Against Diversity

A History of DEI

Before Trump’s comprehensive termination of DEI by executive orders, university DEI initiatives were fast becoming a cottage industry of corrective training to rehabilitate the tenets of racial liberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism. Its corporate management of difference partitions the political into programmatic silos based on identities that tend to uphold market interests and the status quo. University DEI is part of an expansive administrative infrastructure that builds on the American company’s Protestant work ethic, spirit of racial uplift, and cost-and-benefit calculus. The professionalization of the DEI field surged in the new millennium as companies picked up on its profitability as a core business function. According to a McKinsey report, diverse companies in terms of racial and ethnic makeup tend to have greater financial returns that are above industry medians.4 Chief diversity officer positions sprouted on executive boards that then made their way to university administration, post-2020, when widespread racial and social unrest catalyzed DEI’s urgency and relevancy.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, digital training became increasingly common for diversity consciousness-raising. The absence of faculty or scholarly work is part of its design. In fact, university DEI capitalizes on the divestment of academic programs or research focused on structural critique and collective action, like that attempted at Dartmouth. The preponderance of toothless diversity platitudes and dialogues that have no real interest in faculty expertise in the area or in cultures that have been suppressed due to structural inequity keeps its mission alive. DEI entities are triage centers to address diversity concerns in earnest, including those articulated by students for bad treatment. But addressing the cause of the mistreatment is not its charge. If the lack of diversity in the room is a symptom of a greater problem, the solution is simply adding more Black and Brown bodies. Driven by numbers, it is primarily invested in metrics as a measure of success even if the intellectual, curricular, or social fabric of the university remains unchanged and, worse still, deteriorates.

Faculty-initiated efforts like the RMS Consortium are an alternative to DEI and a small investment for faculty and students to do their work without being singled out as scholars who are at risk or in various states of distress and exclusion. More importantly, it is driven by the urgency of interanimating conversations about US racial politics, decolonial struggles, and genderqueer futurity, especially with the stunning rise of racial and gender violence both domestically and around the world.5

By broadening the terms of diversity beyond the United States, RMS viewed racial silos and single-issue identities championed by DEI as well as conventional academic programs as inadequate for understanding the world. Diversity was not a corrective slogan to right the wrong but the outcome of an intellectual community made of many scholar misfits and experts whose unconventional backgrounds and divergent aspirations also made Hanover, New Hampshire, more livable for everyone. While DEI promoted racial respectability and gender conformity by way of embracing all categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer in a normative and identitarian way, RMS imbricated genderqueerness in racial histories and structural violences that DEI cannot or is simply not set up to account for. RMS’s unique formation at Dartmouth opened a way to engage the suppressed undercurrents of institutional tensions around race, gender, and sexuality.

RMS’s cancellation and DEI’s dismantlement in the MAGA-billionaire antieducation complex are unforced errors by the liberal academy that has been self-corporatizing and relinquishing its scholarly and moral positions to the Right. The twilight of intellectual vitality on our campuses is a kind of slow death by bureaucracy.6 DEI’s ostensible facility as the institution’s legal scaffolding (from potential lawsuits), on the one hand, and virtue signaling, on the other, is hardly to be celebrated. Even as DEI’s power is much exaggerated in current debates, it is very much a part of the university’s increasingly onerous and soulless proceduralism. Its prefectorial fervor favors surveillance by surveys and forms and new codes of conduct, constraints, and crackdowns that are robotic and antiseptic. Perhaps the problem isn’t DEI per se as a core administration function but the corporatization of diversity, equity, and inclusion into a punchline and a punch card.

For the reasons aforesaid, administrative professions of diversity are almost always different from scholarly critiques about structural disparity and inequality. It is a missed opportunity that administrative DEI does not engage scholars in the field while leading the public discourse about related issues. For scholars and intellectuals in the field, diversity is not a new method but an invitation to think and teach with difference in mind, whether it has to do with pedagogy and praxis or choice of subject and object. Diversity is a way to name and play with different modes of thinking such as intersectionality, assemblage, and constellation. The theoretical modalities proposed by Black feminists, critical race theorists, and Indigenous scholars help us to better understand the world and to propose ways to improve it. That these histories and visions of diversity are in a different universe than administrative DEI tell us something about the bifurcation of our educative missions in the same university.

