The spread of the “Student Intifada” around the globe has transformed universities into sites of anti-Zionist struggle, triggering brutal repression from school administrations, police, and vigilantes. In this special livestream event, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner sit down with student organizers from the University of Michigan, Purdue, and Oxford to discuss the state of the international student movement in solidarity with Palestine.

TRANSCRIPT

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us.

Marc Steiner:

And I’m Marc Steiner here and at The Real News, with the Marc Steiner Show, and it’s good to be with you all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And you’ve been involved in this struggle for quite some time, haven’t you, brother?

Marc Steiner:

You trying to show my age?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Marc himself, as you know if you’ve listened to the Marc Steiner show here at The Real News, has been involved in the anti-occupation struggle since 1968. And that anti-occupation struggle continues today. And on today’s live stream, we’re going to dive back into the student-led protest movement that has become known as the Student Intifada. And we’re going to talk with a panel of students, grad students, and faculty members from the University of Michigan, Purdue University in Indiana, and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. This is a grass-led movement involving students, grad students, faculty, and other members of campus communities on college and university campuses around the country setting up encampments, occupations and protests to demand an end to Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And to pressure university administrations to disclose and divest their institution’s financial ties to the Israeli War machine and the military industrial complex.

This movement has even spread to campuses around the world with encampments in France, Australia, Japan, Canada, the UK and more. And here in the United States, especially in recent weeks, it has faced draconian repression from police, university administrators, Zionist antagonizers, and attempts by hostile politicians, pundits and pro-Israel lobbying groups to smear and dox participants, silence their right to protest suspend students, or worse. Over 3000 demonstrators have reportedly been arrested between April and May alone.

In our last Student Intifada livestream, which we hosted at the beginning of this month, we spoke with encampment organizers at Indiana University where police had snipers stationed on top of university buildings. Our own LA-based reporter, Mel Buer, was there on the ground at UCLA filming on the night of April 30th as campus police let Zionist counter-protesters barrel into the encampment and violently attack Gaza solidarity protesters before eventually clearing the encampment. And Mel was there again last week as students erected a second encampment, which police forced to disperse soon after.

While the systematic slaughter and displacement of Palestinians continues, including with this week’s attacks on RAFA and refugee camps there, all funded by our tax dollars. People of conscience everywhere, including on college campuses, are doing whatever they can to stop it. And today, as we always do at the Real News, we’re going to take you directly to the front lines of struggle so you can hear for yourself what is happening on the ground at these encampments, how students and allies are confronting the repression they’re facing, what will happen to this movement as the school year ends and summer begins, and what you can do to get involved.

Now, before we get rolling, I just wanted to quickly remind everyone that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but incredible team of folks who are fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices from the front lines of struggle here in the US and around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without you and your support. So we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com forward/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference.

Now, Marc, before we get to our amazing panel of guests, I want to turn to you and ask if you can help ground this conversation with some historical perspective. Because as we said at the top, you’ve been involved in this movement yourself for many years. You’ve covered this movement in the occupation, on your show and on the radio here in Baltimore for decades. And you were there during the student movements in the 1960s when young people across the country rose up to fight for free speech, to fight racism, to fight for civil rights and an end to the US war in Vietnam. And like the student protests back then, the student protests that we’re seeing today have turned college and university campuses into this flashpoint for a larger battle that’s raging within the country.

So I wanted to ask if you could tell us about the comparisons that you see between then and now. What’s different? What’s changed and what can people in the movement today learn from those students struggle 60 years ago?

Marc Steiner:

It is simple and it’s complex. I mean, the movement against the war in Vietnam was also because people felt threatened because they were being drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam and didn’t want to go to Nam. So the anti-war movement was based in draft resistance, which is a little different than what we’re facing now. It also was based in the Black liberation struggle here in this country. And that made a difference too, because it was about Black people dying in the streets, the Black Panther movement being slaughtered in front of our eyes and all that was part of what was built around the movement.

And I also think that part of it was that… What you saw was a movement that came out of the universities, but it also involved organizing in poor working class communities. And that shifted the whole dynamic of what was going on because the slaughter in Vietnam was a genocide. Millions of people dying in Vietnam and people went to jail because of that. And also we had, when campuses erupted, people talk about Kent state where four students died was horrendous. People don’t talk about the other campus where people died, which was Jackson State University in Mississippi, which was a majority Black institution. And 2 students were killed, 12 were badly wounded, some came out crippled. Nobody covered Jackson because it was Black like they did Kent state, not minimizing Kent state, just nobody covered Jackson. So the struggle was a bit different.

This one of the biggest similarities is the complicity of universities in the Vietnam War as the complicity with the universities in the slaughter of Gazans, the slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli army. And you’re seeing something really I think different in this struggle. And I’m seeing in my own community, the Jewish world where we are seeing tens of thousands of young Jews saying, “No, not in our name,” which is fundamentally different than what you’ve seen before. I wouldn’t be surprised one day the clashes when Zionists attack the clashes will be between Jews saying no and Zionists coming in to attack. So I think it’s a very different dynamic for facing today. In some ways, more intense because this war happening now has global ramifications for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man, I really appreciate that. And again, I highly recommend that everyone watching and listening listen to Marc’s show the Marc Steiner Show because he is constantly bringing in this historical perspective and other voices from the movement in the sixties, seventies. And we need to learn from you all as best we can if we are going to win these struggles. And this is a struggle that we need to win. And the only other thing I would add to that because I want to then cut to our incredible panel is that two elephants in the room, but the very culture and the ways that we perceive Israel have changed dramatically from then to now. And I know later in the conversation you’ll talk a bit about how you yourself made that journey from anti-Zionist to non-Zionist. You have been on that journey and that’s been part of your political struggle as well.

But across the country we’ve had a major shift in the ways that the average population is seeing and perceiving the occupation and of course, the radical of our institutions of higher ed over the course of corporatization in the past 40 years, where universities complicity in the war machine is not just in terms of the research it’s providing, but in terms of the massive endowments that they are using to invest in the war machine. So that itself has also really changed the game in a lot of ways. I really appreciate that and I want to roll that into our incredible panel here and hear firsthand about what they’re going through. So let’s go to them right now.

Salma, I want to turn to you first. We spoke on the Real News podcast a little under a month ago about the encampment at the University of Michigan and your involvement in the organizing. Now, obviously with police raiding the encampment last week, things have changed quite a bit since we last spoke. So I wanted to ask if you could walk us through what’s been happening on the ground over there in Ann Arbor since we last spoke, especially in the past week. And if you could also please reintroduce yourself to the good live stream viewers and listeners.

Salma:

Hi. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. So my name is Salma. I am a member of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. And just about last week, in the early morning hours, about 5:48 AM, police in riot gear made an announcement at our encampment, essentially giving us about 10 minutes to disperse. Otherwise, you would be subject to arrest and first police brutality. But as we saw, their 10 minute warning somehow transformed into about 7 minutes, and they started to attack students very quickly through a shower of pepper spray, brutally beating students to the floor, arresting students as they would fall to the ground, not allowing us to pick ourselves back up or march back. And they actually did this while there was a church service going on at our encampment.

So the abundance in violence that they executed against the students is unfortunately not a first time occurrence. This has happened several times across our university and as we speak right now, there are eight students at the University of Michigan who are facing felony charges due to their advocacy and due to them protesting over the course of the last eight months. So at least within our raid in our encampment, we were able to sustain it for exactly 30 days, nearly a full month with hundreds of students coming from all walks of life, participating in the encampment and truly transforming it into a community space and a space that we would hope would be reflective of what the future might hold, especially considering the title that our Liberated Zone where meals were free. Our campus would now be offering of a variety of each educational programming and truly standing from a perspective of collective resistance and collective liberation.

And we made sure that that was integral to every element within our encampments, and it truly was heartbreaking for our university administration to instead meet with us… At the encampments, they met with us with violent, brutal force. And in addition to us sustaining the movement as well through the encampments, our Board of Regents has refused to meet with us entirely. And we are a coalition of 100 student organizations, one of the largest multicultural ethnic advocacy organizations ever exist on the University of Michigan campus. And they somehow not only ignore us, but also our faculty staff and faculty senate passed the resolution also calling for the government one of the first in the nation. So they have ignored us at the student level, the faculty level, the staff level, and so we are entirely taking the movement into our own hands. It is no longer operating on their own terms, but rather on our own. We cannot operate and function as though we can just appeal the humanity of the Board of Regents because they have proven that they’re unfortunately non-existent.

