Targeted scholars, targeted institutions

On April 10, in advance of the April 17 national day of action for higher education, Tempest hosted a panel of scholars and activists addressing the federal and state-level assaults on higher education and strategies for fighting back. The Trump administration has engaged in a multi-pronged attack on higher education in the United States. In February, the Department of Education issued a letter demanding that universities purge their curriculum and organizations of any and all diversity, equity, and inclusion content and efforts.

The administration has undertaken the systematic targeting of faculty and students involved in protest–particularly Palestine solidarity protest–for firing, suspension, and outright abduction, detention, and deportation. International students across the country are discovering their visas have been revoked, and these vulnerable communities are living in fear.

The administration has threatened multiple universities with the loss of federal research funds unless university leaders concede to sweeping demands to retrench curricula and policies to fall into line with anti-diversity and anti-protest protocols. And a number of state governments, for example, in Ohio, Florida, Texas and Indiana, have likewise passed legislation curtailing academic freedom and efforts toward diversity, inclusion and equity at public universities.

Universities historically have functioned as sites of public debate, protest resistance, critique controversy, and the production and teaching of critical knowledge. So it is not surprising that a far right authoritarian regime would seek to disable the work of critical intellectuals and campus activists.

An ongoing national and international conversation about how to mount resistance and fight back against these attacks is increasingly urgent. To contribute to that conversation tonight, we have a panel of five scholars, union leaders and activists who have been on the front lines of this fight.

Sherry Wolf is the senior organizer of the American Association of University Professors at Rutgers University. Sherry is also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Tempest Collective. She is the author of Sexuality and Socialism.

Joshua Hamilton is an organizer living in Dallas and the former director of the Multicultural Center at the University of North Texas. 

Bryan McCann is a professor of communication at Louis Louisiana State University, a member of United Campus Workers and Secretary of the LSU AAUP chapter. 

Pranav Jani is a professor at Ohio State University and the president of Ohio State’s AAUP Chapter. Pranav is also the advisor to Ohio State’s Chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. 

Kristin Godfrey is a PhD student in Arizona, an organizer and a Tempest member. 

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Sherry Wolf: Good evening, comrades. It’s good to be with you all. I find being with comrades these days more urgent, crucial, and life-affirming, life-giving than ever.

So thank you for being here. I’m the senior organizer at Rutgers, AAUP-AFT, the American Association of University Professors affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. I’m not speaking on behalf of them tonight. I’m a longtime socialist. This is my job. This is my perch, my vantage point.

I enter this conversation very aware that Rutgers is in a position unlike those of the other speakers here, in so far as Rutgers has wall-to-wall unions. That is to say, almost everyone from the most senior distinguished professor to adjuncts, postdocs, grads, administrative assistants, and maintenance workers at Rutgers are unionized, the chairs of departments, the medical faculty, and clinical practitioners in the hospitals at Robert Wood Johnson and Barnabas–all of these people are in unions.

This is, after all, New Jersey. It is the medicine cabinet of the United States. It is the heart of pharmaceuticals. If I crane my neck, I can see the headquarters of Johnson and Johnson that faces the headquarters of Rutgers. Merck is down the road, Squibb, all of the big pharmaceutical giants.

And their research is done right here at Rutgers and Princeton, a half an hour away. But we are a public university that’s unionized for decades. In fact, I believe that this was the first unionized public institution in the United States in 1970.

That is a different environment from my comrades here in Louisiana and in Arizona, and even in Ohio and elsewhere. And I’m very aware of that. And I’m also aware that I’m speaking to you on the second anniversary of what was a historic strike here. It was the first strike in 257 years of Rutgers history.

This is one of the original land grant institutions in the United States, meaning that these were institutions that were set up to teach people agricultural knowledge. In fact, this place is surrounded by farms as well.

We went on strike two years ago and that is a somewhat different terrain to be organizing with what we are facing, as dire as the circumstances are. The years that went into building a shop stewards network, which we refer to as a department rep system, and the strike school trainings of 800 or more faculty, grads, and postdocs to organize the other thousands of their colleagues—all of these things have placed us in a position of having a certain infrastructure of dissent at Rutgers that is not what most others have.

It doesn’t mean that we are in the promised land of unions. There is great unevenness and huge holes in our structure; we are not the well-oiled machine of my dreams. I wish we were. But nonetheless, that is an advantage and I see it on display not only this year, but even a year ago when encampments at Rutgers led to threats of police violence and institutional crackdown and all the rest of that. During these events union members were able to summon and organize hundreds of faculty and grads to come out and protect those encampments for Palestine.

Here we are now a year later when Palestine is coming back like a boomerang, as Noura Erakat, the Palestinian lawyer, scholar-activist explains, a boomerang that has come back to hit higher ed. It is the very violence being meted out by the empire abroad being brought back home; the weaponization of antisemitism and Palestine are being used to eviscerate and upend every aspect of democracy, starting with our higher ed institutions.

The reality that is we are human beings , living under rising authoritarianism, 18 months into a genocide, living on a dying planet. And that does not make for a cheerful anything or hopeful anyone.

We are where we are. The first hits that all of us took and that all of us saw, especially those of us at research institutions (and we are at a research-one institution, Rutgers, which is the state University of New Jersey), was to see the funding cuts by NIH and NHS.