As the Right continues its termination of DEI by executive order, it behooves us to think about what they are ultimately after and how their objection to diversity is a continuation of liberalism’s punitive stance against the revolutionary projects by the Left. Besides, why should American small-mindedness and administrative pettiness (whether liberal or right-wing) dictate our pedagogy and frames of reference? Rather than be led by their terms of execution, we need to clarify why it is imperative to be against diversity as long as it is an administrative script for the deradicalization or deracialization of identity and difference. This is larger than taking a stance against diversity’s performative correction of racial mistreatment, retraining of supposedly bad behavior, or facile celebration of ethnic inclusion. It has to do with the existential threat against the university made manifest by the moral frictions of academic solidarity in times of war. Gaza is key to that fight and points yet again at the corporate bankruptcy of university diversity as an idea.

The Academic Moral Crisis over Israel-Palestine

As of October 2025, the death toll in Gaza is fifty-six times more than those killed in the Hamas militant attack on October 7, 2023.7 The disparity in casualties is itself a mind-boggling statistic. Yet, the humanitarian calls for ceasefire in Gaza have been continually and singularly blocked by the United States as the world bears witness to Israel’s formidable military force pummeling Gaza to the ground. As the relentless violence continues over there, university presidents over here are interrogated by Congress about antisemitism on their campuses. Three women presidents (from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania) were targeted for the public scolding, and by January 2024, two had resigned in response to the highly organized pressure.8 The presidents are faulted for not being empathetic enough to a line of MAGA questioning that falsely asserted that student protestors are pervasively violent or calling for violence against Jews. Defending the First Amendment’s protections for speech had little traction. Claudine Gay’s departing words from the Harvard presidency sounded the alarm of “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society” starting with “education and expertise” to desensitize the public of propaganda.9 Sure enough, the Trump administration has moved to dismantle the Department of Education a year later in March 2025.10

The proxy battle by MAGA Republican propagandists weaponized antisemitism for their unvarnished attack on higher education, conflating it with “anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality” as the same “ideological problem.” Everything apparently is antisemitic. To demonstrate their “moral clarity,” the House united Republicans and Democrats alike to pass a nonbinding resolution that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”11 The congressional virtue-signaling hearing is a game of political brinkmanship and a corporate takeover under the guise of antisemitism. Remarkably, the collusion of politicians and the billionaire donor class applies both performative and administrative pressure to move the goal posts ever further to the right. As the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee writes, “The congressional hearing recapitulated months of distortions propagated by donors and lobbying organizations seeking to control what can be studied at US universities.”12 With breathless righteousness and re-educative fervor, the MAGA-inspired apparatchiks target liberal arts educators as lacking empathy and moral courage even as they have for years kowtowed to Trump’s antisemitism, racist demagoguery, and sexism.

“Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them,” Gay notes even as she is herself afflicted by the American Achilles’ heel around the matter of Israel’s militarized settler colonialism and genocide of the Palestinian people.13 With breathtaking fervor, American universities have justified activating outsize campus police and administrative force against student protestors within their own communities, sometimes to the opposition of the local police force who believe in the students’ right to protest. Many students have been arrested based on the triggering misconceptions that their calls for the boycott, divestment, and sanction of the state of Israel are an actual threat of violence. Consequently, any speech act calling for Palestinian liberation, including the word intifada, which is linked with civil uprising or postcolonial struggle, is willfully misread as a call for “the genocide of Jews” in the US context.14

At Barnard College, a short statement written by women’s, gender, and sexuality studies faculty expressing solidarity with their students afflicted by the longue durée of “disturbing events” in Gaza prompted an unprecedented censorship and a fly-by-night revision of policies to curtail “political activity.”15 The irony of a historical women’s college acting swiftly against its distinguished women’s, gender, and sexuality studies faculty leading the charge against patriarchal imperialism and femonationalism is not lost on anyone. The blatant manipulation of process and policymaking in the university, including the undemocratic dismantling of faculty governance, is symptomatic of broader trends in the United States that Trump’s America only intensified.