So not only have we protested within our University Street, but also in front of the university board of Regents Homes, shortly after when our encampment was raided, we headed over to our board of Regents Homes and taped our demands directly to their front door and to the head of the Regents, Sarah Hubbard, we stood outside of her front door and essentially set up tents there. And we said, “Since you haven’t come to the encampment, we are now bringing the encampment to you.” And we had Palestinian students begin their speeches at the house of Sarah Hubbard, our board of Regents by stating, “Since we have waken up the notifications of our dead loved ones on our phones for the past eight months every morning, this morning, you two will be waking up to their names.”

So we read their names and we protest in front of their homes. We protested outside of nearly every single campus event because these are the terms and conditions to which they have decided to meet their students if they have not decided to come to talk to us, to divest from death and divest from genocide, we have now made the issue of Gaza and the question of Gaza at the forefront at every institutional event and activity. And that is why BOOM has been able to sustain itself for so long because it is the red line that we are going to address within our university campus. And it thankfully has exposed every single person within our campus who’s either decided to remain silent and remain complicit versus those who have decided to be conscientious. And that is ultimately the step we are taking forward in our movement considering that they have refused to engage in dialogue with us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Thank you so much Salma, and we’re going to come back to you in the next round to talk about where things go from here. And also as I stated on the podcast that we did here at The Real News with Salma, as I’ve stated on every interview I’ve done with anyone from the University of Michigan, I just want to disclose that I myself am an alum of the University of Michigan. I was a graduate student there, member of the grad student union. So you can take whatever I have to say about the University of Michigan for what it’s worth or not, but you should absolutely listen to students on the front lines like Salma. Now, Marc, I want to toss it to you because I know you got a question for our next guest.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. There’s a bunch of things here. First, I’m curious, as a Michigan grad, even though you’re at Oxford at the moment, talk a bit about what you heard her say and your reflections on that from your experiences there?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And this is for Amytess.

Marc Steiner:

I’m sorry. Yeah. Amytess.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Introduce yourself a little bit as well.

Amytess:

Yeah. Hello. Hi. So I’m Amytess. I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford in the UK, but I am from Michigan and I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan. I was there very recently. Only 2017 to 2021 is when I graduated. And I want to tell you, Salma, I have been watching the organizing you all are doing with so much pride, especially when the TAHRIR Coalition went up and I looked at that list of student organizations on there, what is it over 90 now or something? I don’t even know anymore. I remember thinking to myself, “There is no world in which that would’ve happened during my time at the University of Michigan.” And to be clear, I was not doing Palestine organizing when I was there, so I don’t want to take credit for any of it, but I was very, very adjacent to it and I was doing a lot of other organizing. And the movement for Palestine at the University of Michigan has been going on for a long time, obviously, as it has at ever university.

But there was a time not too long ago where people were going through hell just to get central student government to pass a resolution in support of BDS. The presence of Zionism at the University of Michigan is among the top of any university in the country. So to see the power of the TAHRIR Coalition and the widespread student support for this movement and the consistent hell you all have been able to raise even before this encampment went up, just like non-stop actions, to me is just such a sign of the surge of energy we’re seeing for this movement globally.

And also, I just want to say with regards to the response from the Regents and from President Ono, that also speaks volumes about the fact that despite the overwhelming support for this movement, Palestine is simply different. It’s different from so many other issues. I mean, I think we have a lot to learn from the organizing of Black students on campus and how that has been ignored for generations. But beyond that, during my time at Michigan, I did a lot of work on issues that are far more palatable to people on the Board of Regents.

I worked with the unions on campus. I worked on fossil fuel divestment. I worked on financial aid, and I could get a meeting with any of the regents so easily, so easily with far less of a coalition than you’re describing. So I think it just speaks to the way that we have such an uphill battle facing the Goliath that is the global apparatus of Zionism, and the lengths that the administration is willing to go to silence you all, despite the overwhelming support that you have, I think really speaks volumes. But yeah, I’ve been telling all my friends in the UK about you all. It makes me so happy to see. So that’s my thoughts on [inaudible 00:19:17].

Marc Steiner:

There must be something in the water in Michigan because-

Amytess:

Yeah, man, we got some radical folks coming out of UM baby.

Marc Steiner:

Even from the sixties on Michigan was always, and before that, Michigan was always a center of a radical ferment and students speaking out and fighting for justice. So it’s interesting that this continues now in your generation, Amytess, it’s the same. It continues.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, baby. Port Huron is just right up the road. Port Huron’s. SDS, yes.

Marc Steiner:

Let me shift for a minute and go to Oxford where you are now, and talk a bit about what’s been going on? Are the demonstrations taking place? At university is from what I’ve been reading across, Britain, but take it out from Oxford. Tell us a bit about what’s going on.

Amytess:

Yeah, I’m so happy to be here talking about Oxford and what’s happening in the UK because I don’t think it’s getting quite enough coverage in the US media. And there’s so much to learn about the global movement, the student that’s happening in campuses around the world, and especially in the UK where there are so many parallels to the US both in how universities operate and also in the complicity, obviously, of the British government. But the thing to know about the Student Intifada here is that all of it is operating on a slightly later timeline than the US. We’ve been organizing for Palestine obviously for months and months, but we saw what happened in America and we started planning our encampments. So May Day and around May Day was when some of the first encampments went up in the UK. We went up at the same time as Cambridge on May 6th.

And then in that week is when many others started springing up as well. And in Oxford and in Cambridge, these encampments have particular significance. We are quite literally the heart of the British Empire. Oxford, and Cambridge, the graduates of these places are the ones who wrote the Balfour declaration. The location of our encampment here in Oxford… Well, now we have two, which I’ll get to, but our first encampment is sat in front of the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is during the Rhodes must fall movement was called the most violent place in Oxford because it is home to colonial artifacts up the wazoo, and we’re around the corner from Rhodes House, the home of the Rhodes Scholarship.

So the symbolism of being at this university and having the movement from Palestine that we have, we feel is tremendously important. But on top of that, there’s also the material reality of the fact that the UK-wide movement for Palestine is absolutely terrifying to those in power, not just at our universities, but also the UK government. Two days after the Off-Bridge encampments went up, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, called all of the vice chancellors, the heads of universities in the UK to Westminster to discuss this issue of campus protests.

And what we have been seeing since then is keep in mind, all of this is a slightly smaller scale than the US. So all of this is very viable. What we’ve been seeing is a coordinated effort from universities across the UK to suppress campus protests to the point where some of the statements, I’m like, “Did you guys copy paste this? Is this coming straight out of Westminster?” I don’t know what’s going on. So it’s very, very interesting to see the threat that this poses not just to our universities, but to the UK government.

That being said, looking at the comparisons between the US and the UK, the first week that we went up, I was getting frankly, way too many questions from press, distracting questions, comparing us to the US, sometimes throwing the US universities under the bus saying, “You all look so much more peaceful than the US. You look so much less like you’re agitating. We’re not seeing violence. This looks like a little picnic that you have going on.” And obviously we know the reason why. It’s because we do not have a militarized police force that is forcing violence on students, and that’s changing, which I’ll get to.

But at first, the tactics of repression that were being used in the UK looked very, very different from the US. The violence was still very much there, but it was far more invisible. It was this coordinated effort that’s coming from the government, coming from administrations, coming from places like Oxford that have literally not changed in 900 years, being absolutely stone-cold towards our efforts, despite the fact that the coalition that we have at this university is absolutely unprecedented. So I’ll wrap up, but I want to make clear the significance of the movement at Oxford right now. Okay. So right now at this university, I never thought I would see the support we have for our demands, which are uncompromising. We have been extremely clear on our values…

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Amytess:

… demands which are uncompromising. We have been extremely clear on our values, and yet we have over 600 faculty and staff who have signed on to a letter with their full names, endorsing our demands unequivocally, no condemnations if I’m off, nothing, just endorsing us.

