The Aftermath

For four days the university watched us grow. On the fifth morning, while the dawn chorus sang, the university’s police raided the encampment and detained thirty-six campers, dewy and fierce in their resistance. On the fifth afternoon, the interim chancellor marched a battalion of police into a crowd of students. He watched idly as the police threw students to the ground by their hair, shoved them into fences, and pepper-sprayed them.

In the aftermath, the university installed a black fence, roughly ten feet tall, around the two lawns where the encampment lived. Around the fence, the university installed generator-powered floodlights to keep the lawns lit up at night. Around the floodlights, the university installed portable surveillance cameras to watch for whatever they thought might come next.

This is the behavior of someone who is haunted. The university is haunted by the encampment. The university is haunted by the apparition of Palestinian resistance in Chapel Hill. It is haunted by tents and song and us. It is haunted by a future where university administration is obsolete, Palestine is free, and peoples everywhere are liberated. The university is afraid, and their fear is motivating, in vain, their attempts to control and quell the people. 

How does one end a haunting? Some might propose an exorcism. For the university, this looks like suspending and banning fifteen students from campus. It looks like closing the Campus Y, a hub of student organizing. It looks like running up the “security” costs to justify reallocating 2.3 million from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to “public safety” (though we know DEI initiatives will not liberate us). It looks like the banning of flags at commencement ceremonies and threats of more arrests. It looks like doubling down on a School of Civic Life and Leadership that promises to counterbalance radical indoctrination.

The university will try anything to purge the spirit of resistance from campus, but we know that physical barriers and honor code violations will only galvanize more support and force the resistance to be creative in finding new ways to freedom.

The more reasonable solution to end a haunting: help the lost soul find peace. Yet justice would be a prerequisite for that, and the university still has not granted amnesty to protestors, disclosed its divestments, or divested from the American–Israeli war machine.

So the university will remain haunted, constantly looking over its shoulder at the growing number of CCTV panels, convincing itself that it caught a glimpse of a kaffiyeh in the corner of a screen. They will bloat the campus police, then create a task force on unlawful campus protest. Before long, the entire university will be a negative image of the encampment: a place of division, control, emptiness, surveillance.

In the meantime, we will not stop and we will not rest because the many I’s that make up the We know when to step up and step back so that we stay on the move. Those of us still permitted on campus will look at the fence and see that the university is still mowing the lawn within the barricade. We will laugh at the petty attempt at order and normalcy, then turn on our heel and vanish. 

Isaac O’Connor is a librarian and graduate student at UNC–Chapel Hill. Isaac encourages you to join the struggle for a free Palestine and liberation for oppressed people everywhere.