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.
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.”
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