14 trade unions in the city, including trade unions at the university and the main university and colleges union, which is the faculty and postgraduate researchers union and staff have endorsed us and have been instrumental in the organizing for our demands.

Oxford is structured with a college system, so we have over 30 colleges at the university, each with their own kind of governance. And within those, there’s each two. It’s complicated, but we have over 30 college common rooms who have issued statements in support, motions supporting us, and we have over 12% of the student body that has signed on full first and last name in support of our demands unequivocally.

So this is unprecedented, and that’s only part of it. And yet we are seeing reluctance from the administration to come to the table to negotiate with us. So that’s why we popped up another encampment in front of the Radcliffe Camera Library, which is the most iconic spot in Oxford.

If you Google it, I’m sure you’d recognize the building before. We’re operating two encampments now we’re running full steam ahead. And we’re starting to see a shift in the UK. And this is the last thing I really want to emphasize, because we’re learning from the US, we’re starting to see a shift in the tactic of repression.

The violence is no longer invisible. It is very, very visible. So last Thursday at the University of Oxford, we staged a peaceful sit-in at the administration’s offices, and 17 students were arrested within an hour. A bunch of people rushed to the scene to try and to stop these arrests, and we saw the worst instances of police brutality in response to Palestine protests that have happened in this country since October.

I live in London, so I’ve been going to all those protests and I hadn’t seen anything like this yet. Students were beat up. A friend of mine got concussed, glasses were broken, you name it. And now as I speak, students in Newcastle are facing similar brutality. Last night in London in front of Westminster, there was an emergency protest called, and we saw a police presence and a number of arrests that we haven’t seen yet.

And so what we’re seeing is empire crumbling and the violent response that comes from that. And obviously that’s what we saw at the University of Michigan as well. So a lot of differences, a lot of similarities to the US and a lot to learn. But I’ll stop there for now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much.

Marc Steiner:

That’s a lot. Thank you. That was really interesting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, that was really, really helpful and especially, yeah, coming from Salma to Amy Tess, this is such an important conversation to have. And again, as you said, Amy Tess not one that anyone’s really having, especially not on the mainstream media. So I just wanted to underscore again how grateful we are to all of you for being here, being on and having this conversation with us.

And yeah, we’re going to return to this question about how the encampments themselves and student organizers are learning from each other across campuses and across borders. But also, as Amy Tess mentioned, how the establishment is also doing the same and how the police and college administrators in the UK are also taking notes on the Draconian measures that administrators and police are leading the charge of here in the United States.

Now, I want to turn to our guests from Purdue University for a second before we get to the second round and talk about where we go from here. But we haven’t heard as much about Purdue as say Columbia or UCLA, but that in itself is one of the reasons why it’s important to highlight a case like this. Now, Arjun, I want to come to you first because you’ve been a lead student organizer of the encampment from the beginning.

And I wanted to ask if you can give us an on-the-ground view of how the encampment came to be, how y’all maintained it while other encampments were being ransacked, and where things stand now with the encampment or the movement as it were, the negotiations with the university. And Bill, after Arjun, I’d love to go to you and ask if you could hop in and give us a breakdown of what this has all looked like from the faculty side.

You’ve been in this struggle for many years as well and are seeing this change. So talk to us about what that looks like on your side, the roles that you and other faculty are playing in this movement, and the pushback that you are facing along with the students. So Arjun, let’s go to you and if Yeah, you could start by introducing yourself to the livestream viewers.

Arjun Jenneken:

Hi, my name is Arjun Jenneken. I’m a member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Purdue University in Indiana. Although I can echo the sentiments about Michigan. I’m from Michigan, and I had the honor of attending a vision University of Michigan encampment, which was truly beautiful.

But a bit of a history on Purdue University, specifically on the pro-Palestinian movement there. In October, after the genocide first began the Students for Justice in Palestine, a coalition forum centered around them with the young Democratic Socialists of America and our local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, where we are holding consistent events every week centered around divestment of our university.

We created a resolution put forward that got like 30 to 40 to 50, and I think even 60 now, student organizations cosigning asking the university for divestment. And we learned two sort of major things about Purdue there. For one, Purdue University as many universities, but Purdue specifically is a feeder school, what we call it for the military industrial complex.

They rent out swaths of land to companies like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or Caterpillar that have office buildings on our campus. These are companies that are of course directly involved in perpetuating not just the Israeli occupation but forever wars in general and have a litany of human rights abuses listed against them, global bribery cases and so on and so forth. And Purdue University gets a lot of its money publicly, a lot of its money from these companies.

The second thing we found out very quickly is that Purdue does not give its students a lot of vehicles for change or for organizing. Purdue is not a union campus. In fact, Mitch Daniels, our former president who’s still very involved at Purdue University, signed a right to work in the law into Indiana at his time as the Indiana governor.

Although the organizations that are organizing in favor of a graduate student union or a faculty union or anything like that are explicitly pro-Palestinian organizations and have lended their support, they do not have standing. In addition, as recently signed into law, Indiana Senate Bill 202 gives the board of Trustees who have almost sole power at Purdue University to deny professors’ tenure if they don’t agree with the political views of their content.

So what we learned very quickly about that is that Purdue doesn’t … Purdue, and to their credit, they very much tried to put on a public face of free speech of negotiation, but they really have no way for students or organizers to organize in a sense of allowing them to come to the table with these conversations, with having any real meaning behind them.

They are explicitly anti-union or not, I shouldn’t say explicitly, but they are, but through their policy, they are anti-union and anti-Labor organization, and they have refused to acquiesce to the demands and asks for Students for Justice in Palestine even longer before this, even long before the October 7th.

But afterwards, even with this groundswell of majority popular student support, they have refused to come to the table and negotiate with us. When the encampments started up, however, which sort of started up as a reaction to the encampments going on worldwide and the idea was, even though at Purdue University where it’s considered a conservative school, the way you can tell that is because ranked high in all the free speech rankings.

We thought our main goal, initially was to just add another university to the list of all the encampments to add our voice, our very powerful voice to the groundswell of student support. Now, what happened was we launched a right near the same time that Indiana University did with a similar amount of people at first, however, with the Indiana University’s insane decision to have a militarized police force presence on campus, snipers on the rooftops.

And of course, that ended up backfiring with them severely with the incredible bravery of our comrades at IU showing up, getting magnitudes and magnitudes larger, and all those pictures everywhere of snipers on university campuses and the widespread disdain that the people had, even quote-unquote moderates that the people had for those kinds of imagery.

Purdue University did not want to have images of that nature come out. So what they did is instead of police repression, they actually asked for police not to get involved and try to suppress speech through an administrative lens. They would do things like they would come up to us and be like, hey, we’re not going to … we can technically, like Purdue administration, we’re not going to do this as long as you violate our no camping policy, which is very helpfully defined as anything that looks like camping.

And they use that kind of gray area to leverage themselves into having more and more power. So they at first said, hey, camping means no tents after 11 and no sleeping on campus after 11. Even in a public room, sleeping is, I suppose, against the rules. And of course, since a majority of our students are international students, we don’t want to threaten their student visas.

We in response set up a checkpoint system where we would just have a group of student organizers stay up throughout the night, and in case anybody came and checked, they can see people awake with tents down just in little structures that were erected to sort of abide sort of malicious compliance with their camping policy.

We were able to toe the line in that way of avoiding explicit student repression until our campus grew more, our encampment grew more and more and more. We saw a lot of community support coming with the encampment. This is again, because of our brave comrades at IU, at Columbia, at University of Michigan, which was a big inspiration for us at Purdue, making the encampment a sort of symbol of worldwide protests.

We had community members coming in delivering food. We had community members who I have not seen at all who are saying, oh, I’ve always wanted to show up to one of these protests, but I couldn’t. And then now they’re staying overnight awake, of course, staying overnight, helping out bringing up food. And the community showed up in a big way.

Now, near the end of the encampment, Purdue University administration were able to find specific charges, we believe completely unfounded charges to target for student organizers, including me, and put us on disciplinary cases that could potentially result in full expulsion from the university. They registered us to have disciplinary cases go on where they would collect information and speak to us.

