Comic by Eli Valley, @elivalley, originally published in French for Le Monde Diplomatique in January 2025
The other day I read a Facebook post by the political theorist Alex Gourevitch which summarized our current moment so succinctly it’s worth quoting at length. Here goes.
One question people have wondered is why the resistance to Trump is so much less organized and vigorous than last time. There are a lot of reasons. Probably the most significant is just that Trump won the popular vote this time around, so he has a democratic authority he lacked last time.
But here's another factor. One of the main liberal institutions, in and through which a lot of the resistance happened last time around, spent 2024 vigorously suppressing free speech and protest. With very little objection from mainstream liberals, sometimes with a great deal of support. Here's how severe the repression was. At the peak of the anti-Vietnam protests in 1969, when millions were protesting, about 4000 students were arrested. Last year, almost the same number were arrested or detained, despite the encampments and protests being orders of magnitude smaller than the Vietnam movements. And less widely reported, because the numbers are hard to find, universities have initiated thousands more private disciplinary proceedings, including suspensions, expulsions or mandatory expulsions if students are caught breaking university rules again. This happened across private and public universities, in blue states and red.
Despite the fact that these protestors were doing more or less the same thing as campus protestors have been doing for decades, across a range of issues, this time around they were suddenly determined to be a threat and to be unacceptably trespassing and too disruptive and so on. And now that they have marks on their record, disciplinary proceedings, or are still facing legal charges or in court cases, the costs of protesting again are even more severe. Meanwhile, universities have rushed to rewrite their rules to restrict this activity even more severely. Some of contemporary liberalism's most authoritarian tendencies were used to shutdown protests, by those who tend to be the most active protestors (anyone paying attention knows that most were not the kind who only protest about Palestine). And now it's mostly heads down and silence. With universities themselves facing yet more threats, just as they cut their own noses off to spite their face.
And if one thinks this all happened because of some ways in which the Israel-Palestine thing is exceptional, whatever the truth of that, it also set a series of precedents for the next time and for other kinds of protest. It is true that universities were already under significant pressure at the time. But mainstream Dems, the universities, the liberal press, etc., did not even come close to pushing the boundaries of what they could do to defend the right to protest.
…Everyone understood that universities weren't going to be just quiet places of study and career-making. They are places that people live, play, collaborate, think, organize, and also study, credentialize, and make careers. They are universities because the entire universe of human activities takes place within that self-contained universe. Which means one has to accept that some areas are commons, where things like protest happen, and that this kind of activity will be tolerated, even embraced as part of that experience. But there has been a gradual chipping away at that idea, which was slammed shut with vigor last year. The university has also become a place with more extensive security protocols, speech codes, administrative interference in student life; where the emphasis has been on credentialing, making one's way through and out; where property rights, including university property rights, matter more than the community's collective activity and the rights relating to that activity. It's possible that the clearing of the Gaza encampments signals a real shift, where those accumulated recent marginal changes have become a new paradigm, the end of that right to protest that was a standing feature of university life.
At NYU, where I’ve taught since 2021 and where my wife Sonya has taught since 2012, the change in the climate and physical environment of the campus has been particularly stark. To put it mildly. NYU, as any visitor immediately realizes, doesn’t actually have a campus. It’s a bunch of buildings sprinkled around lower Manhattan; its focal point is Washington Square Park, a city park. The number of open outdoor spaces NYU actually controls is tiny: Gould Plaza, in front of the Stern School of Business; a walkway between Bobst Library and the admissions building; another walkway next to the hideous new eyesore in Mercer Street known as the Paulson Center.
Since the protests against the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, all those spaces have been the sites of encampments and protests, and they are all now walled off, protected by temporary fences and walls, closed by private security to all but NYU ID holders.
NYU advertises itself (even today, with no sense of irony) as a “campus without walls.” For undergraduates especially, that is its institutional brand, born in the era of neoliberal global capitalism 30 years ago. Now, this brand has never particularly made sense. The campus may appear open to the city, but its paywalls are very steep. It’s always been difficult—and now is often impossible—to hold an educational event at NYU that’s accessible to the public. Apart from its tiny art museum and sub-par performing arts center, nothing at NYU can be described as primarily existing for the public good. And as for NYU’s much-vaunted global campuses: the two largest ones are in authoritarian states, China and Abu Dhabi, where there is no pretense of a right to free expression. (While NYU claims academic freedom prevails on its overseas campuses, the record definitely demonstrates otherwise.)
