Unsettling the Land

University students fight displacement and occupation, from South Central to Palestine

On the morning of Wednesday, April 24th, I sat on a bench in Alumni Park—a park centrally located on the main campus of the University of Southern California—and watched as students began pitching camping tents on the lawn. Along the perimeter of the park hung Palestinian flags, accompanied by a hand-painted list of demands and signs that read “Liberated Zone,” “Jews for a free Palestine,” and “there are no universities left in Gaza.” The Gaza Solidarity Occupation, organized by the USC Divest from Death Coalition, was constructed exactly one week after students at Columbia University launched a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s South Lawn. These solidarity camps, of which there are now hundreds across the U.S. and the world, are demanding that their universities divest from companies complicit in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and infliction of genocide¹ on Palestinians in Gaza. 

University of Washington, Scarlet Hansen for Cascade PBS

University of Southern California, Jordan-Renville for Daily Trojan

Syracuse University, Joe Zhao for The Daily Orange

Cal State Long Beach, Richard H. Grant for Signal Tribune

Now I am not here to tell you that these camps are peaceful, student-built pedagogical spaces where members of the university and broader community have come together to teach and learn from one another, to make art, to read poems, and to participate in or observe each others’ religious and spiritual practices and traditions. Not because it’s not true, but because that version of the story is already beautifully documented by journalists and faculty members who spent time at these campus encampments. And because solely focusing on that version of the story diverts our attention from the underlying systems of power that these encampments so strategically exposed over the past few weeks.

Universities are often understood by the general public as sites of education. The university is upheld as a space of achievement that not only symbolizes the intellectual and academic success of those who attend, but that promises to secure a more materially stable future for its students. Go to college so you can get a good job, this country says. So why were so many student-built camps—camps that utilized students’ own educational backgrounds, teach-ins, and town halls to raise awareness about their university’s financial investments, land ownership, and suppression of voices critical of Israel—so quickly destroyed by police who were called in at the behest of university administration? 

Because universities are not entirely the bastions of education we so hope they could be. Often they function more like corporate land owners that will defend private property over the rights of their own students to think critically and exercise said critical thinking in service of defending Palestine. Sure, students on college campuses attend classes. I even teach some of those classes. And in those classes—writing classes themed around “education and intellectual development”—I ask students about their college educations. They describe 150 person lectures, classrooms where they are expected to memorize information to be later regurgitated on tests. Their lives are tightly scheduled, the pressure to perform is high, and they report that they often only hold onto the skills and lessons that help prepare them for jobs after college. Which is not to say that those skills aren’t valuable or that securing a job isn’t one very important aspect of going to college—we all have to pay our bills, after all. But what’s too often missing is the kind of education that pushes students to question the institutions that are educating them. 

James Balwdin remarked in his 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers:”

“Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”

Baldwin’s paradox articulates for us the precise circumstances under which universities around the country have violently arrested hundreds, if not thousands nationally, of their own students and faculty. Administrators claim these camps are “illegal,” “violent,” “anti-semitic”, and that they “violate the rights of others.” But on-the-ground journalists, legal observers, and faculty have reported over and over again that the only actual violence they have witnessed at these camps has been provoked by police or Zionist counter-protesters. Participants in Gaza solidarity camps are exactly the kinds of people a society like the U.S. would rather not have around, to paraphrase Baldwin. The university does not want to hear from a person who points to the educational system and says, “this place where I am supposed to be learning is investing in weapons manufacturers and displacing residents of the local community—be that in Morningside Heights, home of Columbia University aka NYC’s largest private landowner, or in South Central, Los Angeles where USC occupies 226 acres of an historical Black and Latine neighborhood.”

While all of the university encampments share a common demand for their universities to disclose their investments and divest from companies complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and subsequent war on Gaza, many of them also have demands specific to their universities’ occupation and gentrification of the aforementioned working class Black and Brown neighborhoods where said universities continue to buy up property and displace local residents.

Present at the USC Gaza Solidarity Occupation camp were members of the South Central local chapter of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), many of whom are directly affected by USC’s land grabs. A 2021 article about Flower Drive tenants—a group of renters who live in buildings targeted by a USC alumni for a development that includes more student housing—introduces a tenant named Inéz Alcazar who has lived on Flower Drive near USC for more than 50 years. The article's authors, Lisa Kwon and CP Roberston, write, “After Ventus Group purchased the 3800 block, the firm targeted Alcazar and her neighbors with an intense cash-for-keys program as well. Prior to the recent decision to sell, Ventus Group hoped to turn the property into a new student housing project near USC. Now, the group’s sales pitch touts the area’s attractions—from the Olympic-caliber sporting venues to entertainment hubs such as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art—and suggests prospective buyers can continue the project of removing current tenants and replacing them with higher-paying USC students.” 

The Flower Drive tenants were invited to campus by organizers from the USC Divest from Death Coalition so that they could strengthen the solidarity between those fighting displacement in South Central and those fighting occupation and genocide in Palestine. In an open letter to USC president Carol Folt, the South Central chapter of LATU wrote, “the students have also done what the university claims to want, yet seems to fear; forge real connections with the neighboring community, who have responded with overwhelming support for the students’ demands. USC’s historic role in the neighborhood has created serious divisions between the student body and the long-time residents and working class community…However, members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union have been unequivocally supportive of the student protesters, who have included in their demands an end to displacement from Palestine to South Central.” 