That was in April. It’s almost June now. We have heard nothing on that front. So they’re still sort of holding over a disciplinary case over us. And what’s very important about that is that as they well know, two of the organizers they have threatened are international students. And for them to be expelled or even suspended would threaten their student visa and levy much greater punishment on them.

And Purdue University is fully aware of this, but they still refuse to act in good faith. They still refuse to have consideration for the very reasonable asks that this coalition of Students for Justice in Palestine, Young American Socialists in America, and Jewish Voice for Peace, all who will coalesce the Purdue liberation zone, have for Purdue University to start the process of divesting from corporations that have been indicted on multiple charges of bribery or human rights abuses or so on and so forth.

They even refuse to give the Arab students a cultural center. Cultural centers are a huge part of identity and organizing here at our university campus, and they have refused to give SWANA, which is the name of our Southwest, Asian and North African Student Union, who have been lobbying for a cultural center for years now. They have refused to even do that.

They have refused to engage and/or offer any sort of reparations to the Palestinian students in any way. And what’s interesting about that is that on the aftermath of October 7th, the president of the university came to Hillel. He said he used the words that, Oh, this shows, October 7th shows the difference between a good civilization and a barbaric one, I believe are the words he used.

He talked a bit about how we are here for students who are affected by this, and to the Jewish community, we are here with you. And of course, that is an excellent on paper, an excellent ask. You have a student, a community of students suffering, and you’re going to appeal to them. Of course. That’s great.

However, president Chang has not appeared at any of the Palestinian events. He has not appeared to any calls for solidarity with the Palestinian community who have suffered and who continue to suffer to this very day. So I’ll wrap it up now, but that’s sort of the bare bones explanation of what’s been going on at Purdue University. I think Bill could talk more in depth about the faculty side of things.

Marc Steiner:

As you were speaking, one things I’d say that it is Indiana.

Arjun Jenneken:

It is Indiana. Yeah, that’s very true.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, Indiana was a state that had to be occupied in the Civil War, it was the home of Eugene V. Debs. It is Indiana.

Arjun Jenneken:

It is Indiana.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. So I’m not shocked to hear this. And that’s the university where most of my wife’s family graduated from.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Even there in the dark heart of Indiana, you’ve got students or you’ve got faculty like Bill. Bill, you’ve been there for a while. Yeah. Bring in that perspective, both the historical perspective as someone who’s been in this movement for many years, and also what this has all looked like from the faculty side.

Bill:

Yeah, thanks Max. And first shout out to Selma and Amy Tess and Arjun because they’re really the heroes in this historical moment. And people like me are here because of them. I’m a long time faculty at Purdue. I’m now a professor emeritus. I’ve been in the Palestine struggle for about 15 years, mostly with the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

And more recently with our organization that we started at Purdue around just before the encampment movement called Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. And I wanted to give some context for that. In November and December, as the genocide began, and I think some of the students know this across the United States, faculty finally woke up and started to say, we’re going to learn from and stand with the students on our campuses who are fighting for justice.

And between November and this spring, about 1000 chapters of what are called variously Faculty for Justice in Palestine or faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine have emerged on university campuses. And I believe, for example, at Michigan, there are students, there are faculty, very active there. And the whole point is to both support the students but to also be another line of defense.

It’s really important that administrations recognize you can’t isolate our students from our faculty. We are one in this struggle and we are actually willing to go to the wall with them if need be. And that was really kind of our approach at Purdue.

We started out in January with a small group that met and said, what can we actually do to support the students who are pushing for divestment, who are pushing for Purdue to break its formal relationships with Israeli universities, including Boycotting study abroad programs to Israel, for example. And we started slowly, and then when the encampment movement broke out, we grew exponentially. And our second meeting, we went from nine to 45 people.

And it was really inspiring to see not just faculty, but staff who at many universities are very vulnerable. They don’t have tenure, for example. They’ve got a lot to lose. They were absolutely committed to standing with the students at the encampment. So we did kind of three things as a group once we got ourselves together.

The first is we wrote a statement in support of the students explaining why they were right, why this was the right struggle, why Purdue needed to divest and why Purdue needed to basically shut down its war machine. And we sent it to all the local media, and then we basically held a faculty press conference at the encampment. We invited all the local media to come. We read it out. And I think the point was we wanted to get ahead of any effort by Purdue to shut this thing down.

We wanted to get media on the side of the students if we could. We wanted to get the community as much on the side of the students, and we also shared all of the same political principles. The second thing we wanted to indicate by going to the encampment was telling the administration, if you’re going to come for the students, you’ve got to come through us. We’re going to be here.

We’re going to be arrested with them if that’s what you decide to do. So for us, that was a really galvanizing moment of solidarity with the students. The second thing that we did together, and this speaks to Arjun’s point about the threats of the four student suspensions, which were amplified by a threat to basically shut down the two leading organizations on campus, which were YDSA and SJP that were leading the encampment movement. So we put out another statement defending the students.

It was basically hands-off produced students. We sent that to local media. We had another press conference where we read that out. And again, the whole point was to win the public relations war with the university to say the students are not alone in this. They have many, many allies on the faculty and staff.

And so we put that out and we also put out a, we started a public petition, which basically said, don’t you dare threaten to suspend these students, two of whom were international students, as Arjun has pointed out, which might very well lead to them being deported from the country. We gathered about 400 signatures from the community and from the university, which in our town was a landslide of support.

And we think that all of these things helped maybe keep the university at bay. They were obviously debating how they should respond and what they should do, but we feel like the solidarity from the faculty and staff side was critical, at least we hope so. And the last thing we did, and this is partly because we’re teachers, we kind of arranged a series of teach-ins that began on a Sunday night, the second week of the encampment.

And we did things like Afro-Palestinian solidarity. We talked about this history of solidarity between Ireland and Palestine. We had a great lecture on why Palestine is a feminist issue. These were nightly gatherings and hundreds of students were coming out and just engaging. And we were talking. It just felt it was like an open university. It was part of the liberated zone.

So for us as faculty, that was completely inspiring. I said it was like a much better teaching experience than being in the classroom, where you’re out, you’re claiming land at the university, you’re talking through real serious questions of genocide with people who were willing to go all the way in the struggle.

So, from the faculty side, this whole moment of the encampment has been an absolute inspiration, but also I think an absolute call to the faculty that we can also not go to sleep. We have to be ready to come back in the fall to support the students in whatever way we’re able to do so.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I mean, Bill, thank you so much for that. And speaking of that, because Mark is going to pose a question to all y’all kind of about that, what comes next. And I just wanted to say to the folks watching and listening that we got another round of questions we’re going to toss to our panel for the next 20 minutes.

And then in the final 25 minutes of this live stream, we do want to pose any questions that y’all have for our incredible guests to them. So please, if you haven’t already throw your questions in the live chat. We can’t promise we can get to all of them, but we’ve got this incredible group of folks here, and we want to give y’all the chance to have them answer your questions. So with that, I’m going to toss things over to my boy, Mark.

Marc Steiner:

This is fascinating. I mean also to me, that hearing the differences between what’s happening on campuses, given their locations and their histories, I mean, it says a lot also about this divide in America, which is part of what I want to talk about.

I think that I’m curious from the three of you first, what happens when you get back to campus and things have not changed, more Palestinians have been killed, that the war continues, and the universities, at least some of the universities remain complicit in that war? What do you think happens next?

And hearing what happens in Indiana where students can be threatened with deportation and not being able to continue with students in Indiana and other universities. So where do you think this takes us? And let’s go in the same order I think that we began. Who do we start with?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Selma.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, sorry. I was going to say Amy Tess. Yes, please.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. So Salma, let’s toss it to you. Then Amy Tess hop right in after her.

Salma:

Yeah, such a good question. So U-Mich students have continued to organize well beyond the summer. We had a pretty early graduation, very beginning of May, and we’re still holding it down. There is even a encampment that was recently set up at Wayne State University, which is in Detroit, Michigan. In addition to us organizing to battle these felony charges that have come out from our prosecutor, Ellie Sabbath.