In times of crisis, emergency prerogatives to act morally are in fact often immoral and unjust. The most chilling case in recent memory is in the aftermath of 9/11 when academic repression and Islamophobia were quickly and widely sanctioned in the name of national interest. Consequently, long-held biases are either cynically or inadvertently activated through all apparatuses of state and administrative control.16 The rights particularly of Black and Brown people are stripped away, and due process is either curtailed or denied. This form of surveillance produced in collusion with liberalism seeks to police rather than liberate political speech and academic freedom. In other words, many structures of liberalism already tend toward academic repression and foretell how Palestine activates that which is imminent in a system of academic social reproduction.17

Additionally, US legal scholars like Paul R. Verkuil raise severe caution about the lack of policymaking accountability and the rise of the administrative state that thrives on cynical manipulation, neoliberal corporate malfeasance, and weakening internal checks.18 If death by proceduralism or “process as weapon” was once the favored corporate method, authoritarian executive power is now the order of the day from Hungary to China to the United States of America. That our university is vulnerable or open to such a playbook should concern us all. The once infamous dictum calling out the cynicism of “process wars” seems quaint in contrast: “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.”19 The university now seems to say, “I’ll write the substance, I’ll write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.” (This predates Trump’s second term in office.)

Barnard’s case is not exceptional and follows in the coattails of Columbia’s unilateral revision of university event policies days before suspending two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. In both cases, the university was suddenly endowed with the sole discretion of determining what are sanctions against noncompliant student organizations, what is permissible speech, and who gets to define what is political. The retrenchment of academic freedom and faculty governance, as well as pedagogical practice deemed radical or politicized, marks a disturbing alignment between the corporate university and administrative authoritarianism. It also marks the return of McCarthyism-style (or Hooverist) persecution that the Trump regime only hastened. The latter is a new form of anti-intellectual, political repression where anti-Zionism and antisemitism are conflated and weaponized by solipsistic racists, rich donors, and opportunistic politicians against supposedly subversive people of color, women, queer people, and American Jews who are organizing against the colonial settler state of Israel.

Meanwhile, an actual genocide is happening in Gaza, the “world’s largest open-air prison” the size of Las Vegas with thrice its population.20 The Barnard statement continues, “We support the Palestinian people who have resisted settler colonial war, occupation, and apartheid for over 75 years, while deploring Hamas’s recent killing of Israeli civilians. As decolonial feminist scholars and educators, we encourage our students to learn about the larger historical context of US-backed and financed Israeli attacks on Gaza and to engage with a range of voices and perspectives analyzing the horrific genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing that we are now witnessing.”21 The censored statement was republished on a noninstitutional web page with resources for further education, historical context, and advocacy of academic freedom and is now part of a broader website, WhatHappenedToBarnard.

As is clear, the university is not immune to these tensions and conflicts. In fact, it is summoned by powerful forces to be the problem’s alibi, janitor, and fixer.22 Columbia University is the most prominent test case, as it reached a $221 million settlement with the Trump regime to “restore fairness, merit, and safety in higher education.”23 The agreement includes corrective action to address a long list of alleged “discriminatory practices,” from civil rights violations against Jews to antitrans legislation couched as the “privacy, dignity, and fairness in women’s sports, programing, facilities, and housing.”24 Bizarrely, the university has easily “capitulated” to Trump’s MAGA demands, leading some to question if it used the political pressure as a cover to enact what it has not been able but wanted to do. To put it differently, is liberalism’s racism and sex panic at the heart of this capitulation (or cooperation)? Its vulnerability and cravenness are signified by a willingness to stand down and step back at the first sign of authoritarian politicking and baseless crackdown. It raises many questions around the possibilities and limits of academic solidarity, integrity, and trust as the United States becomes a bully to its own people. Will our colleagues attempt to enforce the same anticipatory obedience using the sheer force of an administrative apparatus that is in collusion with corporate and imperial authoritarianism? Is it possible that diversity’s betrayal is reflected through the actions of supposedly progressive faculty who take the side of power under the guise of dialogue and pragmatic illiberalism only to repress the Left and anti-imperialist forces for professional and personal gain?

