calling the police or private security firms to attack their students.

As students returned to campuses last fall, they entered a new phase of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. The encampments were gone, corporate media had turned away their cameras, but student organizing continued in new forms and upon a new and more repressive terrain. Indeed, university administrators had spent the summer months preparing a new arsenal of “security” policies and personnel intended to prevent the appearance of a second student intifada in the fall.

It is difficult to grasp the full extent of this new repressive apparatus at any given university, much less Canada-wide. In order to provide a fuller picture and support ongoing Palestine solidarity organizing, we investigated changes in “security” policy and personnel from June to December 2024 at 17 Canadian universities: Acadia University; University of Alberta; University of British Columbia; University of Calgary; Concordia University; Dalhousie University; University of Manitoba; McGill University; McMaster University; Memorial University; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD); Queen’s University; University of Toronto; Vancouver Island University; Western University; University of Winnipeg; and University of Waterloo. Our research relied on media reporting, social media posts, university websites, and information provided by students and/or faculty at these universities. 

Our findings paint a portrait of repressive policies and practices but also include the administrative anxieties provoked by students who have dared to demonstrate what solidarity looks like and what universities could be – places of learning and liberation rather than institutions devoted to corporate donors and deadly imperialist interests. It shows how a longer history of political repression on university campuses, perhaps most evident in the late 1960s, has been reactivated through moments of conflict between universities’ support for imperialism and students’ commitment to anti-imperialism and international solidarity.  (more...)

Universities in service of imperialism