So our organizing and our movement has continued well into the summer and will continue well beyond the summer and carry into the fall. Over seven months of a rising death toll must coincide with our rising anger. We will escalate in that it is the only way forward. There will be no more attempts to appeal to the humanity of those who are not on the side of Gaza. And if the mountain of our corpses have not moved you yet, then the mountain of our collective anger will.

If the scenes of burnt Palestinian flesh have not shaken you, then the scenes of our mass mobilization will. And if the voices of our martyrs has not reached you, then the voices of us in the street will. There is no sitting by, standing by as we watch our brothers and sisters quite literally be beheaded in some of the worst war crimes.

And as for American politics, well of course we don’t believe that the system will serve as true liberation, we are going to use it to the best of our ability to shake the system itself. And for that, we will be voting Biden out in November. He will be losing Michigan, and it will send such a crucial message to both the Democratic and Republican Party that Gaza is the red line, and Gaza is the most important …

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Salma:

… that Gaza is the red line, and Gaza is the most important topic of discussion for this election cycle. Two of our Board of Regents are also going to be up for re-election this November, and we are also going to be voting them out. We will be utilizing every forefront possible to make sure that Gaza and the whole of Palestine is liberated within our lifetime. And so, while they think they’re dependent on students to cycle in and out, and they are expectant of our institutional memory to die out, that is not going to be the case. We are passing our knowledge down, we are passing our organizing skills and our experiences down, and not only are we passing it down to the next student body, but also horizontally to campuses all across the world.

We are finding a collective anger and a collective sense of purpose together through these [inaudible 00:48:59], and we are sharing this wide spread of knowledge that there is a better world, and there can be a better world, and that starts with us liberating Palestine. So that is one thing that we’re hopeful to continue on throughout the summer, throughout fall semester, and throughout the rest of the remaining years yet to come, until we see a liberated Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Amy-Tess, like you and I know from our days back at University of Michigan and organizing there, that like every campus, the administration’s weapon of first resort is summer break, so whether you are striking as a grad student union, waging direct action in encampments on campus, the main thing is just wait them out until summer and then it’s all going to peter out kind of thing. But obviously, in the UK, you’re on a different school year timeline, so I wanted to ask if you could pick up there and talk us through if there are particular nuances in the UK system that we should be mindful of, but also, same question, where do things go from here, from where you’re speaking in Oxford?

Amytess:

Yeah. The first thing to know is that we do still have three weeks of term here at Oxford, and most UK universities do have some time. But regardless of whether term is on or not, the reality is that genocides can’t happen on the university’s delayed timeline. I have plenty to say about the fall and I’ll get into it in a moment, but the first thing is thinking through what are the victories we can win now with the platform that we have now.

Here at Oxford, that looks like a few things. One is we are in an excellent position as a coalition, and we will continue pressuring in the ways that we have been for the remainder of term. But also, as Bill said so beautifully, it’s not just students, it’s not just a student movement, there are workers whose wages are being used to fund genocide who are also very upset, and there are academics whose knowledge is being used to legitimize an institution that then legitimizes genocide, which is a problem. And so, the faculty here at the university, and the union of faculty here at the university, have been doing incredible work to pressure this administration, and that is not something that ends in term time.

So much of what we have learned here at Oxford is that as much as rallies and sit-ins and these types of escalatory actions are crucial towards the movement that we want to build and the hell that we want to raise, so are meetings, so are meetings. Unfortunately, they’re not as fast. But we are being extremely strategic and extremely intentional about making sure that this momentum does not die once term ends. We have backed the Oxford administration into a corner, and we have every intention of maximizing that opportunity.

That being said, we also are realistic about the fact that there are plenty of committees that simply do not meet in the summer, and there are plenty of students who leave, and it would be naive to think that we could just keep everything full steam ahead once term ends. So we are thinking about the fall. I know for a fact that ever since October, we have had an incredible surge of organizing, and every single event we had between October and April, I kept asking myself, “Is this the event where less people are going to show up? When are people going to burn out? When are people going to stop coming?” And they haven’t stopped, they’ve only increased. And I don’t expect that to change in the fall.

I think what we have seen globally is an absolute rupture of people’s understanding of how the world order works, whether it’s Palestine or anything else. And I think that what we need to do now is strategically build the organizing structures so that we’re not solely relying on how people feel on any given day, but that we actually have the structures in place to continue mobilizing in the fall. So for us, again, unions are a crucial form of continuity, whether or not students are present, the unions remain. But also, plenty of us will be present in the fall.

The last thing I’ll say is that it’s really important that we divide the line, or dissolve the line, that the narrative tries to build about the university and the rest of the world somehow being separate things. Students still very much exist when school is not happening, and students can very much take to the streets, they can picket arms factories, they can do all kinds of things that still continue building pressure, both on their universities and their governments, that aren’t necessarily on campus. And so, we are very, very focused on mobilizing people, as this genocide is ongoing, and continuing that engagement so that when we are back on campus in the fall, we can do what needs to be done.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, yeah. Arjun, Bill, we’re going to toss it to y’all. What happens now from where you all are at Purdue and beyond? Take it away, and then we’ll turn to our audience questions.

Arjun Jenneken:

This is going to be a bit of a summer of research for us. Purdue University is a public university, and therefore subject to FOIA. We can get all the information we need over the summer about what specific deals we want to target, what specific financial ties we have to these companies, what ties we have to Israel, how we can pressure those, what legislation needs to be drafted for us to be completely divested, and around those causes, we can organize. I’ve been organizing at Purdue for a few years now, and the Palestinian organization is by far the issue that has gotten the most people mobilized.

If we can get a union, or if we can even organize around union, around union building, around strike building, strike building around specific demands, if we can use those demands to get these people who have come into the fold of organizing because they see what’s happening in Palestine and they want to get active, and then we take that energy and transfer it into a union, and we have all the work already done for day one of a potential union forming of what needs to happen. That is going to heavily bolster our momentum if we have a clear path for exactly what we want to do, and the fine details, come the fall.

Now, echoing what Amy-Tess said, we are also very much encouraging students, when they’re not here at Purdue, to go and be involved in their local community, try and swing by encampments near you. I know many of my comrades here are visiting the Wayne State encampment. Keep being involved, keep being involved. When it comes to the local side of Purdue, like West Lafayette, as opposed to the university specifically, and the Democratic Party presence in there, of course, being a college town, it has a lot of Democrats, I see, with the general Palestinian movements, two major paths we can go to with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is the current party in charge, and they provide the means for this genocide.

There is, I suppose, a bit of a debate on whether or not the correct course of action is to seize and supplant the Democratic Party or to abandon them in favor of a new vanguard party. Now, while I personally believe that the seizure and supplanting of the Democratic Party, changing it into an explicitly pro-Palestinian organization, is a more viable option, if the Palestinian movement, and this was discussed at the recent People’s Conference for Palestine, which I attended, decides that the only course of action is to build a vanguard party aside from their own party, I will have no [inaudible 00:56:55] about devoting my full labor to that.

But the point is that if the current political structures, the current city council members who refuse to pass even a milk toast ceasefire resolution, the University Senate members who refuse to heed calls for divestment, those bodies that have the power to move mountains in the situation need to be seized and supplanted. And we need to identify those targets over the summer, which we are doing, we are power mapping, we are finding, okay, these are the people who have voted down a ceasefire resolution, these are the people who have ties to military industrial complex in this way and this way, how can we target them? What specific clauses can we try and activate to back out of some of these contracts, so on and so forth? We are preparing more and more ammo for a complete seizure of the means of genocide as is on our campus.

And again, Purdue specifically, huge military industrial complex campus. Our labs are donated to us from Lockheed Martin, from Northrop Grumman, missiles are made here. The means of this genocide are quite literally on our campus, and they need to be seized and disarmed fully, and we need to do that by making sure we strike precisely, and making sure that we are able to carry this momentum and organize into full labor power. I’ll toss it over to Bill for the next steps on the faculty side, but that’s just the way I see the next steps being for Purdue University.