Conclusion

If the minestrone of issues stemming from the university’s corporate turn is a slow, neoliberal burn in the last decades, the pot is now cooking at a boiling point in the Trump regime. Ironically, universities are being punished for not acting sufficiently corporate even as they have been riding on this gravy train without much regard for intellectual and moral decline and, in many cases, fostering an environment of compliance, conformity, or cowardice. The Trump regime’s extreme antieducation and anti-DEI stances may be brazen displays of corporate authoritarianism, but the university’s rabid autocorporatization has been decades in the making. It has created the conditions of possibility for the Trump regime’s oligarchic worldview to gain credence as an unquestioned standard, a corporate apex. As is happening in real time, it involves a terrifying push to make its propaganda the new normal and to remake the American university into a sort of Viktor Orbán university spouting one man’s views.25 As faculty, we have to push back against this inducement and not capitulate to its authoritarian temper.

At Dartmouth, finding an intellectual lifeline for many young scholars, particularly those who do not fit in our isolated and rural campus, has always been a challenge. It is even more challenging now. We need to invent more parainstitutional enclaves like RMS that can resist the segmentation of knowledge as disciplinary property or opportunistic self-gain. RMS retreats, colloquia, workshops, and institutes revitalized a sense of critical purpose and cross-cultural solidarities across the fields. Our camaraderie, care ethics, and intellectual formation defy the diversity metrics of DEI and their institutional incorporation. We created new portals of thinking through small relations, durational intimacies, and collective praxes. Another version of RMS is possible anywhere and everywhere.

Finally, DEI is neither the solution nor the boogeyman of the university’s or, by extension, America’s diversity problem, even as right-wing apparatchiks have cynically wrested DEI’s liberal do-good narrative by using anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Still, as a corporate invention dominating public discourse and administrative mindsets, DEI has helped to bankrupt rather than enhance intellectual vibrancy and moral clarity. Before the Trump regime’s destruction of DEI, the charge has always been to rebrand or retool DEI to make it better. It is time to put its administrative mandates to rest in the university complex and invest instead in the broad spectrum of intellectual, creative, scientific, and political possibilities that scholars with diverse backgrounds bring to the table. When professors from different fields gather to meditate collectively, whether on ethics and epistemology, queer and trans pedagogy, or the ungovernable arts, new pathways and encounters are imagined across difference. This is profoundly meaningful for writers, artists, and scientists who face unusual odds as the minoritized “other” at different historical moments and conjunctures. That moment and conjuncture is a form of intellectual solidarity and integrity, and it is defined by the urgency of the Palestinian humanitarian crisis moment right now.

To end this essay, we might return to the seemingly inexplicable cancellation of RMS at Dartmouth as a cautionary tale of liberalism’s racism and racial capitalism’s miseducation. RMS’s cancellation predates DEI’s demise in the Trump regime. On first glance, it may seem startling to see DEI become a boogeyman of the far right, but the fallout has been crackling on the liberal edges of racial resentment’s precipice for a while. On such a treacherous terrain, RMS’s intellectual priorities were also inconvenient critiques of DEI, including DEI’s antiracist virtue signaling and multiracial postering and posturing. The consortium’s nonwhiteness served no value as a commercial prop for the corporate university that favors apolitical multiculturalism. Worse still, RMS’s anticapitalist stances attuned to racial disparity were seen as a threat to academic civility and the cohesion and value that whiteness carried. That threat was methodically neutered by DEI executioners, which ironically became DEI’s own problem as it was terminated by the Trump regime. White fragility’s revenge is now a spectacle and a deed sponsored by the state and its regiment of toxic genders.

DEI’s narrow promotion of racial diversity sought to stabilize and extract racial identity as a resource to make money, boost a brand, or improve rankings. As a liberal acolyte of racial capitalism, DEI accumulates social and economic benefit from racial identity, which tends to exploit nonwhite people and rewards the few who play the part. Diversity, in this regard, is all show and no substance. Consequently, diversity cannot bear any critique or even own any critical function as a remedial or reparative action for past discrimination (to put it in the lightest terms). Rather than improving race relations on campus or racial understandings, diversity is easily instrumentalized for racial capitalism’s institutional operations whether as a legal and cultural defense against racism or as soft value and virtue. While diversity’s minions get promoted, its corporate makeover into the administrative boondoggle of DEI with lost academic souls made it a target for right-wing attacks. Its reliance on legless liberal conceits, as well as capitalism’s fictions on race, exploit that warm feeling of inclusion with no transformative power on the racist system. DEI’s dismantlement substitutes rage and race-baiting for warm inclusion in the same racist system.

