Whose University?

The Gaza Solidarity Encampments appearing across U.S. college campuses recall those important student protests of the past, such as the student movements against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, and the Iraq invasion. Like those previous efforts, the Gaza campus protests include teach-ins and guest lectures, often with faculty and noted public intellectuals joining the cause. Within a day or two of a camp’s creation you would find a library with a number of radical texts, shelves filled with books on the history of Palestine, capitalism, policing, and imperialism. Students named their libraries too. The most common library names were a People’s Library and Refaat Alareer Memorial Library.

At the entrance to an encampment, you’d most likely be greeted by a sign that read, “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” Next to this sign would be a list of the students’ demands to the university. These demands were decided by the students democratically and were subject to revision at the encampment’s daily assemblies. It’s clear, however, that the student movement coalesced around three main demands: disclose, divest, and amnesty, that is, disclose current investments, divest from companies tied to the current war being waged by Israel, and grant amnesty to all the student protestors involved in these protests.

One would think that the student demands were radical, given the extreme repression faced—police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion. Ultimately, these demands were quite reasonable: transparency and agency. Where and on what is tuition money being spent? Students have insisted that their university not put their tuition money toward war. Students are asking for a voice in university decision-making processes, a say in how the university is organized and how it is run. If this description rings familiar, it is because this is what we call democracy. But why would student demands for greater democracy in the university be met with repression and widespread political crackdown? To answer this question, we need to get clear on how the university works.

Students, as we all know, put forward a sum of money in exchange for a product down the line, a diploma. The contemporary or “corporate” university transforms students into worker–consumers, where managerial attitudes are fostered through alienated education work. That is, students see themselves as patrons of their university even as they labor on behalf of the university. With the Gaza protests, students feel justified in their demands because they pay tens of thousands to attend their universities. They argue that their financial investment in their school in the form of tuition grants them a say in the university’s functioning. In other words, if a student pays vast sums of money to attend their school, the school has an obligation to be receptive to their wishes and demands. Unfortunately for students, the university has other, more powerful customers: donors and trustees. 

The students demanded a product in line with their values. The university was not only unwilling but also unable to give them this. Why? Because, despite their nonprofit status, universities are increasingly run like capitalist enterprises,1 and capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic. Let me explain.

Universities responded to declining state funding and bipartisan austerity by installing a class of managers, specifically administrators, presidents, and trustees, to oversee and increase their capital. Many techniques are employed to achieve this aim—tuition hikes (Newfield), business partnerships, casualization of teaching labor (“adjunctification”; see Bousquet)—but what’s relevant for us to make sense of the demands of the protestors is the universities’ usage of endowment funds. 

Universities invest tuition money (along with other monies raised) into companies that offer the highest rates of return. The investment of universities’ funds transforms tuition and other revenue into capital. 

Tuition money thus becomes additional money in the form of interest;2 M becomes M′ (Marx, 461). Here, we have the general formula for interest-bearing capital: M–M′. Universities, insofar as they treat their endowments as capital, act as money capitalists. They thus find themselves subject to the dictates of capital. Capital says grow or perish!3 So, the money capitalist will work to realize M′ without any qualms as to how it is attained, whether it be through genocide or war.

The endowment portfolio of universities rendered their own students complicit in a genocide, and students rightly rejected such complicity. But to make themselves not complicit in this war would require the complete blockage of M into M′, the prevention of the transformation of their tuition money into interest by means of war. The student protestors believed they had a right over how and if M should turn into M′. The students were threatening the possibility of capital accumulation. The boards of trustees and administrators could not have this. This is the line we are not permitted to cross. But how exactly does this relate to democracy?

Under capitalism, social wealth (i.e., profit) is controlled by a class of individuals, namely capitalists. As Marx tells us, this is rooted in property relations. Since capitalists own the means of labor, they have a property claim on the final product produced by those means of labor. This means that although workers—in this case faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates4—produce the commodities society needs to survive, capitalists own these commodities and the profit that comes with their sale. As a result, capitalists, rather than workers, control where profit is spent and invested. Let’s return to the student protestors.

What these protests and their subsequent crackdowns revealed was the antagonism between capitalism, free expression, and democracy. Free speech and academic freedom of students and professors will be tolerated unless such speech and pedagogy threaten the movement of M to M′. To the admins, the presidents, and boards of trustees, greater democracy in the university threatens the increased accumulation of endowment funds. They themselves freely admit this. In 2020, after Columbia College students passed a divestment referendum on Israel, then–President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger said, “Endowment funds are not decided by referendum but through a process involving the University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing” (Noxon).

The protests also made clear, perhaps to the dismay of some faculty or graduate students, that we in the academy are workers. Although our labor keeps the university running, we do not have a right to how the university invests the profit we ourselves produce through our pedagogy. When we overstep these bounds, university administrators, trustees, and presidents, as overseers or managers of the university’s capital, will not hesitate to bring in the wrath of the state and the police.5

What the students demanded was a fundamental change to the university structure, one that threatened its status as a site of capitalist accumulation. They were demanding, albeit not explicitly, that their universities not be run like capitalist enterprises, that they instead become sites of shared governance and therefore truly democratic. Furthermore, the protestors disagreed with their student status. For these students, the tuition and labor they provide to the university guarantees them not only a diploma, but a say in how the university functions, from hiring to investing. By demanding transparency and divestment, students are asking to be involved in the organization of the conditions of their learning. The students understand that their complicity in Palestinian genocide was forced on them by this corporate model of education that not only exploits academic labor but also allocates funds toward Imperial Zionism.

It’s no surprise then that every encampment had daily teach-ins and libraries. Students were putting into practice their vision of a new university, one that is truly responsive to the demands and wishes of its students. For this type of university to exist, it would need to be truly democratic. It seems, then, that by connecting their encampments with their own visions of pedagogy, the students did know what was at stake in their protest.

We watched the encampments be brutally cleared by police. At my campus, Columbia, the police were called in twice. My grandmother’s blanket along with many other students’ belongings are now in the possession of the NYPD. Since the last round of arrests, our campus has been closed except to a few—students who live in on-campus dorms, faculty, and those who provide “essential services.” Many graduate students like me are not yet allowed back on campus. The previously occupied lawn is now empty. The only evidence of the encampment is the yellow rings left on the grass from the tents.

As I spoke with others in my union, it was easy to feel despondent. We have collectively been grappling with the question: How can we achieve our demands given the ability (and willingness) of our universities to suppress our speech with police force? We can do so through solidarity, through local and mass movements. We must also organize and build militant rank-and-file unions. We need an organized mass base to successfully build power and fight back.

As I’m writing this, the University of California schools are holding a strike authorization vote. They are voting to strike in solidarity with Palestine. If the vote passes, this would possibly be the first political strike since the passing of Taft–Hartley. This, in my mind, is the path forward.

Sara Wexler is a PhD student in philosophy at Columbia University and a member of UAW Local 2710. She is primarily interested in Marxism and the intersections of philosophy and political economy.