Bill:

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Arjun. Just two things. The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is already preparing a document, which is basically going to fully endorse and second the demands of the student movement at campus, and specifically around divestment. Because I’ve been in the BDS movement a while, this moment of moving and pushing actually for divestment, more has happened towards divestment in the last six weeks than has happened in 10 years. It’s incredibly critical that we seize the moment of divestment. Just historically, if you remember, it took the BDS movement in South Africa almost 30 years before it actually won. We’re in the early to middle stages of a struggle that we can win, but we cannot let go of the divestment demands on the universities.

And from the union side, I really appreciate what people are saying about broadening out the struggle. The University of California graduate students are on strike right now. They’ve begun a rolling set of strikes, with UAW 4811, basically to respond to the police violence on campus. We need this kind of tactical disruption everywhere there’s a faculty and student union on campuses across the United States. We have to actually use labor power now to shut down campuses in the way that I think Arjun is talking about. So I think the California model here is something that we should be looking to emulate.

I’m a member of a local 67-41, which is the American Association of University Professors, and our plans over the summer and fall are to push for divestment. We’re trying to encourage the American Federation of Teachers to divest from its Israel bonds, and we’re actually trying really hard to push the American University of University Professors to overturn its historical opposition to boycotts of Israeli universities. And we actually think these are big leveraging points, because American administrators always point to the AAUP’s rejection of boycott to reject boycott. So we’re trying to create wider space now for students and faculty, and to use union power to open that further going into the fall. So I think that’s part of how I see things, I hope, unfolding.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Well, again, I’m just so grateful to all of you for your time and for sharing all of that with us. And I just wanted to remind everyone watching live right now that we’ve got another 29 minutes here in the program that we want to focus on questions from you all. If you have them in the live chat, please do send them there. We’ve got a couple so far that we’re going to pose to our panel here.

One that was already sort of addressed was a question about suspensions and potential expulsions, and even criminal charges that students are facing. As we heard our panelists talk about, these are very real. And I would also encourage folks to check out a great report at The Appeal, the magazine The Appeal, where they are tracing the charges that student protestors are facing, many of which, the fate of many of those cases is going to depend on local prosecutors, and The Appeal is trying to track those different charges. And our amazing guest did address in different instances the ways that university administrations are weaponizing the threat of suspension or expulsion on Gaza solidarity encampment organizers, and the heightened stakes of that for international students who could get deported for that. So I just mentioned that to say it was a question that came up from our audience. Our great panelists have addressed it, but if there is room to speak on it more in this last section of the live stream, please feel free to do so.

I want to pose another question here to the whole group, but I want to start with Mark and Bill, and then I want to open it up to Salma, Amy-Tess, and Arjun, because one question that’s come into the live chat is the nature of the corporate university, and the corporate capture of higher education and the role that that’s playing in everything that we’ve been talking about for the past hour. And so, Bill and Arjun mentioned one example of this, we know, for example, that the more institutions of higher ed become dependent on jacking up tuition on students, they become dependent on funding sources outside of state funding, which was really a trajectory we’ve been on since the ’80s, dis-investing publicly from higher education, putting that burden more on the corporate machinations of the universities, but one of the things that that does is it creates weaknesses for the corporate university, and Arjun and Bill mentioned one, that a more corporatized university that is more dependent on outside dollars is more susceptible to bad publicity, and more in desperate need to avoid bad publicity, and that has been incorporated into their tactics on the ground.

And so, I wanted to pose this question to Mark and Bill first, if y’all could talk a little bit about the change in the nature of higher education in this country, and how that you recall that shaping the terrain of the protests in the ’60s and early ’70s, and then how it’s changing the terrain now. And again, we’re going to pose this to the whole panel, so our student and grad student panelists can speak on this as well.

Marc Steiner:

I’ll start quickly and throw it over to Bill. I’m not so sure things have changed that much. In the ’60s, it was this whole analysis and chant about the military-industrial educational complex, and it was real then, it’s real now. And part of it is that, especially in private universities, they don’t get the public funding the public universities get, and even public universities do this as well, they’re reliant on corporate money, they have to have it for research. The military research still supplies huge percentages of funds for the universities to function, whether it’s here in Maryland, whether it’s University of Maryland, or Johns Hopkins University, which is private, they all survive on military industrial money. And I think that is something that is difficult to change, because it goes to the heart of how we support public higher institutions and how much we’re willing to support them.

I’ll give you an old-fogey thing here for a second. When I was at University of Maryland for a brief period before flunking out, tuition was like $500 a semester.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Fuck off. From my generation to yours. Keep going. Pardon my French.

Marc Steiner:

But things have changed drastically now. And so, I think that this is a much larger question than the question of struggles on campus individually, this is a much larger question about how we fund our higher education, and the role of the corporate sector in that education, which has become greater as deregulation has taken place, and as our military industrial complex has grown, not shrunken, but grown. So it’s a huge question, it’s a huge struggle, it cannot be answered easily or quickly.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and one point on that too is, with tuition being so low back in the ’60s and ’70s, you have students who can engage more actively and consistently in direct actions, without having this tens of thousands of dollar anvil hanging over their heads. There is a direct correlation between the threat of debt and paying back that debt, and people’s willingness and ability to put themselves and their academic and professional futures more on the line when you don’t have that many student loans hanging over you. But Bill, I want to get your perspective on this as well, both as someone who’s been in the movement, someone who’s been in higher education for a long time, how do you think the change in higher ed is shaping the terrain here?

Bill:

Well, I think when it comes to Palestine, the influence of private money and donors has played a huge role in the Zionist clampdown. I was at the University of Pennsylvania in September for a Palestinian literature festival, this was before October 7th, and the donors at Penn were pulling money left and right from the university because there were Palestinian writers coming to their campus. They were explicitly Zionist. And they have subsequently helped lead that movement of the Higher Education Commission, they helped get the Penn president fired because she refused to walk a Zionist walk, at least to their standards. She was actually treating Palestinian students terribly, but from the donor’s perspective, she wasn’t doing enough.

And we’re seeing that all across the United States right now, and it is a structural problem, it does have to do with dis-investment and de-investment in public and private education, and opening the spaces for what Isaac Komola at Trinity College calls dark money. It’s Koch brothers money, it’s trustee and donor money, and it’s political money, because it oftentimes brings an explicitly pro-Israel agenda with it. So we’re really living in a matrix of economic dis-empowerment and vulnerability, which has a very specific political agenda.

And if I can make one last point, like the whole Boycott Israeli University movement, which I have been part of, and which is part of the BDS campaign, is about severing those military industrial ties between American universities and Israeli universities, both of which profiteer from genocide. The Technion, which is the leading weapons manufacturing university in Israel, has a partnership with Purdue University, where Arjun is a student. So this is a death-dealing industry, money is literally being passed across the transom between these two campuses. So it’s another way in which I think money functions as an aspect of the struggle that we’re in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much, guys. Well, Salma, Arjun, Amy-Tess, I want to bring y’all in here, as, again, folks from the younger generations going into higher ed in the 21st century, same question. How do you feel that the university and the system of higher ed that we have today, how do you think that is shaping the terrain of struggle that you yourselves are involved in? Does it provide more opportunities for strategic disruption, like y’all have been talking about? Does it provide or impose more barriers to that kind of action that we didn’t have in the past? Anything that you wanted to share on that front? We can go again with Salma, Amy-Tess, and then Arjun.

Salma:

Yeah. So the University of Michigan is a public university, but it is, first and foremost, an investment firm. Like Harvard, Columbia and other elite universities, the University of Michigan has become essentially a hedge fund with a school system attached to it. And university administrators often talk about how the endowment supports academics, because a very, very small percentage of annual investment earnings are put towards academic expenses, but this portion is increasingly small, and has decreased steadily over several decades. And instead of the endowment supporting academics, the university’s academics support the endowment.

And in particular, academics provide the university investment functions with two crucial things, and the first is that it provides them with insider information, and the second is tax exemptions. And it basically provides U-of-M decision makers and [inaudible 01:11:40] essentially a path forward into high finances of power, and it enables the administration to rub shoulders with elites who control vast amounts of wealth. And so, in addition to us being a public university, a lot of their finances are actually very private and-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]

Salma:

Their finances are actually very private. And so, we’ve been trying to discover a lot more regarding the various connections that our university endowment has, but nearly every single FOIA request that we’ve submitted has been denied.