With oligarchic authoritarians at the helm in the Trump regime, and corporatization taking a right turn lockdown in the foreseeable future at our universities, any effort to decorporatize and decolonize our minds would be a good place to restart our engines as we imagine yet another way to regroup and consort with friends in the struggle for a better world to come. To act morally and humanely as lifelong educators, scholars, and students, we must be ever more vigilant against diversity’s collusion with corporate authoritarianism, racial capitalism, and cynical, disciplinary civilities with a liberal temper. As for right-wing MAGA tantrums aimed at destroying diversity for supremacist ends, there can only be thoughts and prayers for their enlightenment.

Eng-Beng Lim is a performance and cultural theorist of race and sexuality, founding director of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality, and chair of the program in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. He is working on two projects, “Megastructures of Feeling” and “Ethnocuties: Notes on Queer Friendship.”

Notes

1. 1. See Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) for a critical account of how supremacist mindsets accompany performative identity and virtue signaling to credential the elitism of class distinctions in capitalist ventures. The university is not only not immune to but also a driver of such productions.

2. 2. Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

3. 3. “Opening Statement of Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), Chairman Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development Hearing: ‘Confronting the Scourge of Antisemitism on Campus’ November 14, 2023,” Committee on Education and the Workforce, https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/11.14.23_final_official_document_rep._owens_opening_statement_-_antisemitism_hearing.pdf.

4. 4. Dame Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince, “Why Diversity Matters,” McKinsey and Company, January 1, 2015, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/why-diversity-matters.

5. 5. Other models include the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration and New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

6. 6. The conservative commentator David Brooks calls this syndrome “death by a thousand paper cuts” in a New York Times op-ed. He views DEI as a “dangerous ideology” in which practitioners are populating the “swelling ranks of administrators” and sanitizing our campuses. See David Brooks, “Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts,” New York Times, January 18, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/american-life-bureaucracy.html.

7. 7. The Palestinian Ministry of Health counted 67,173 Gazans killed, including 20,179 children. Also, a staggering 90 percent of its 2.1 million population are displaced and in states of famine. In comparison, the Hamas militant attack killed 1,200 Israelis and held 251 hostage. Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Emma Farge, “Explainer: How Many Palestinians Has Israel’s Gaza Offensive Killed?,” Reuters, October 7, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-10-07/.

8. 8. Claudine Gay and Elizabeth Magill—presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively—announced their resignations weeks apart following the hearing. Gay was mired in allegations of plagiarism that reeked of a political hit job. See “Harvard University President Claudine Gay Resigns,” All Things Considered, NPR, January 2, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/02/1222516898/harvard-university-president-claudine-gay-resigns.

9. 9. Claudine Gay, “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger than Me,” New York Times, January 3, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html.

10. 10. Rebecca Shabad, Garrett Haake, and Katherine Doyle, “Trump Signs Executive Order to Dismantle the Education Department,” NBC News, March 20, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-signs-executive-order-dismantle-education-department-white-house-rcna197251.

11. 11. “Opening Statement of Rep Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Chairwoman Committee on Education and the Workforce, Hearing: ‘Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,’ ” December 5, 2023, https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/12.5.23_chair_foxx_opening_statement.pdf.

12. 12. David Kanzanjian and Emily Steinlight for the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee, “We Must Protect Higher Ed,” Nation, December 19, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/higher-education-gop-penn-freedom-teach/.

13. 13. Gay, “What Just Happened at Harvard.”

