Notes from the Popular University

Of a Morning at the Popular University

On the sixth day of the Popular University at Montréal/Tiohtià:ke, campers are woken up early as anxieties rise about an upcoming Zionist counterdemonstration. Campers file to the cafeteria tent, which sits under a young apple tree just beginning to blossom.

In response to the encampment’s call for support, a large crowd has amassed outside the barricades, intent on drowning out the jeers and chants from the Zionists. Families, faculty, artists, politicians, cegep students, a line of Independent Jewish Voices and Palestinian and Jewish Unity members, populate the field. CKUT, the campus–community radio at McGill, has set up a table, where they broadcast live almost each day. As students and prominent community figures pass by, they are called in for interviews. Following her speech to the crowd, Mohawk activist and artist Ellen Gabriel is interviewed. She speaks on colonial violence: “I’m here because there is so much injustice that has happened to the Palestinians over the last seventy-six years, as Indigenous people we know what genocide is, we are survivors of genocide, we know what it looks like” (“Off the Hour”).

As the interview wraps up, Nima Machouf, a leftist political figure in Montréal, passes by. She is interviewed for her work on the freedom flotilla, which has been shipping necessary supplies to Gaza since 2008, aimed at bringing attention to and ending Israel’s seventeen-year-long siege. In my years of organizing panels, speaker series, and public lectures, I know the difficulty of coordinating events from within the institution—bureaucratic barriers, honoraria, scheduling challenges, the list goes on. Here, at the Public University, in less than an hour, what was de facto a community dialogue with experts on Indigenous resistance and anti-colonial action fell into place.

On the Zine Table

At the anarchist table nearby, a spread of zines on direct action and organizing tactics is laid out. I pick up Defending the Camp, a scan of which can be seen below. There has been a proliferation in the sharing of community-centric documents, zines, and learning materials since the beginning of the encampments. Out of the occupation of university campuses across North America / Turtle Island, there has emerged a public intellectual culture that would put university efforts at community engagement to shame. There has emerged a rapid and decentralized printing press publishing on subjects from theory to history to praxis, forming the canon for a movement that is both intellectual in its aims at public education and material in its form and in its demands.

The infrastructure for this kind of knowledge-sharing preexists this movement. Our comrades with close relationships to their local print shops and obsessions with digital file storage know this well. But the immediacy with which the zines have spread from camp to camp means that lessons and strategies are being diffused and employed as the movement itself unfolds. Cheers ring out across the camp as new encampments are announced, popping up across the continent. The zines coming out of these encampments share vital organizing information. They tell of a long history of student revolt and the lessons learned therein. These lessons inform the organizing practices of new mobilizations as they come into being. From First We Take Columbia, first circulated by hand at the Columbia encampment in New York on Sunday, April 21, 2024:

From To Them, We Are All Outside Agitators, on distinguishing between student and nonstudent demonstrators at the CUNY encampment, “Students did not win in ’68 by turning away the people of Harlem who threatened to storm the gates of Columbia, and neither will we now.”

The zines, all published within the span of a month, form a network of informal citations. Flood the Gates: Escalate cites from To Them, We Are All Outside Agitators: “Enough with de- escalation trainings; Where are the escalation trainings!” Defending the Camp, a report from the University of Urbana–Champaign Gaza Solidarity Encampment, cites from Lessons on Taking the School on Cal Poly Humboldt: “If you build it, they will come.”

In Our Lifetime

In the injunction filed by McGill University against the John and Jane Does of the encampment (Province of Québec, District of Montréal, No. 500-17-129903-244, 4–5), it is referred to as being “tantamount to a small village,” with “designated areas such as laundry, toilets, cafeteria, clothing store, first aid, a library, and press room.” Of the campers, the injunction states, “McGill is not able to identify any individual, or even designated groups of individuals, who exercise control over the encampment” (4–5). This proves to be problematic in court—the judge requires that the McGill lawyers present some real defendant against whom the injunction can be levied. As of the final day of writing this, the second attempted injunction against the encampment has been rejected. In the Québec superior court judgement, the collective mobilizations of universities across the continent is named, as well as the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, hurt, and displaced by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip (2).

It is the very principles of the encampment—that it is an uncomfortable, makeshift, muddy, nonhierarchical, expansive entity—that make it both ungraspable and disruptive to the institution. The institution that the encampment demands disclose and divest. No more research on bombs that burn infants alive (Quiazua and Corbeil). No more investments in companies supplying the active genocide against the Palestinian people (“War Crimes Exposed”). The act of encampment imposes itself materially on the grounds, posing a real threat. Not to the students, to the dean, or to the pristine lawn, but rather to the continued viability of an institution intent on repressing the revolutionary buds of thought and action that spring from it and make the imperative—in our lifetime.

J. Doe is a student living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Her research takes place at the intersection of affect and psychoanalysis, with a particular fascination at the body and its holes. She is interested in revolution, psychoanalytic practice, and the pursuit of a life of leisure.

Works Cited

1. “Off the Hour.” 2024. CKUT, May 3. https://ckut.ca/playlists/shows/18642.
2. Quiazua, Nicolas, and Laurent Bastien Corbeil. 2012. “From the Lab to the Battlefield.” McGill Daily, November 26. https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/11/from-the-lab-to-the-battlefield-2.
3. “War Crimes Exposed: Accidental Photo Leak Reveals Israeli Army’s Use of Banned Thermobaric Bombs in Gaza.” 2023. Watan, November 6. https://www.watanserb.com/en/2023/11/06/war-crimes-exposed-accidental-photo-leak-reveals-israeli-armys-use-of-banned-thermobaric-bombs-in-gaza.