That said, until 2023, NYU was a campus where left-wing thought was allowed to flourish with few restrictions, for the benefit of its students and the intellectual world at large. Eve Tuck, the Native scholar whose essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” defines the modern study of settler colonialism, teaches at NYU. So does Fred Moten, whose book The Undercommons advocates for a practice of fugitive resistance against the modern university. Vivek Chibber, one of today’s most influential Marxist social scientists, is a mainstay in NYU’s sociology department. The list goes on and on. Of course, as at all research universities, the progressive activists and theoreticians at NYU are vastly outnumbered by those who are vaguely liberal but politically disengaged, or by those who teach a variety of centrist or conservative positions: mainstream economists, business-school professors, pseudo-scientific celebrity “thought leaders” like Jonathan Haidt. And then there are NYU’s most eccentric right-wing conspiracist professors like Marc Crispin Miller, a 9/11 truther and fanatical opponent of vaccines and masks, and the late Stephen Cohen, a strident Putinist who appeared often on the Russian state propaganda channel RT.
The faculty, in other words, has always been a cranky, squabbling, chaotic, dissonant body, mostly focused on whatever is happening in their own subfields, taking for granted that the protections of tenure and academic freedom will shield them from the disapproval of the college administration, or the vehement hatred of professor X down the hall, who believes their entire field of study, and the principles behind it, shouldn’t exist. (This is more common among academics than you might think.)
No longer. Since October 7th, 2023, as Alex Gourevitch writes, NYU, like virtually all American universities with an activist student body, has criminalized any form of speech that mentions Palestine or describes Israel’s actions in Gaza, correctly, as genocide. At NYU, protests are banned from all campus spaces, including many that were the sites of loud, vigorous demonstrations during the Black Lives Matter and Sanctuary protests of the last decade. All of these developments have been covered at great length over the past year and a half. The deeper question is: why, and why now? The immediate, obvious and (as far as it goes) correct answer is the Palestine exception; if you don’t know what that is, please watch this film or read this report or this one. But is Palestine a sufficient explanation for the extraordinary, creative, totalizing way universities have implemented repression and censorship since October 7th? After all, pro-Palestine, anti-occupation activism on college campuses, and censorship in response to it, is nothing new; that’s why the phrase “the Palestinian exception” exists.
What’s really at work is a new step in the transformation of American universities themselves—a transformation from the inside—and NYU is a perfect example. This is a story that goes back decades, and has been described in detail in books like Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things and Sarah Ahmed’s On Being Included, and I can only provide a microscopic, bullet-point summary, but here goes:
• After the Reagan revolution, many of the most prominent leftist thinkers and activists of the 1960s and 1970s retreated from the public sphere and took up academic positions.
• Over time—assisted by affirmative action programs that made universities far more diverse—these thinkers cultivated generations of students and new schools of thought—again, largely out of the view of the public.
• In the 1990s and 2000s, the students came into new positions of power and influence, and took these new intellectual concepts into the public sphere.
• In the 2010s—the decade of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter—the students of those students took those concepts out into the streets (and onto college campuses) in a new era of popular protest with radical goals not widely visible in the US in 50 years.
Prison abolition. Income inequality. Structural racism and Critical Race Theory. Intersectionality. Late capitalism. Anti-globalization theory. Queer theory and Gender Trouble. Debt resistance and the debt jubilee. Settler colonialism. All academic concepts generated, or popularized, on college campuses over the last 40 years; all brought by students and activists into the mainstream. It’s no wonder, given this tremendous success, that white supremacist ideologues like Christopher Rufo will do anything to destroy academic humanities and liberal arts programs (“using financial pressure to put universities into existential terror”) and tech-libertarian-fascists like Marc Andreessen think universities as a whole need to be deleted, like failing companies, and replaced en masse:
No way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? It fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out, we have built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system.
But why are major universities—Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Cornell—not fighting back; why are they cooperating with an authoritarian government that quite literally, and explicitly, wants to defund them as a whole, demoralize them, remove their autonomy, and (if allowed) raze them to the ground?
The answer has to do with what universities today actually are: profit-producing, self-sustaining financial entities. They are corporations with enormous capital holdings (endowments, real estate, patents and another intellectual property, sports teams, globally recognizable brands, and so on) largely protected from taxation because they are, nominally, educational nonprofits. And like other large American corporations (Amazon, Starbucks, Whole Foods) there is one thing they fear more than anything else:
Unions.