14. 14. At the aforesaid hearing, MAGA Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik equated student chants of “intifada” with “the genocide of Jews” and used this cynical and dangerous conflation to badger Claudine Gay, the first Black woman president of Harvard, about whether “calling for genocide” violates the school’s code of conduct. Unfortunately, Gay’s calm and constitutionally correct response, that action would be taken only “when speech crosses into conduct,” did not first disabuse Stefanik of her definitional error (intifada, انتفاضة, means to shake off oppressive power) or the fallacy of her logic. Intifada is not synonymous with antisemitic violence and the targeted harassment of American Jewish students on campus. Protest is not the same as harassment. Clearly, Stefanik, who was, at the time, named as a possible running mate for Trump, has learned the MAGA game book of exploiting outrage for disingenuous goals. Like other MAGA operatives, her political stock rose from the bravura of her hardline questioning calculated to arouse feelings unrelated to actual cases of antisemitism, for which the congressional hearing was held. It is important to note that no one has called for the genocide of Jews on any of the three campuses in question—or any US campus, for that matter. Riding on the outrage thus produced, she opportunistically promised to launch “an official Congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power into Penn, MIT, & Harvard and others” (Bianca Quilantan, “House Education Committee to Launch Probe into Harvard, MIT and Penn over Antisemitism,” Politico, December 7, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/07/colleges-anitsemitism-house-education-committee-00130666). It also bears noting that Stefanik had repeated the Republican party’s lies about the election being stolen and was removed from Harvard’s (her alma mater) advisory board for the Institute of Politics located in the Kennedy School of Government. Her gross incompetency in thought, demonstrated in her disingenuous grilling that willfully confused free speech with targeted harassment and antisemitism with anti-Zionism, is an example of a loud and extreme voice with a self-serving agenda (see Gay, “What Just Happened at Harvard”). That her political grandstanding was celebrated rather than called out in the mainstream press is the real scandal. Following her removal from the Harvard committee, Stefanik wrote an angry statement about Harvard caving to “the woke Left” and marching toward a “monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views.” Stephanie Murray, “Harvard Removes Republican Elise Stefanik from Advisory Committee,” Politico, January 12, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/12/harvard-removes-elise-stefanik-advisory-commitee-458141.

15. 15. Shea Vance, “Barnard Altered Its Policies After Removing a ‘Solidarity with Palestine’ Statement from a Departmental Website. Faculty Are Calling It Censorship,” Columbia Spectator, December 7, 2023, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2023/12/08/barnard-altered-its-policies-after-removing-a-solidarity-with-palestine-statement-from-a-departmental-website-faculty-are-calling-it-censorship/. As Janet Jakobsen, a longtime women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professor at the college, notes, “It is one thing to say, ‘We can change the policy at any time.’ That’s bad for conditions of freedom. . . . But to say, ‘We can act on the basis of a policy we will then write’ is even more serious.”

16. 16. Many scholars note how liberalism, white nationalism, anti-Arab sentiment, and the state apparatus of surveillance are all imbricated in discourses of standard, protection, and civility and how notions of community, dialogue, and debate can just as easily be co-opted and weaponized against “the other.” See, for example, Sunaina Maira, The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (New York University Press, 2016).

17. 17. A useful reading to extend questions of repression and resistance in the psychic realm and in Palestine is Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2023).

18. 18. Paul R. Verkuil, “Policymaking Accountability and the Emerging Authoritarian State,” Regulatory Review, November 2, 2022, https://www.theregreview.org/2022/11/02/verkuil-policymaking-accountability-and-the-emerging-authoritarian-state/.

19. 19. Verkuil, “Policymaking Accountability and the Emerging Authoritarian State.”

20. 20. “Amnesty International Investigation Concludes Israel Is Committing Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” Amnesty International, December 5, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/.

21. 21. See the statement on October 22 in “Timeline of Events at Barnard,” WhatHappenedToBarnard, https://www.whathappenedtobarnard.com/timeline.

22. 22. See Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds., The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). There is no academic immunity around any number of hyperobjects or rights-based issues, from climate change to queer and trans life. The university is a crucial space of aligning with power and reproducing and normalizing discourses from the state and powerful advocacy groups. The question is whether progressive faculty is actively taking the side of power to repress anti-imperialist forces.

23. 23. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Secures Major Settlement with Columbia University,” White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-secures-major-settlement-with-columbia-university/.

24. 24. “Fact Sheet.”

25. 25. Bence X Szechenyi, “Viktor Orbán’s Pet University Is All About Propaganda—I Know, I Was There,” Guardian, September 11, 2023, https:/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/11/viktor-orban-university-propaganda-london.