But what struck me right from the get-go is the involvement of STEM faculty. I’m sure I’m not saying anything that is outlandish here: STEM faculty don’t tend to be at the forefront of the fights in higher ed because of the neoliberalism of US science and because those faculty have been turned into grant-getters and small business people, essentially running labs in which they are the supervisory administrators, the managerial person to the postdocs and the grads. They often are not the first ones out the door to fight, but they were the first ones hit even before the DEI hits.

Another thing we are seeing now is the revocation of the visas of many of our students. And it’s important for us to talk about who they’re hitting, because these are not yet the political hits. These are random, these are being done by AI bots who are finding people randomly in a system, yet not entirely random. All of the people targeted are Brown, and all of them come from parts of the world targeted by this administration. And largely, I would say 99 percent of them, are Muslims who’ve been targeted. So not so random, but random in terms of not political hits, not yet, but the first ones. What I see developing is experienced organizers beginning to organize themselves into protesting the federal government.

Immediately, there were protests of hundreds of STEM faculty, of leading geneticists and cell biologists. Again, not the people who were leading the way two years ago. Those tended to be in the English, history, sociology and other humanities and social science departments that you can predict, but STEM folks are at the front lines right from the get-go and actually very early on understood the connection to DEI hits.

The immigration attacks cannot be held separately from the fight around funding because look around a STEM campus and look who is there. Look at who does research and science in this country on any STEM campus–anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the people on those campuses tend to be international folks from all over the world.

There is no leadership from the Rutgers administration. And in that environment, we understood as unionists that if we didn’t fill that void with demands, with a vision, with a posture of not obeying in advance, of not giving in, of putting up a fight, of resisting any scrubbing of DEI or our trans siblings, any of that that vision was not going to come from anywhere else but us. And so very quickly, we came in, formed an International Workers Solidarity Committee, came up with sets of demands, and began to put in place and work with people, sometimes with, and sometimes against the administration, to make some things happen, to get accommodations, make sure that people are protected, are defended, and know their rights.

What we are seeing at Rutgers and many other places is an understanding that we are living under an authoritarian regime–not full-blown fascism, although fascists historically do need to get rid of the intelligentsia.

They need to get rid of the bastions of resistance, they need to discipline the intelligentsia, the campuses. A population that has historically in this country and around the world been the site of resistance, of critical thinking, of opposition to the status quo and oppressive practices in society. And so we have to understand that this fight for higher ed is not a little battle. It’s a war.

We are just seeing the first taste of this battle. If their goal is to be successful to restore profitability and power in a declining empire, they must discipline a workforce and cut down on the insurrectionary behavior that has taken hold over the last 15 years in this country.

Consider the history from Occupy, move it through Black Lives Matter, take it into the Palestinian resistance and then even the 2023 wave of strikes that ran through higher ed just a few years after the K -12 wave of strikes. If the feds are to get their way, they have to discipline the intelligentsia in this country and put intellectuals and scholars in our place and wipe out the gains of the last 50 to 60 years that came out of the civil rights struggles, that came out of the women’s liberation struggle, that came out of the queer liberation struggles, that came out of the Black and Brown and ethnic studies struggles.

If they are going to be successful in reversing that history, they are going to have to keep coming at us. And that means our organizing is going to have to be collective, united, and strategic. We have to be united with larger sectors of labor: communications, transportation, all of the ancillary labor that is touched by our labor.

It’s a united fight back, or we’re going to lose on all fronts. Whether we’re talking about funding fights, whether we’re talking about DEI, whether we’re talking about immigration. This is a fight for all of our lives and we gotta be in it together. And I think that the unions and workers acting as if they had unions, whether you have collective bargaining contracts or not, acting as if you do, acting in concert with all labor is going to be what saves us in the end. A united front of working people is the weapon we need to forge right now.

Joshua Hamilton: My name is Joshua Hamilton. I formerly served as a director of the Multicultural Center at the University of North Texas. Before that, I served as the Black Cultural Center director at the University of Arizona. My context comes from being a staff member and understanding how expendable we are in our roles because our commitment to the institution is solely based on our job and mainly to the students. The University of North Texas, just for a little more context, is a historically white institution located in the South. But the majority of the students are students of color.

In Texas, there was already a fight against DEI. State legislators mostly used CRT to target K through 12 educators.

In 2019, students had already been organizing after a white board of trustees member used the N-word during a free speech event on campus. When the students went to protest, they covered their mouths and held a silent protest.

Before 2020, people working in K -12 in Texas were being fired or removed for being gay, trans, or supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

That’s the landscape that I stepped into at the institution. And we don’t have strong unions in the state. And so you know when you’re in these positions, your strategy of resisting is connecting to anybody who wants to be in community with you to organize on campus. one of the things that I did was to find faculty who were with the shit. I met previous faculty members who organized when the city of Denton was in the middle of fighting to become a sanctuary city.

As the state began discussing the elimination of DEI offices at public institutions, our office offered weekly attempted political education sessions. We aimed to help students learn as much as possible because their access to and engagement with spaces was minimal. One factor is that the culture is hyper-individualistic and very religious. It affects how students show up.

However, our office faced many challenges.One was the Dean of Students, who funded student organizations such as the Black Student Union and Latinx Student Union, which kept them happy but hesitant to organize. These groups were provided support up to $20 thousand for their organizations.