And it has just been increasingly evident that while the university is seen as a public university, it is first and foremost an investment firm. And it is not truly contributing that money that it is receiving back into its students. Instead, it is funneling into these weapons manufacturers, these warmongering companies that is quite literally killing their students’ family members. And it is just insane how they attempt to utilize their funding in this increasingly non-transparent way. And also while suppressing public disclosure laws. So one thing that is evidently clear is that we absolutely do need to target the university endowment, and that can happen through strikes and by shutting down the very functions of the university because appealing to their lack of morals just, unfortunately, has not worked as history has shown. And that is something we are closely paying attention to.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Arjun, Amy Tess, any thoughts on that?

Amytess:

Yeah, if you’ve seen me moving around, it’s because I’m literally writing notes down because I have so much to say on this. And I’ll try to keep it brief. But I’m so glad that you asked this question, especially because being in the UK has sort of expanded my perspective on what the privatization of the university looks like in this context because we’re not facing the same situation as the US when it comes to tuition, or how things are funded. But obviously, this is still a global phenomenon. And so, I want to say a few things.

The first is that while the UK context is different from the US in many ways, when you finally look at the endowments and you look at the investments, you realize that this is all the same fight because Oxford still has money in Elbit, Oxford still has money in Caterpillar. These are all the same investments that are being made. And in fact, Oxford’s endowment is managed in two chunks. One is by a private firm, Oxford University Endowment Management, but then the other is BlackRock, right?

So the connections between the US and the UK are very poignant here. And the same can be said for donors. One of the biggest donors at the University of Oxford is Len Blavatnik, who funds the policy school here of all things, who also, famously, there was an article that came out just last week that he was among the group of donors that was pressuring the NYC mayor to shut down these campus protests, right? He’s British American. So this is a global network that financially, morally, rhetorically, has upheld Israel since its inception.

And that means a few things for us strategically. On the one hand, yes, it makes things harder because we’re facing a global apparatus, we’re not facing our university administrators. But on the other hand, what that does is very effectively blurs the line again, between what the fight at the university is and what the global fight for a free Palestine is which, in my mind, is actually very much a plus. Because what that means is that when people are fighting G4S Security in the US with regards to policing, they’re also fighting the same issue here in the UK. And if we can take down these companies in any which way, then any university is more likely to also want to divest from them.

The same can be said for donors. We have a lot to learn from unions and the rise of strategic corporate research campaigns in understanding how we want to approach this issue. Because if we can’t get to it through our university trustees only, we can get to it through pressuring donors. We can get to it through sabotaging these companies in other ways, and pressuring universities to divest through that route.

But the last thing I’ll say is that I actually think one thing we need to talk about more is how this process of corporatization of universities has led to the precarication of higher education work, which has galvanized higher ed unions, which has then radicalized them to also support. Palestine now. Cannot emphasize enough how tremendous the trade unions support for Palestine has been globally this time around in a way that we have never seen before, particularly in the US. And a big part of that, in my mind, also has to be attributed to on higher ed campuses, the fact that academic workers and adjunct faculty have been dealing with a level of precarity over the last few years that is absolutely unheard of. Unions have been organizing, unions have been doing the work, and that’s why we are seeing now people at the University of California striking. It’s why we’re seeing here, UCU, the faculty union at Oxford. UCU has been on national strikes consistently for the last two years because of the precarity of the sector right now. And that’s why they’re more organized than ever and able to hop in for Palestine.

So I think when we talk about this process, it’s not just Palestine, as you’re saying, it’s the way in which people have been radicalized to fight all of the corporate forces that are pushing Zionism among other agendas. And I think that that’s a boon to our organizing because it unites these issues in a very meaningful way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There’s 1,000 good points in that, but just one that I also wanted to underline there, what Amy Tess is saying is that, so perhaps there’s a correlation between people being more financially, economically secure in their lives, more secure in their jobs, and then more able and willing to fight for political causes they care about. Should make us think a little bit about why the establishment and the capitalist class and our politicians are so hell-bent on making us also financially and economically insecure and the political rewards they hope to reap from that.

But Arjun, I wanted to toss it to you real quick before we do our final question to ask if you had any kind of final thoughts on the sort of corporatization of the university, and the vulnerabilities and barriers that that has posed to y’all in this organizing effort?

Arjun Jenneken:

I mean, with Purdue, where do we begin? Harry Targ, a professor in America’s professor at the university, along with his collaborator, [inaudible 01:18:49] I believe wrote an entire book on it called “From Upton Sinclair’s ‘Goose Step’ to where we are now, the Birth of the Neoliberal University.” Purdue University famously has used things like pointing to its frozen tuition, and others such benefits to say, hey, we are trying to make this as good as you can possible. Just let us do our thing. Let us sell out a bunch of land to military industrial contracts. Let’s go further and further into ties with Lockheed, ties with Northrop, ties with Raytheon, all these incredibly damaging companies.

And then, when you try and push against that, they can very easily say, “Hey, if we don’t do this, we lose all our money. If you don’t do this, we go bankrupt.” Now, that’s entirely a Purdue University choice. They can obviously, choose to partner with different companies, but what they have created a culture where the number one thing that I heard when I was talking to STEM students about this, Purdue University is a STEM focused school. When I was talking to STEM students about this was not about Israel’s right to defend itself, although that did come up. It was not about Hamas, although that did come up. The number one thing is, hey, listen, I get that war is bad, but what can we do about it? This is just how STEM is. Purdue is a STEM school so therefore, it must be connected to the military industrial contract.

And what they failed to conceptualize is how much of a choice that is by the upper administration. How much they have continued to further themselves into the corporatization of the university, selling out to the highest bidder, trying to get more and more involved in the corporate world, trying to go for the big moneymakers. And currently, in the STEM world, that’s semiconductors and weapons. And that’s where Purdue University is heading more and more and more corporatization.

That’s why as Amy Tess said, that’s why unions are going to be so incredibly important in higher education because if there isn’t a labor union and if it’s just up to administrators who do not care about higher ed, who do not answer to any sort of ethics board, do not answer to any sort of code of ethics, they will simply go with the highest bidder regardless of all of the very real concerns to humanity that poses.

Purdue University, as it says right now, and I have no problem saying this, is contributing more to harm and to hurt humanity than to help it. And that should not, of course, be the case for a higher-educated institution, but it is because of the specific policy decisions they have made. And with them using things like frozen tuition, all these things to say, “Hey, we’re in a good spot. We just need money. Just let us make our money the way we want to make it,” they’re using that to obfuscate from the very real harm it’s causing, and we need to address that.

And it’s going to be very hard to address that with a STEM-focused school that doesn’t have labor unions, that doesn’t have protections, doesn’t have groups of people making decisions on ethical guidelines. And instead, just leaves it all up to a board of trustees that can deny professors tenure if they speak out, that can unilaterally punish students for organizing.

The corporatization of university and STEM schools is a insanely huge problem and will contribute further and further if it’s not addressed to the widening and fattening of the greater military-industrial complex. And I just really want to emphasize this point, that the primary role of labor unions in the pro-Palestinian movement is to divest from the military-industrial complex as a whole unilaterally. And that is the only way that we can shift these universities from being a creator of death and destruction to what they should be, which is a place of growth. That’s all I have to say about that though.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, well said, beautifully put as by all of you. And I could genuinely keep this conversation going for three more hours, but I want to be respectful of everyone’s time, especially our panelists, everyone watching, our incredible studio team running this behind the scenes.

So we got just a kind of final lightning round here, and really it’s the question that we try to end every interview with, which is, what can folks out there watching and listening do to help? We are not just passive consumers of news and information. The real news is where information and action meet. And so, folks in the live chat, folks who are watching this, they want to know what they can do to help. As alumni, they are asking, what can we do even if we’re not in our college towns? What can we do as alumni? What can we do as citizens, as members of other labor unions? So, I just wanted to pose that to the group. Again, we’ll start with Salma and go around the table just in this kind of final lightning round, any final words that y’all have and then, any kind of final thoughts that you have for our folks watching and listening about what they can do to support this movement, get involved in this movement and assist in your efforts to pressure your universities to disclose and divest from the Israeli war machine?

