In defence of students

STUDENT protests, particularly but not only in the US, are showing how totalitarian universities have become.

I’m not using the word lightly. Students are facing suspension, disciplinary sanctions, loss of scholarship, expulsion, police violence, eviction and arrest for insisting on an end to Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and both university and state complicity.

These young, brave and clear-eyed souls are absolutely right and the moral fearlessness of their generation is inspiring. They are taking the risks demanded by these times.

Meanwhile, an older generation holding the reins of power everywhere has largely denied them support – governments and donors have warned universities, and universities have found or invented rules to repress.

The encampment of campuses is a fight that brings student politics up against university administrations, their corporate entanglement and logics, and their defence of the status quo. This is particularly true for the US, which is damningly guilty of continuing to send billions in military and construction hardware to Israel for use in its occupation.

Students are calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). This movement to break the interlock of capitalism, militarism, state power and universities for supporting, benefiting from or staying silent about violations of international law has been growing over 20 years.

Now, the civic courage of the young is the historical moment’s moral compass.

Facing the radical politics that comes from "critical thinking" – the mantra of higher education over the past two decades – universities are instead turning to censorship and bureaucratic domination. They are warning that university spaces are private property in which students have no independence or rights, including the right to protest.

This is also happening here. Student politics are censored and surveilled, and students are allowed no autonomy. Such a pedagogy of obedience produces docility and fear, and recognition that the jurisdiction of university space is nowhere their own. At Spelman College’s graduation, Prof Ruha Benjamin nailed it when she said to graduating students that “Black and brown faces in high places are not going to save us.”

What is occurring on campuses is also occurring online, the primary mode of communication among the young. Social media is a calculated mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In one, a population is controlled through suppression, silencing and surveillance, and, in the other, through distraction and entertainment. If he had imagined such technology, one or the other would have added algorithms which filter out critical journalism, skew news, make timelines an information bubble and depoliticise.

Twitter has been reported by numerous media outlets, from Al Jazeera to CNN, to comply with most government takedown requests. On December 21, 2023, Human Rights Watch published a report which observed that, “Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media.” The report documented cases from over 60 countries of peaceful content unduly suppressed and Meta’s failure to meet its human-rights due-diligence responsibilities through unfair restrictions, suspensions, disabling and shadow banning of accounts.

Facebook immediately and permanently blocked my nearly 80-year-old mother for posting credible analysis from The Intercept about the New York Times’s biased reporting of the genocide in Gaza. In this textbook example, gone are a Caribbean grandmother’s networks and her social lifeline. A Muslim friend had to deliberately add cute cats to her posts on pro-Palestine mobilisation for them to appear on anyone’s timeline as entertaining, rather than political.

These are the educational, military, and technological relations in which a protesting generation is coming of age.

To quote Henry Giroux in an April 26, 2024 article in CounterPunch, “We live in an age of increased disasters and encroaching fascism. This is a historical moment marked by a systemic attempt by an emerging authoritarianism to disable language and dissent of any substantive meaning, remove actions from the grammar of moral witnessing, and disassociate power from institutional justice.”

Students may also be prepared to protest because an older generation (dominated by men) has failed their intelligence and expectations, leaving them debt, unemployment, climate crisis, social and economic insecurity, corruption and class inequality, violence, LBGT (lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgendered) exclusion, and more.

All educational institutions should see the signs of a globalised era shifted toward the right, one in which hostility to student protest is undermining the very purpose of university life – which is to discover how knowledge can be empowering and transformational.

My solidarity to students determinedly applying their education to today's real world.