And that’s constantly what we were up against. I would seek out other faculty. I expect that you should have some solidarity if you do scholarly critical work. What are your political commitments? There were very few faculty members in the fight. There was also a lot of fear, which I want to name. When the encampments happened at the University of Texas, within two days border patrol and state troopers were beating students’ asses.

So, the warfare in the state of Texas makes it really difficult to resist. Political education was the bare minimum we could do, building solidarity with the faculty we knew who wanted to be in solidarity to push back.

I was expendable, so they demoted me, hid me somewhere in the corner, and eventually pushed me out—me and other colleagues.

My last thing is on solidarity. When the people who do critical work or research on CRT or whatever shit they want to put on paper, don’t show up in any form, I hold that against them. If you do critical work, you need to be here, period. This isn’t a question, you just show your ass up. We have faculty who will conduct the research, but they don’t show up when it’s time to testify. To me, it’s all symbolism.

The south is where the fight is for sure.

Bryan McCann: A lot of the questions that Joshua closes with are also on my mind as someone who is also in the deep south. We are facing a right-wing regime at both the state and federal levels. I am approaching it somewhat differently in that I am a tenured faculty member.

The question of solidarity, of where are the faculty, is one that has been on my mind quite a bit as of late.

In the state of Louisiana we, of course, are not unionized in any kind of substantive sense of the word. We have a United Campus Workers chapter, which I’m proud to be a member of, and we also have an American Association of University Professors chapter, but we are not unionized. At LSU we have two faculty governance institutions. We have the Faculty Senate, which, as with most institutions, is elected representation. But we also have the Faculty Council, which is literally the entire faculty. The Faculty Council is the faculty’s main governing body. In theory, the faculty council, if it makes quorum, meets once a year to discuss and vote on various matters.

For the past several years, the Faculty Council has not made quorum and therefore has not been able to meet. And today, actually literally today, April 10th, is the deadline for my colleagues to RSVP to what might be a Faculty Council meeting on Monday. And last I heard we were nowhere near reaching quorum.

So in all likelihood, there will not be a Faculty Council meeting in the present context of higher education in Louisiana and in the United States, which is disconcerting to put it mildly. I think being honest and sober about what is in front of us can definitely inform how we move and how we think about solidarity and the kinds of infrastructures of dissent that we attempt to develop in these kinds of moments because they might not be the most apparent.

Probably the most high profile case at my institution is that of my colleague in the LSU Law Center, Ken Levy, who has been put on leave, by most measures without due process, for political speech in the classroom. Ken is currently embroiled in a legal fight with LSU attempting to just get back in the classroom. Right now the disciplinary hearings are unfolding, but right now he is out of the classroom.

This is not really as much of an outlier as it might seem in our current regime of governance with our current Governor. Even before he was Governor, when he was Attorney General, Jeff Landry had a penchant for going after professors in Louisiana. While he was Attorney General, he went after my retired colleague Robert Mann, who was in the mass communication school, for saying things that were critical of the Attorney General’s office. Landry insinuated that LSU should discipline him for his indecorous speech and conduct on Twitter.

Nick Bryner, another professor in the Law Center, was put on notice by Landry, though in this case, the university actually held the line with him and stuck up for his academic freedom. Notably, this happened before the current Trump administration.

We have a changing picture at both state and national levels. Recently, LSU unleashed an AI bot on its entire web infrastructure flagging the terms equality, diversity, and inclusion. This is interesting in some ways since those terms don’t necessarily turn up in radical scholarship because I think Marxists and radicals have critiques of the DEI framework in the first place.

Nonetheless, there was a mass purging of online content, profiles and job descriptions, and so on. Also, we are in the midst of a hiring freeze and other kinds of administrative withholding of departmental budgets and things along those lines.

Even before Trump and Landry took power, LSU was under two AAUP censures and has been for quite some time. So the picture has been relatively bleak here. So I guess the question in the time I have left is, what can the fight look like at LSU and in Louisiana, and in the US South more broadly?

One thing I’ve been hearing a lot–and this has come from faculty leadership as well as administrative leadership–is this assurance we’ve been getting that teaching and scholarship are safe. Even with the AI bot getting unleashed, they made it clear that they’re not going to mess with faculty profiles because that’s covered by academic freedom. And that gives me pause in two respects, first because cases like Ken Levy’s suggest otherwise, that the classroom is not safe. But the other is this implicit invitation to throw my comrades and staff, and my students under the bus because it’s not going to affect me. Presumably, I don’t have anything to worry about. But we know how these things work. It’s a gradual creep and it will begin to impact us. But also, for instance, in addition to being a scholar, in addition to being an activist, I’m also a person in addiction recovery. And thanks to DOGE, the collegiate recovery programs in Louisiana are about to get shuttered because they’re losing their federal funding. People I know in student affairs at my institution are reeling right now. And these are people who connect with and engage with students in really substantive and meaningful ways.

So the notion that I should just keep my head down and bide my time because presumably my teaching and my writing are not going to be vulnerable to this authoritarian onslaught is nonsense. And I think that my call to a lot of scholars, to a lot of my colleagues is, that I think too often we become so enamored with the idea of being faculty that we lose and compromise our capacity for solidarity.