Salma:

Yeah. Well, I think the first thing that people can do that’s a pretty easy step, is to follow our socials. Our Instagram account is safeumith, S-A-F-E-U-M-I-T-H. We are posting various ways for people to help out the students who are facing felony charges, including emails, apps, phone calls, and just pressuring our university as a whole. So it’s super crucial to have the broader community gets involved within that framework.

However, on your own individual personal capacity, please join local organizations, unions, whatever it is that is at your fingertips because this is not something that one person can do on their own individually. It is a collective-run movement that requires not only for us to mobilize, but also for us to organize. And that requires us joining these spaces that are trying to truly uphold the principles of the Palestinian movement. So please join them and do your absolute best to stay up-to-date and engage with the students on the ground and any and all groups that are pressuring our US government to stop supplying the Zionist state with weapons and to also apply pressure to the universities that are funding these [inaudible 01:25:28] war companies.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay, we’re rolling to Amy Tess then Arjun, then Bill, go for it.

Amytess:

Yeah, I would say, I mean, I know that the listeners of this show tend to be already pretty engaged, pretty on board with what’s up. And so, given that many of them are probably American, as an American who is now in the UK, what I would say is do your due diligence to understand where the global movement is at.

And so, what’s happening in the UK, we are doing so much work to try and build solidarity with the US and vice versa. And that has been an essential part of the organizing we’re doing, whether it’s at universities, whether it’s through trade unions, or other means. That can start by following us on Instagram it’s OxAct4Pal the number 4, P-A-L, that’s Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. But also, I would highly recommend getting news and following other accounts just about the UK Palestine Solidarity movement in general and Europe as a whole. I think what I’ll do maybe is send you all some handles that you can put in the show notes for when this podcast goes up, just so people can have that.

But then, just emphasizing what Salma said, this isn’t about the student movement, it’s about the movement for Palestine. And so, what everyone needs to do, especially now, especially with what’s happening ain Rafah, there’s really no time to waste. If you haven’t been doing everything in your power to mobilize before, it’s not too late, do it now. Whether that’s getting plugged into your trade union and the efforts that are happening there, whether it’s taking to the streets, I guarantee you that something is happening locally and we need you to do it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Arjun?

Arjun Jenneken:

Absolutely. So I’ll start with the plugs @YDSAPurdue and @SJPPurdue. That’s Young American Socialists of America and Suits for Justice in Palestine at Purdue University specifically. Every time a new update will come on the case, we’ll make sure that YDSA Purdue and SJP Purdue publicize. Anything you can do with student movements, with calls, with helping the students who are threatened, of course, that’s including me and three other students who are facing expulsion charges. YDSA National as a whole has actually been hosting, all throughout this month, every week, a series of calls on national organizing for Palestine. Just yesterday, we had our first call where we had a very talented person speak to a call of, I want to say, 300 or so people teaching them how to submit FOIA requests, how to submit public records requests, how to organize on behalf of that.

We have three more calls coming up. If you just look up YDSA Building Power for Palestine, you can register for them and join these calls about… And if you’re a college student, have a YDSA chapter near you, or have a relatively new chapter, [inaudible 01:28:25] to start one, get involved in our network. We can try and get people to you, have people do calls with you, help you research your university, help you organize on behalf of your university.

And for everybody, in general, just watching this, this is a vague piece of advice, but find the body nearest to you, the organizational body, no matter how small, no matter how irrelevant you think it is, even if it’s just a local dance group to a local labor union find anybody that you can get your hands on and paint them to an explicitly pro-Palestinian stance. Shift the culture in any way possible, any means of publicization, any means of community that you can take and seize, seize, and you paint them as explicitly pro-Palestinian, and in solidarity forever with the liberation of Palestine. This is a fight that will require all of us to make a shift on a cultural level, and it can be done. That’s all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Bill final thoughts from you? Although, I hate that you have to follow these fired up students, but any final thoughts from you, man?

Bill:

It’s not fair, man.

Two plugs and then an idea. If you’re a faculty member, go to www.fjpnetwork.org, which is the website for the National Faculty for Justice in Palestine in the US. You can learn where chapters exist. You may be working at a campus where there is one. Or you can start one, and there’s information there about how to do that.

Second is actually a book plug. I’m reading this amazing book by Maya Wind. I don’t know if you can see it called, “Towers of Ivory and Steel.” It’s a history of Israeli universities and the role they play in settler colonialism and the occupation. It is an amazing book. It’s food for the BDS movement because if you want to know more reasons why you should boycott Israeli universities, how they steal land, how they create weapons of mass destruction, it’s all there. It’s a really brilliant work of scholarship. It also tells you a little bit about the state of the American university and why it’s becoming so pro-Zionist.

And then the last thing is, if you’ve never worked in the BDS movement, the Palestinian BDS movement, it’s a really good time to learn about it and get involved. The beautiful thing about BDS is that anybody can participate if you’re in solidarity with the Palestinians, and particularly if you’re in a workplace. I think what we really need is to push divestment and boycott in every place we work.

If you’re a nurse, if you’re an electrician, if you’re a dock worker, the time is now to stand in solidarity with your Palestinian brothers and sisters. All the major trade unions in Palestine have signed on for BDS. They want workers around the world to use their workers’ power to basically strike with them through the BDS movement.

And, I can recall in the late 1980s when the longshoremen in the United States stopped loading ships to South Africa, it really made a difference. And we’re getting closer to that in the United States. We’re getting closer to that around the world, where global solidarity is being expressed on the ground with people’s hands. So I would say invest yourself in BDS and bring some comrades with you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, yeah. Well, I genuinely cannot thank our incredible panel enough for giving us so much of their time, for walking us, and our viewers and listeners through what’s happening on the ground, giving folks the real news about history happening all around us. And this is not going to be the last time that we do one of these live streams regardless of any ridiculous lies or misrepresentations spread about me or us on the internet, clearly we’re going to keep doing what we do, taking you all to the front lines of struggle so you can hear directly from the people who are involved in the change making that’s happening. And we are going to do whatever we can to empower you to get involved in the struggle wherever you are. So we are going to continue with these live streams. I assure you of that. We want to hear your feedback. We want to hear ideas, questions you want answered on these and other live streams.

But by way of closing us out, I wanted to again, thank our panel, thank everyone for watching. Thank our incredible studio team and everyone in the back room there making this live stream run. And I wanted to thank my man, Mark Steiner, for co-hosting this with me. And Mark, I kind of wanted to toss it to you for some final reflections here. Do you have any final thoughts after what we’ve been talking about here with everyone that you wanted to share before we close out?

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I think that I’ll make it very quick ’cause we’re out of time. But I would say that there’s so much here, and I think that this moment we’re facing in Israel-Palestine, in the Middle East could have a huge effect on the entire planet and on the future of peace. And it could just spread. We’re in a very dangerous moment, I think. And it also, because of the complexities of the American electorate, it could push what I call the neo-fascists into power in America. [inaudible 01:33:52] neoliberals and neo-fascists, but it could push the right into power. And I think that there are a lot of complexities here.

And I think one of the things that heartens me a little not a little a lot, is watching the young people in the Jewish community rise up to say, “We have a different idea of what the future could be, and we stand with an end for this war and the slaughter of Palestinian people and for freedom for all people who live in those borders, whatever the borders are in the holy land.” I think that this is a really important and complex moment.

And I really also want to just thanks the panel. Really, really to the point, articulate, said what had to be said. And once again, in the 1960s at Columbia University or every university in the country, it’s the students who help lead the struggle. And it’s happening again. And it heartens this old man’s soul to watch students take it up and say no to what’s happening in Israel-Palestine at this moment and how our country is complicit in it. So thank you all for your work and for being here today.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, baby.

And this is a final message to all of you watching and listening. What happens next depends on what we all do now.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So whatever you do, do something. And thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing to support us here at The Real News. Thank you for continuing to take the fight wherever it needs to be taken, where you are and around the world.

For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Before you go, I just wanted to ask folks to head on over to therealnews.com/donate, become a donor of our work so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.