Even Princeton

The university, today, is a shadow of the state—it has health centers, grocery stores, zoning mandates, investment firms, economic hierarchies, racialized surveillance, police forces, and government. So, so much government. It is an echo of a reality more textured, more classed, and typically far more violent. It was then disorienting to watch the grounds of my alma mater be stormed on the morning of April 18 as Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, authorized the raid on a group of students camped out on the South Lawn who were simply asking for the university to engage them in negotiations around disclosure and divestment from the genocidal regime of Israel.

The university, though it may be a world, is a very small and extraordinarily insular one. Like many peers, I had left one and landed at another private higher ed institution; we knew the rhythms of a Columbia, a Yale, a Princeton. On the evening of the 19th, a group of us who had been organizing under the fledging banner of Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest turned to our Slack channel with a shared hope: we can make a camp here too.

Banned from my campus, I write this dispatch on Princeton’s Popular University for Gaza from afar, navigating the emails of an administrator apologizing for our “treatment” and another hell-bent on putting us on the Terrorist Watchlist. This, I’ll say, is “universitality,” a contained system of bureaucratic etiquette in the face of severe punishment, administrative pedantry in the face of no due process. At Princeton, the days since April 25, when our “liberated zone” came to life, have exposed forms of violence unlike those experienced by our peers who were batoned, flung downstairs, and dragged from a tent in the middle of the night. Princeton Campus Police, “P-Safe,” carry no guns by university regulation; a team of “Free Speech Deans” attends every event that might “cause controversy,” just to make sure we are fully aware of our rights, the constant reassertion of which does the trick in putting even the boldest chant leader on edge. 

Indeed, Princeton terrorizes and represses through more intravenous bureaucracies. I could write here about the email sent on April 24 to the whole school on the total acceptability of protest, while openly prohibiting the pitching of tents and tent-like structures, or the fact that two students were arrested seven minutes into the launch of our encampment and given just fifteen minutes to pack before eviction, or how they sent around health, food, and environmental safety inspectors just to help us, or how I was arrested, detained, and charged in the diversity, equity, and inclusion office. Every one of these ills was promptly followed up from a cohort of deans citing the RRR, the “Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities.” “2.6.7,” they’d say, when I asked, “Can I keep my on-campus job?”; “1.2.3,” they’d say, when we said, “Free Palestine.”

Yet the procedural terror the university employs stirred up an unusual foe in its student body this April. When we started to plot out a camp, we were aiming for sixty people. The number felt aspirational, despite its smallness. As we began to recruit, evening after evening on the endless train of subcommittee Zooms, largely constituted by the same ten people, we all said, “Princeton is different,” “Students are apathetic here,” “Students don’t like protest here.” We set our expectations so low, so shamefully low. As an academic, as a committed pedagogue, this is my biggest regret from my time at camp: I grossly underestimated my students’, my peers’, and my faculty’s ability to be as inspired and enraged as I was in the face of a mass genocide, and their resolve to act wholly, ecstatically, and courageously toward ending it. The first hour of camp found over a hundred on the small lawn of McCosh Courtyard, and by that afternoon, we had hit four hundred. It didn’t feel like Princeton; it felt like a world.

I had joked, though in some earnestness, that at Princeton I was reliably the most radical person in a room, the only place outside of my family’s dinner table where I was the token anarchist. And still, as I led a training in a packed apartment off campus on how to hold your fists when getting arrested to make it most comfortably through your detention, I felt unexceptional. We were not establishing a campus left, but surfacing it; we were not educating, we were organizing. 

And still, we hurt each other regularly. There were the midnight removals from Signal chats; the constant punctuation of “in good faith” knowing that we were, in fact, thinking and feeling quite the opposite; the endless harping on transparency. I told a friend often, as if it were a revelation, that “the hardest part should not be us fighting against each other, it should be us fighting against the administration.” Yet I see now that in large part, this was because there was no “us,” no “we”; in the fractured site of the university’s uncoalesced, blighted left, its pedantically separated cohort groups, we were coherent as a collective only under the banner of a free Palestine. We were hurtling toward solidarity before having a chance to learn each other’s names, liberating zones as a first date. Such febrile coming-togethers are what make the first leg of a movement its roughest stretch. We all remember Columbia ’68, but there was a Columbia in ’67 too. 

This is not about hearts or minds. If the second video of a child being pulled out from the rubble of her home, clutching on to whatever toy her parents, now also murdered, had given to her for her last birthday, did not shake you, a set of tarps patchworked around the groomed lawns of the Ivy League was certainly not going to move you an inch. The camps exist to stain the irenic facade of the university, to refuse negotiations on the established terms, to forge avenues and make precedent anew for our own demands, and to force witness—as the cops nab our peers, as they muck up our spaces, as they evict us from our homes—to the collectivity of all our struggles. This is not about hearts or minds, but about acknowledging that our education, both at the university and beyond its gaze, has manifested into a set of ethical practices and actions. About building pressure, taking risks, throwing away futures, burning bridges, escalating until the university sees that a generation has spoken, and it has said, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

A favorite story of mine to explain the peculiarity of this campus: on November 15, 1969, during the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, a group of SDS organizers held a banner saying, “Even Princeton.” So incisive, so clear. I remember saying that when we pitched our first tents, it would be our Even Princeton moment, a form of disruption that normalized and sanctioned a gentlemanly movement. More clearly, I see now that Princeton’s “evenness” was not a product of how far a movement has come, but of how blind its own students have been to the blistering potential of their peers. We had spent the first days of organizing putting together a set of ways our actions followed university policy, proving how decorously we had acted, how faithfully we could be seen as equals at the bargaining table—but what we didn’t account for was that the minute we inaugurated our Popular University for Gaza, the rules were ours to make. What could the RRR say about the seventeen students committed to an indefinite hunger strike until divestment demands are met? How could free speech orthodoxy curtail the graduating student giving up their own commencement for an opportunity to negotiate with admin?

Next time it won’t be Even Princeton, maybe it will be Also Princeton, and maybe it will be not Princeton at all. Because maybe next time, the campus won’t be the final phase of the movement, but from where it goes out. Maybe next time these are not separated zones of solidarity, but worlds acting together. No shadow, no core. This is, most acutely, what we mean when we say that we are not freeing Palestine, but that Palestine is freeing us—that the movement for Palestinian liberation has invited us all to think beyond the social and geographic regimes that prescribe our division, to think in the spirit of solidarity in its todays and tomorrows. Free Palestine, free Palestine, free Palestine.

Aditi Rao is a third-year graduate student in Princeton’s Classics Department where she works on the scar tissue of Indian and Greek encounters in the Seleucid worlds and the construction of anti-Indo-European philologies. She is based in Philadelphia, where she is an organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation and divestment from Israel, which sits in solidarity alongside her work on graduate unionization, prison abolition, and demilitarization.