And to Joshua’s earlier point, what is criticality without solidarity? How do we organize across different positions within campus? There are some faculty, some staff, some students who are approaching this with kind of a radical politics and who are hungry for connection and solidarity with each other. I think that’s in many ways where the fight really needs to begin, which is why, for instance, I think the model of United Campus Workers is a deeply important one right now because United Campus Workers is a wall-to-wall union that includes everyone who draws a paycheck from the university.

And while I think there will continue to be a place for organizations such as AAUP and other faculty entities, I don’t think this is a fight for faculty alone. And I don’t think faculty solidarity in all cases is going to be something that we can take for granted. So being more creative, reaching out and thinking about where the infrastructure for dissent really can begin to take hold and take form is going to be the order of the day.

Pranav Jani: Thanks for organizing this. It’s really great to be here. I’m the president of Ohio State AAUP, a faculty advisor of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a member of faculty and staff for Justice in Palestine.

I’m not speaking for those organizations, but I am wearing all those hats at the same time. I am speaking from those perspectives.

Some context: Ohio State is a massive, non-union campus in Columbus, the 15th largest city in the U.S. It has many large Palestinian, Arab, and people of color communities. And since we were just talking about the South, I’ll throw this in: the thing about Ohio is that our southern border is the old slave states and the northern border is Canada. That’s why Ohio was so big in the Underground Railroad. That mix shapes a lot about political consciousness in Ohio, from the union struggles, the Underground Railroad legacy, and also just the racism and conservatism of the Old South.

My argument today is we are experiencing the convergence of three things: the Ohio GOP’s attack on higher education (2023-now), the bipartisan repression of the Palestine solidarity movement (2023-now), and the federal attack on curriculum, Palestine, and international studies (Trump’s first and second terms).

Let’s get some timelines down. From March, 2023 until today, the Ohio Republican Party has attacked higher education, pushing bills that would turn Ohio into Florida and Texas and Indiana and other places. We had a victory on Ohio Senate Bill 83, which was introduced in March 2023 but could not pass, despite GOP majorities, and expired in December 2024. But then came SB in January which we could not defeat.

Also from October, 2023 until now, the Ohio State Administration, along with other university administrations, attacked the Palestine movement. The demonization of it as antisemitic lay the foundation for the attacks we’re seeing right now.

So I’m just thinking about these converging contexts where it’s not just about the Republicans, but it is about the Republicans. It’s not just about Palestine, but it is about Palestine. And that really hit us at Ohio State. And as of now, 11 OSU international students have had their visas revoked.

The core question I want to ask tonight is, how do we participate fully in what I would call the growing mainstream movement, which is by definition, politically diverse and heterogeneous, while also underlining the need to see Palestine as a key site where the struggle is happening?

We need to ask within these broader movements why is it that suppressing the Palestine solidarity movement is so important to the federal government. How do we raise those questions, raise those slogans, raise those realities about Palestine, but also realize that it’s a big growing movement that has many different dimensions?

Sometimes the Left doesn’t know what to do when things get big. We don’t know how to operate in the mainstream; that’s not a criticism, just something we need to learn. When the movement grows to a mass scale, ideas are all over the place. It takes a great deal of patience and conversation.

About the repression and the convergence that I talked about, here’s just an example of it. During the SB83 fight, Republicans controlled both the state House and the Senate. They promised that they would just get it through in March, 2023. But they were not able to get traction everywhere just because they wanted it. Then the genocide in Palestine and the massive OSU protests happened and Senator Cirino, the sponsor of SB83, jumped on it to take advantage of it.

To build support for SB83, Cirino wrote an essay in November 2023 called “The Growing Danger of Kristallnacht on Campus.” “Thirty-two OSU professors and more than 2000 students and alumni have signed a publicly posted statement in solidarity with Palestine,” he raged. Trying to sound the alarm, Cirino wrote: “The statement reads like anti-Israeli propaganda from Al Jazeera.” Pointing to the statement’s praise for Students for Justice in Palestine at OHio State, Cirino ends by saying Students for Justice in Palestine “is an ominous presence lurking on the OSU campus.” For me, as the AAUP president and advisor of SJP, this attack had a particular resonance. But you see the convergence in the political attack,

Rather than standing up for students, the OSU administration fanned the flames, repeatedly.  Consider this tweet, for instance, on April 20th, in response to Zionist pressure against an anti-genocide protest. OSU implies that pro-Palestine students are engaging in “hate speech” and even violent speech – and will face quick punishment. Consider that Ohio is a place where the right wing had passed an absolutist free speech policy, basically so that Nazis could come and speak freely without any opposition. The idea of hate speech has almost disappeared from campus – but all of a sudden OSU discovers it when ramping up to attack Palestinian students.

Consider also that this warning is being given before the big crackdown against the encampment on April 25th, when OSU brought in riot police and a sniper to go after students who were praying at the time, take them off their prayer mats and arrest them, and send them to Jackson Pike jail, a pretty notorious place. That’s the kind of thing going on here; in fact, Ohio State was laying the groundwork for this crackdown the entire year leading up to April 25.

A little bit later, in the summer, they created all these space rules and noise rules and all kinds of things like that to restrict students and everyone else. There’s a FAQ on the OSU webpage that explicitly warns or instructs us that the First Amendment does not protect civil disobedience. Very clearly.