Over the last 30 years, the same cadre (yes, let’s call it a cadre) of leftist and progressive academics have helped drive a unionization movement on college campuses, particularly among graduate students, non-tenure-track professors, and student workers. (There have also been efforts to unionize college athletes, but these have fallen by the wayside in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow athletes to profit from NIL contracts, effectively making them into individual entrepreneurs and free agents.) These union drives have been ugly, bitter, and divisive. Many ostensibly liberal college administrators, like Amy Hungerford (previously Yale, now Columbia) became dedicated union-busters. At NYU, in the last 20 years, there have been difficult and protracted struggles not only to unionize grad students, adjuncts, and contract faculty (ongoing), but a lengthy public battle over the construction of NYU Abu Dhabi, which (like most buildings in the Emirates) was built by contract laborers from South Asia, who are often subject to exploitation and abuse.
And what do the Palestine protests, and the present crackdowns have to do with unions? Quite a lot, because of that key leftist concept: solidarity. Leftist and progressive students and faculty are not single-issue activists. They are annoying and hard to shut up. They have succeeded in creating new unions in a conservative and anti-union moment in American history, and there’s a chance (however remote) that they might someday grasp the holy grail of higher-ed labor: overturning or subverting the Yeshiva decision, which prohibits professors at private universities from joining unions.
It’s becoming clear, in this current stage of college crackdowns alongside campus invasions by police and DHS and ICE agents directed by Trump, that universities are well aware of who they’re targeting, and why. Read, for example, this Twitter thread by Grant Miner, a Columbia student expelled for taking part in the Gaza protests, who is also the head of Columbia’s union of student workers:
“They are universities,” Gourevitch writes, “because the entire universe of human activities takes place within that self-contained universe. Which means one has to accept that some areas are commons, where things like protest happen, and that this kind of activity will be tolerated, even embraced.” Wouldn’t that be nice? Of course, the truth is that for decades many US universities haven’t maintained a commons—a public mission, an intellectual and educational commitment to free discourse and knowledge for its own sake—so much as a tasteful simulation of one. Now they’ve decided the simulation is over.
And here’s the key point: university crackdowns on academic freedom and the right to protest are having an enormous depressive effect on broad-based organizing against Trump, just as they had a major role in weakening young voters’ enthusiasm for Kamala Harris. Pressure and energy and organizing from the left has been the key to major Democratic successes going back to Obama’s victory in 2008 (even as the Democratic Party itself has done everything it can to marginalize, delegitimize, and defund its progressive wing, from Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar on down). Now corporate universities, with ostensibly liberal leaders and mission statements, are doing their part to crush student activists and silence the professors who inspire and encourage them.
What comes next? NYU clearly hopes that by demonstrating its own commitment to repression it will be spared the worst of Trump’s crackdown on campus protest: that is, what’s now happening at Columbia, where the administration has succeeding in extorting interim president Katrina Armstrong into gutting its Middle Eastern Studies department and adopting a blatantly racist and nonsensical definition of antisemitism by threatening $400 million in federal funding (for medical research, among other things). The New York Times, not exactly alarmist in its approach to Trump, calls it “a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.”
How can these passive corporate managers, often too afraid to show their faces on campus, actually believe, in the face of all available evidence, their universities can ride out the storm with their core resources and reputations intact if they just strike the right bargain? As M. Gessen has written recently, there’s a reason people like this obey fascists in advance: they’re trying to save their own skin. It almost never works. When the NYT uses words like “stunning” and “annihilation,” you know things are serious. Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, Trump, and Rufo are not interested in negotiations; at the very least, they want to do to all American universities what DeSantis and Rufo are already doing in Florida (eliminating entire college faculties, imposing strict ideological conditions on syllabi, encouraging scholars to flee) but their ultimate goal is to shrink American higher education nearly to nothing: for-profit online business schools, diploma mills, and a few hollowed-out flagship schools dedicated to the Politburo-style “cultural promotion of ‘Western civilization’.”
The only way to resist this catastrophe is one I’m afraid is unlikely to happen: liberals and leftists have to start working together again. The broad coalition that went out into the streets to protest the Iraq War, to defend the 99%, to elect Obama, and to support Black Lives Matter, has to fight for its basic, existential goals: to defeat fascism and protect democracy. If we win (and the chances are not good) on the other side we will need to transform American higher education to restore its public mission and obligations, including stronger protections for free speech, restrictions on private endowments and tax exemption, broader union protections for students, staff and faculty, board reform, governance reform—it’s a long list. Universities, if they survive, will have to have a very different relationship with their communities and the public as a whole.
It’s a very big if.