USC is not the only university with demands to stop university displacement of surrounding working class communities. Eman Abdelhadi, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago said in a May 2024 roundtable on resistance to corporate governance of universities, that students at the University of Chicago “very smartly included in their demands, demands around the University of Chicago’s relationship to the South Side of Chicago, the fact that the University of Chicago acts as a colonizer in the South Side and effectively uses the same logic of displacement against poor Black communities. Scholars have drawn the link between the logic of gentrification and settler colonialism. And so the students have asked for reparations in regards to the university’s relationship with its immediate neighbors, and I think they’re very smartly seeing that the relationship between UChicago and its immediate environment is similar, and, in fact, deeply interlinked with its relationship with the global environment, where it is funding displacement.”

Universities’ insatiable desire for land (and therefore profit and power) has always been rooted in the displacement of other people. A 2020 High Country News investigation published extensive research about higher education’s roots in the theft of indigenous land. The first public universities in the US, including the University of California which comprises ten campuses in the state, exist because of the Morrill Land-Grant Act. “In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land taken from tribal nations into seed money for higher education… High Country News has located more than 99% of all Morrill Act acres, identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched the principal raised from their sale in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. HCN reconstructed approximately 10.7 million acres taken from nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions, a legal term for the giving up of territory.” A list of universities benefitting from land grants can be found on the Land-Grab Universities project website.

Universities own hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the United States, much of it acquired through theft or gentrification, and their students have erected tents, as a form of protest, on that land. These tents, though substantially very different, share a visual similarity to refugee tents that sprung up across Rafah, a southern city in Gaza, in late 2023 after Israel declared the southern half of Gaza to be a safe zone before initiating a ground assault on Rafah earlier this month. And these tents, too, share an aesthetic kinship with the tents of unhoused neighbors displaced from working-class communities of color, pushed to the streets by corporate landlords, some of which are universities. 

USC Gaza Solidarity Occupation, May 2024, photo by Ali Rachel Pearl

Tents in southern Gaza, December 2023, Mahmud Hams for AFP

Unhoused encampment, Los Angeles, Matt Gush | iStock

On April 21st, three days before USC students pitched their tents in South Central, community members with LACAN and other local orgs pitched tents outside of the federal courthouse in nearby Downtown Los Angeles in preparation for the supreme court hearing of Grants Pass V. Johnson, a case that will decide if the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment applies to unhoused people who are increasingly criminalized for sleeping outside. 

Outside 1st Street U.S. Courthouse, Downtown Los Angeles, April 2024, Ted Soqui for CalMatters 

Two days after the court proceedings for Grants Pass v Johnson began, and only a few miles away, I rose from the bench on which I was seated in Alumni Park and rushed toward my students as USC’s Department of Public Safety began violently ripping tents, chairs, and other personal belongings from their hands. I stood over a tent full of students’ possessions—their computers and backpacks, clothes and books—as five DPS officers yanked the tent out from under me while one DPS officer shoved me away. The university had spent the morning issuing new policies about “hanging signs from trees” and “camping equipment,” despite the fact that multiple student organizations like the Trojan Knights and USC Helenes camp out on blankets and under tents every year to protect USC statues from defacement during UCLA/USC sports rivalries (all of which is well-documented in this video). Apparently the only sanctioned “camping” events at USC are ones that protect university property. And isn’t that what all of this boils down to? Property. Land. University destruction of student solidarity camps to regain control of campus, University displacement of locals through gentrification, University investments in Israel, a nation that displaced Palestinians in 1948 and that has continued to murder over 40,000 and displace over a million of Palestinians since October 7, 2023.

Settler colonial nations like Israel and the United States—nations that displaced or killed much of the indigenous population inhabiting the land they colonized—build their educational systems in their own image. Their universities, under the guise of providing an “education,” buy up more and more land, displace locals, and call militarized police forces on anyone threatening the colonial order. From South Central Los Angeles to the South Side of Chicago to Morningside Heights in New York City to Gaza, to the West Bank, and greater Palestine, liberation only comes after we not only question the systems of power that structure our lives, but when we act in defiance of those structures. If this is a fight over land, which colonialism and gentrification always are, then pitching tents in the middle of all that as a means of demanding an unsettling is the most powerful and rational act I can imagine.

1. I want to note here that one of the most challenging aspects of writing about Israel/Palestine is choosing your audience. I recognize that my use of the word genocide will instantly cause some readers to project a level of bias and assumption on me that might inhibit any further good-faith engagement with my writing. I still choose to use the word genocide because 1) Israel’s assault on Gaza falls under the legal definition of genocide and 2) as a Jewish person raised in a Zionist synagogue who has myself experienced extensive anti-semitism, I reject the conflation anti-semitism with critiques of Israel or calls for a free Palestine. I do not believe calling Israel’s strategic collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza a genocide equates to anti-semtism in any way whatsoever. Many Israeli officials have gone on record stating their intentions to eradicate Gaza, an act which constitutes the legal definition of genocide.