Now, of course that’s true. Civil disobedience is literally about breaking the law. But we don’t have spaces on campus to explain why the same university that purports to respect Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his tactics of civil disobedience, also puts out these harsh defences of its actions on April 25 and beyond. This is just an example of the kind of chill that was  happening on campus, way in advance of any laws imposed by the state or federal governments.

Given how I am situated, these issues all have a substantial personal impact on me – and has led to direct targeting.  I will just give one public example. After SB1 was signed, one of the Ohio legislators tweeted, referring to me: “One of the best parts of voting in favor of SB1 today was remembering that ‘Professor Long Live the Intifada’…was one of the biggest opponents of it. Under SB1, Ohio State regains the ability to manage its own workforce.”

I joke about how I’m living rent-free in the mind of this politician who has nothing better to do than kick down at an academic worker, targeting my job because we disagree politicaly. This is political repression, plain and simple, targeted those in leadership to create fear.

Solidarity is the only way to win.  It is possible, and it has been built at Ohio State.  But it is hard work and always faces obstacles.

For instance, on May 1st, a week after that big crackdown on April 25th, we had a feeder march of about 150-200 faculty and staff coming in to join the students who were doing another attempt at an encampment, which was again shut down. You can see the  joy of the students in this video and the comments –  that faculty and staff actually came out to support students in mass numbers. But that took a lot of work. In this instance, it was about figuring out ways for the AAUP and FSJP to work together against the administration’s repression while having related but different projects.

Although I was accused by some racist members of our own AAUP Board of using the AAUP for my own agenda, the opposite has been true. My stance has been that AAUP does not need to become FSJP – and yet, that AAUP needs to defend Palestine protests right now because that’s where the attack on free speech and academic freedom is happening, even if members of the AAUP  have a whole bunch of other political ideas about Palestine. And the vast majority of our leaders and members had the same idea. That’s where the march on May 1st, 2024 came from.

Let’s take March 4th, 2025 as another example of how hard it is to build solidarity.

March 4 was speakout at Ohio State against SB1 involving over a thousand people; I was told it was the largest protest on campus since the anti-apartheid days. In fact, it was the first ever public-facing faculty action ever at Ohio State.

It was a joyous atmosphere, though we couldn’t use any megaphones because of the noise rules; they would’ve shut down the event, or even arrested students, staff, and faculty. We decided not to break that rule, but used our teacher skills to split people into two different groups, and did all kinds of things to get around it.

The speakout was a mainstream event: the Buckeye Nation was out. I lead with the “O-H-I-O” call-and-response you hear at official  events and football games . We had people singing the alma mater and musical instruments and tubas and all that.

And yet, this mass event occurred at a time when, due to campus repression, some of the Left groups and the Palestine movement were in a little bit of an ebb. So there was a real question of how to connect them.

I think we did a better job of this on March 19th, another mass march and rally drawing over 1000 people.

I led off the rally in my capacity as AAUP leader, and stuck to talking points around SB1.  But then I said at the end that we should make sure we don’t stop talking about Palestine, that we didn’t speak about the things we truly stand for just because the legislative calculus requires convincing Republicans to vote against the bill.

The SJP leader at the rally went even further. She forcefully connected SB1 and the Palestine movement, and led a “Free Palestine” chant  in which probably 75 percent of the crowd chanted with her. That development happened after a lot of conversation and thought ont the part of different student groups. Everyone finally agreed, it seems to me, that “Free Mahmoud Khalil” is a very good slogan when we’re talking about fighting for free speech and fighting authoritarianism.

So those are just two examples, with the kind of ongoing work around solidarity.

There are two events coming up that again show these attempts at growing solidarity. One, organized with graduate students, is a “Know Your Rights” teach-in on April 18 (our contribution to the April 17 Day of Action) for which we’re actually bringing a representative of Student Legal Services that Ohio State says students should use. Sometimes, we have to do basic work like that to help. It’s not just about pushing beyond the mainstream. When the leadership actually doesn’t do anything, we have to actually step in and do some of those basic things.

And then there is a May 1 action at the Ohio Statehouse, organized by teachers unions, that AAUP is joining to connect K-12 with higher ed. It’s going to be a massive event including a picket. Let’s see where it goes. Questions will come up once again: How does Palestine relate to this event? How does radical politics relate to it? All of those questions are on the table.

Kristen Godfrey: My name’s Kristen. I’m the director for the LGBTQ Center at the University of Arizona. I’m also a PhD student in the College of Education, a member of Tempest, and a member of my Union, United Campus Workers. I think what I’d like to do with my time is provide some context for the University of Arizona, what we’re currently up against and some lessons we have learned. And really my main argument is that all of us must understand and know the history of our universities and how they’re connected to and exploit the land and the people where they reside.

The memory must be upheld by infrastructures of dissent that students, faculty, staff, and community can work alongside each other in. I’m also arguing that Tucson and other college towns around the country have strong ties to defense companies. For example, U of A is so in bed with Raytheon that we must take up divestment campaigns to get these companies out of our schools and our cities.

The University of Arizona is located in Tucson, Arizona on the stolen land of O’odham and Yaqu lands, and we’re about 70 miles from the border. The high-tech surveillance created by arms companies used at the border is malleable and elastic and moves up to Tucson and throughout the city, often surveilling indigenous people and using surveillance tactics in border towns.

Raytheon is also one of Tucson’s largest employers, employing 10,000 people. In Tucson alone, Raytheon makes sidewinder and guided bombs that are sent to the Israeli government and used to murder in Gaza. The U of A is a research institution in which almost every STEM department and even some liberal arts departments are sponsored by and working in collaboration with Raytheon.

For example, the U of A is currently paying Raytheon for 14,000 square feet in office space that is now called the U of A Tech Park. U of A supplies a workforce for Raytheon, and these workers then build bombs and create surveillance at the border. All of this relies on a right-wing conservative campus so that students can graduate and work at evil companies without questioning the violence of the status quo.

But Tucson is also home to struggle, especially home to struggle for ethnic studies, programs that radicalized oppressed students in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That struggle is inextricably linked to the xenophobia and heightened surveillance at the border and the disappearing of international students we’re seeing today.

U of A specifically has a history of struggle in organizing in spaces like the LGBTQ Center where I work, along with six other cultural resource centers. A divestment campaign led on and off campus in 1985 forced the U of A to divest $3.4 million in holdings from companies doing business with South Africa.

And in 2019 mass protests forced the university to drop charges against three students who protested the presence of border patrol on our campus. And that organizing led to having United Campus Workers on our campus. We do not have bargaining rights.

Sherry, I liked what you said: You have to act like you have bargaining rights. Right now our wall-to-wall union is not acting that way. And so it makes sense that our new president, Suresh Garimella, who just came to us from the University of Vermont, has chosen to comply with both state and federal threats to get rid of DEI programs and initiatives on our campus, without speaking with Indigenous tribal leaders and Indigenous students, faculty and staff.

U of A took DEI language out of our land acknowledgement, and they also chose to get rid of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion website. Garimella has worked under the radar to not just comply but also reinforce racist and ableist calls to get rid of services and programs.

The U of A plans to close and restructure six out of the seven cultural resource centers. And they’re waiting, cowardly, until the summer when students are gone to do it. Folks who work at the centers are under threat of losing our jobs, and over 50 undergrads who work at these centers and rely on the money to pay their rent and their groceries have no idea if they will have a job in August.

I don’t want to get too specific about organizing really for safety, because right now I am at risk for losing my job, but since Trump’s inauguration, we have created multiple coalitions that people are joining. We have created demands, we have planned protests, we continue to mobilize, and we will mobilize until graduation.

I would love to hear folks about the lack of infrastructure or infrastructure looks like on your campuses, but we at the U of A really do lack institutional memory and infrastructures ready to take on and battle forces.

What it requires of us is to rebuild organizations and rebuild coalitions every time an attack comes from the top. And this keeps our movements fragile in recent struggles on our campus as a crisis happens. And then it’s followed by mobilizing. And either the semester ends and students and all of us are exhausted, or we get a minor win.

And then the organizations and coalitions that we worked so hard to create go away. And this trend keeps us from building deep relationships and building spaces with masses of people to grow. And this moment, I think, calls for trust in creating spaces for people to mess up, be accountable, and grow.

The only way to get out of this moment and to gain power is to connect the struggles for Palestinian liberation, the attack on international students and trans people, and the decimation of DEI reforms. This requires democracy and easily accessible entry points for people who have never organized to be able to join and struggle. They may not immediately understand how Palestine is connected to the closing of an LGBTQ Center.

And then we give them the space to make those connections for themselves by participating in struggle on campuses. And on campuses is where we are faced with so much contradiction. That’s why people are radicalized so quickly on campuses. We really need spaces where you don’t have to have perfect politics to join.

As I’ve been part of helping build these coalitions and organizations on campus, I have always gone back to community. The Palestine solidarity encampment at the U of A couldn’t have happened or sustained itself without community members being fully involved alongside students. I don’t know if you all have seen the new encampments documentary about Columbia, but Columbia students could not have kept going without community.

As public spaces like libraries and community centers are being taken away, university and community college campuses are sometimes the only space where you can just even rent a room for a meeting. The false borders we put up around campus must fall, and communities need to be included in fighting for accessible and free education. It requires us to learn how universities are exploiting people off campus. And our movements usually see these attacks on education in K through 12 first.

The punishment we faced after Black Lives Matter was the attacks on CRT. I think that we’re facing punishment for the encampments with the attacks on DEI. And we could better handle that if we’re connecting higher ed struggles to K through 12 struggles. I also think whatever people build on campus must be wall-to-wall.

It is difficult for us to build wall-to wall in terms of faculty and staff having class consciousness, getting our hands dirty, taking the risks like students, and being on committees, for example, with undergrad students in which faculty and staff and students are taking turns taking notes, facilitating meetings, signing up to be on a security team, and learning from one another.

It’s so often as if faculty have a project over here and students have a project over there, and they’re not talking to each other. Faculty are not embedded in grassroots organizing with students. If we are wall-to-wall, if we are community-based, our spaces are more likely to be multiracial and intergenerational, and we will not win without multiracial and intergenerational participation. As I think about the LGBTQ Center closing I have a lot of grief, but I do believe that we can fight back.

As I think about other centers closing across the country, I think of trans ways of being in resistance that we have to look to. Our centers, usually LGBTQ centers, are incubators for radical politics and movement building. And as queer and trans people, we are really good at producing and reproducing ourselves.

We do it collectively and we always have. And if we can root our campus struggles in that mode of care then we can have actual relationships with our international students so that we actually know what they’re going through, even if the university doesn’t tell us how many visas are revoked which is what U of A is doing. We would have those care connections of picking up groceries and picking them up if they’re fearful of getting to campus.

And I think that if we can do that, we can strategize a way forward.

After the panel and discussion, participants were given an opportunity to wrap up.

KG: I’m thinking about community as an antidote to fear. I don’t care what your political home is, but it’s really good to have some type of foundation. One, because it is really awful to exist in isolation. And with this political whiplash coming at us, it’s really easy to become disillusioned and then feel like we can’t take on anything. So to have somewhere where you can go and get an analysis and assess the moment is really important. That doesn’t have to be some official thing, but it does have to be with people that you are growing relationships with, not tied to nonprofits and grants. It has to be grassroots.

I want to provide an example, which I think has been really successful in the Tempest branch in Tucson. We are facilitating a freedom school to teach revolutionary socialism to people of color. We had about 30 people sign up and there are between 10 and 17 people who have been coming to each session for six weeks. These are spaces that the Left has been so good at, bringing people together to have these conversations, to be with each other in a room, just to practice disagreeing and to practice some discipline.

Reading together is really, really important. I think just having the skills to have an analysis of what is happening around you is something that we all need to learn how to do. I think that the role of Marxists on and off campus is to create those spaces where people can have these conversations. We can provide a Marxist analysis of why people can’t pay for eggs while Trump is really good at providing another explanation.

It’s also about asking people to do stuff, whether it’s do you need a ride? Can you come to this meeting? Can you talk to strangers? And if we can’t talk to people, we’re pretty screwed, right? So we have to trust in each other that people are doing the best that they can and then we have to meet them with some asks and some political education.

PJ: I think it’s really important to distinguish between criticizing institutions for preventive compliance versus criticizing working people. We have to get used to the idea on the Left of faculty as working people. We’re so quick to throw faculty under the bus. It’s one of my big frustrations with the Left, honestly.

When we’re attacked and targeted, when we write a certain book that people like, it’s like, oh, how come you’re not always already the most radical person in the room because you wrote this thing or that thing? So think about how when people are affected and targeted, not all of them come out and fight. A very small percentage does. And that’s true of faculty just as much as anyone else. Let’s try to think about faculty as ordinary people. In other words, there are times when faculty go into motion because they’re confident. There are times when they’re afraid. Because there’s a lot of fear. And think about the question of of confronting faculty fear like you think about your neighbor or your friend or somebody else who might not be a faculty member.

You want to talk to them about getting more involved. Just because there’s a ton of knowledge or even someone’s writing about resistance doesn’t mean they actually know how to do it. They’re learning just like everybody else.

I’m not trying to give a free pass to anybody. If you’re talking about these big things, you should come to a meeting. When people are moving, you should come out. That’s what I do every day. So I’m not trying to give a blank pass. I’m just saying use the care and concern we use to mobilize anybody who’s afraid and doesn’t know how to take the next step. And we say, here’s how you can take the next step. The organizers are going to have to do that work. It’s not going to happen automatically, although sometimes people surprise us.

Right now, I’m taking a bunch of measures right now to protect myself. I’m being fucking attacked by name, by politicians who have a direct line. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to make a complaint. But think about going to a meeting where you say or someone says they’re being personally attacked. And everyone will come back and say, oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s not what I get, because people assume that I’m going to be okay with it. And I’ll take care of my being okay somewhere else. Don’t get me wrong. I talked about it like an organizer. Hey, I’m being attacked by a politician. It even becomes a badge of pride. I’m an organizer and then I take care of my personal shit somewhere else.

But for most people, that’s not how it works. What I’m trying to say is there’s a lot of fear. They’re going to attack certain people hard. And I’m taking certain measures that I feel guilty about because I feel like I’m not being courageous enough. And my comrades are telling me, you’re just ducking and weaving. You’re just not punching all the time. It’s okay. Take a step back. So I want to distinguish that from preemptive compliance.

I think we just have to do a few things well and focus on where people are moving right now as opposed to where people are not moving. And then maybe we could figure out what the next step is. It’s exhausting right now.

BM: I in particular really appreciate that kind of call to compassion because it’s an important component of solidarity. A few years ago, I made the decision to live openly as someone in addiction recovery and someone who lives with mental illness because those are fucking labor issues as well. We can see the ways in which these institutions really do crush our soul, not just at times like this, but also in general. They can really crush us, and taking care of oneself is a very real material consideration at all levels of the institutions that we work in. So showing up for each other in some of the ways that Kristen described are really important and also to create the infrastructure that we’ve been talking about.

I ]think that showing up and joining and being part of the existing organizations that we have is important, whatever our critiques of them may be.I have a lot of critiques of my institution’s AAUP and my state conference of AAUP. But there’s also a lot of institutional wisdom there. I’m a full professor, but I’ve been at LSU for 12 years, whereas some of my colleagues in AAUP have been there for 40 or 50 years. I may not see eye-to-eye with them on everything, but their big picture sense of the institution is deeply vital.

Also, finding your people, your fellow radicals, your fellow revolutionaries is going to be key. And that network for me is really vast and surprising in a lot of ways. I’ve got people in New York who are not academics. I have people In Louisiana, California, elsewhere. We can work through our national organizations in addition to our campuses. I think it is a really key tactic and strategy.

It’s also important to use the power that we have. For instance, if you have tenure, you have power. You have certain degrees of leverage others don’t. If you are a department chair, you have the capacity and ability to do important work. We need to find the places of power that we have and not be shy about using that because our enemies sure as hell aren’t shy about using their power.

JH: One thing that I sit with is the idea of critique as care. When I see Black people in positions of power who are literally becoming the Black misleadership class, they’re doing shit to harm their own people. Even if I don’t know them, I take it upon myself to engage with them and to call them out on their shit. But I view it as love. I love my people so much that I want them to care for me and others. So when people aren’t doing things they’re supposed to do or are saying shit, I’m going to go talk to them about it because the shit is messed up.

And that’s what I think about when I think about care.

We may not be friends, but I care about you enough to let you know that shit is messed up and you’re impacting others. I don’t consider them a comrade. I don’t even believe that they’re going to come to fight. But I do believe they need to hear that. We can’t be afraid to critique one another. I think critique has to come from a place of care and love. Like, yeah, I’m mad at you because you didn’t resist and earn solidarity. I also understand that the institution puts us in positions where we have to find places of care.

So this is no absolving of the institution. But I care about you so much, I want to let you know that that shit you did hurt me, hurt others, and will hurt you in the future. But you’re not disposable. But cut that shit out. Because we all need each other. I really do want to live in a world where we owe each other everything.

SW: A couple of quick points, one slightly longer. One, Columbia did everything that was asked of it and it got fucked anyway. And in some ways it’s done us a huge favor by making them go first. The fact that they conceded everything and they’re still being eviscerated becomes a model for the rest of us to understand, this is clearly not the path forward.

Number two, everybody has to be in an organization. If you’re not in an organization, you really are not able to use your power, because alone we really don’t have the power that we want. So connect with other people. I’m part of the Tempest Collective because it helps me think through and connect with larger ideas, bigger history, and I’m part of other groups so I can put these ideas into practice having the wisdom of comradeship. We need to not just be mobilizing, but organizing people.

It’s better to spend time grabbing the two or three people you have to go talk to 10, 20, 100 more to build a structure and something that’s much more enduring than to blast out over every social media platform the next action and the next action and the next action and the next action. If there’s no building in between, you’ve got nothing. You’re not building anything and it’s very ephemeral.

I find it very clarifying to go back and read history right now because the modern day sucks. But we can learn so much. And I went back and read this very short pamphlet of Clara Zetkin on fighting fascism, Haymarket books reissued it. One of the things that she’s writing about is how absolutely incapable the middle class was. And we’re talking about the professoriate here, workers who perceive themselves to be middle class.

They could not understand, we’re talking about back in the 1920s, the middle class intellectuals could not imagine a world outside of anything. I mean, it’s hard enough for any of us to imagine a world outside of what exists now. And so they kept reverting to all the existing structures. What are we seeing now? The reliance on the Democrats, the waiting for the courts, the systems, the institutions to do something or not doing something.

It finally broke open last Saturday when a million or so Americans took to the streets in the Hands Off protests, as problematic as they were. It was people pouring into the streets going, well, somebody’s got to fucking do something where we’re losing everything. And I think that we need to understand that people are not on their own coming to the conclusions of how that this is not a dress rehearsal, that this is the real deal, that this isn’t just Rachel Maddow using the word fascism, that this is what it actually looks like politically and socially and economically en route to, and here’s what you need to do.

All of these liberation schools, freedom schools, popular universities, efforts that people are talking about here, the things that we are doing, the things that all of you are doing, whether you’re unionized or not, are exactly the ways that we’re going to start with the clumps, the twos, the fives, the tens, the twenties who are paying attention because people are looking for community right now, they are looking for direction forward, and they are looking for places and ways to plug in. And we need to find, however modest, ways to do that in order to build that solidarity.

And the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t feel any more brave than anyone else. I am scared like other people. The train has left the station on my scrubbing everything that exists about me out there in the world. I’ve been an organized revolutionary for 42 years of my life. I can’t go get rid of that one article, that one petition or whatever, and go hide myself. But what we’re about to learn is that all the bullshit we have in our heads, the romanticized bullshit about heroic historical figures who stood up and fought is just that. It’s nonsense. It was regular people like us, scared people like us. People just like us who are fearful and who are worried and legitimately so, who come together with other people and find a way.

And that’s what we’re going to do, comrades, because we don’t have a choice. This is what we’ve got, each other. And the most potent weapon our society has for us is solidarity. And we’re going to have to build that with all our fears and all of our inadequacies and all of our broken left groups and the sectarianism, all the baggage that we’re bringing to this. And that’s how we’re going to build each other up and make each other a little bit braver than we are and make each other a little bit tougher than we are and grab each other and hold each other when we fall down because we will, and we will make mistakes and we will get scared and we will fall back and we’ll hold each other up.

Because we are not any different from the historical figures who fought back. They weren’t heroes and we’re not heroes. We’re regular people in a moment in time living through shit and looking to each other for solidarity. That is the only thing that we have.

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Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Jbcurio; modified by Tempest.