Recommended Reading: Campus Police States
Editor’s note: a semi-regular feature, Recommended Reading shares links to, and offers casual commentary on, two or more related news articles in a simple rundown blog. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.
Preparing for War
A couple of weeks ago I published an article here on NIDC talking about the ongoing transformation of U.S. educational institutions into a functional arm of an increasingly fascist police state. While much of that piece focused on the ways the fascist American right is seeking to erase history and indoctrinate students with the kind of mindset necessary to keep the trains running on time while the planet burns, billions die, and nations in the imperial core engage in genocide, I also talked about the rise of the “Homeland Security Campus” being engineered by ostensibly “liberal” higher education centers and administrators in response to the ongoing student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. While most people spent the summer focusing on the serpentine twists and turns of the U.S. presidential election campaign, university administrators, security consultants, and local police have busied themselves with trying to permanently snuff out a protest movement run by their own students, silence calls for those institutions to divest from companies in Israel, and violently suppress free speech rights on and around campuses all over the country.
For an update on what that process looks like and how administrators intend to transform campus life, let’s turn to this recent article on Mondoweiss by National Students for Justice in Palestine organizer and urban counterinsurgency researcher Carrie Zaremba:
U.S. universities spent the summer strategizing to suppress student activism. Here is their plan.
“Such coordination will fuel the increased militarized campus policing emblematic of the post-9/11 era, with over 100 colleges and universities now equipped with military surplus gear through the Department of Defense’s 1033 program. The integration of SWAT teams and paramilitary gear into campus life, along with its own system of ID checkpoints, embodies the ambitions of war-profiteering university trustees who envision higher education as an extension of U.S. empire. As campus police acquire more advanced technology, university administrations eagerly funnel resources to accommodate their growing arsenal, perpetuating an arms race within the academic sphere. This professionalization has been accompanied by the rise of campus policing expertise as a distinct field of knowledge production. It is a technocratic pursuit situated within the administrative engine of the neoliberal university, a system of efficiency and control designed to maximize “security.” Under the guise of neutrality, the label of expertise attached to campus policing conceals its biased alignment with the Board’s financial interests.”
Owing to the fact that American universities have responded to anti-genocide protests as an existential threat, and spent the summer workshopping with expensive “risk and crisis management” consulting firms, this is a detailed article that runs through a gamut of interlinked responses by those institutions; far more than I can list here in a blog post. The key point however is that schools have transformed themselves into micro “security states” for the thinly-concealed purpose of stopping student-led anti-genocide protests. The establishment of these security states allows the suppression of free speech rights, administrative oversight on who can and can’t assemble (peacefully or otherwise) on or near campuses, militarized campus policing, sophisticated online and digital surveillance, the dismantling of student self-governance, the appropriation of student-controlled funds, increased powers to expel students or punish faculty who don’t toe the line, and at one university in New York, the establishment of “Zionist” as a protected class; which is a round about way to justify this increased enforcement and the application of anti-hate laws to punish students for opposing a genocide in progress. In short, higher education institutes in America have spent the summer transforming their campuses into some sick combination of a surveillance state, an army base, and yes, a type of prison; all to stop young adults from exercising their constitutionally protected rights to demand institutional actors stop funding and enabling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, by a U.S. backed client state – namely Israel.
As someone involved in higher education in my life before I openly embraced antifascism and anarchist thought, I can definitively assure you that there are no happy endings to this story. If you transform school into a prison, you will churn out prisoners, not scholars. If you make campus a military base, you will create soldiers not thinkers. If you celebrate activism on campuses of the past, while transforming activists on the campuses of today into criminals, you will be consumed by the stench of your own hypocrisy. Stamping out democracy and free thought on campus will not preserve or protect those executing the genocide in Gaza, and it will have horrifying, long-term costs for our entire society going forward.
Punishment and Intimidation
When writing about the transformation of higher education centers in America (and much of the broader Pig Empire) into fascist indoctrination camps and functional arms of the reactionary police state, I have tended to focus on the fallout from this situation for students and society at large. At the same time however, I think it’s important to remember that the war against free thought and moral activism being undertaken by administrators and government entities also extends into the intimidation, repression, and punishment of university faculty, especially teachers, who are trying to protect the democratic rights of their students, or openly oppose the erasure of history, the militarization of campuses, and investment in genocidal colonial police states by the institutions they work at. As the following interview on Democracy Now with the (now suspended) chair of social justice reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Steven Thrasher demonstrates, the forces of reaction are also working overtime to make an example of any professor or faculty member who isn’t down with genocide, the brutalization of student protestors by police, or the installation of what myself and others have been calling “the Homeland Security Campus” at American colleges and universities.
Northwestern Suspends Journalism Professor Steven Thrasher After Gaza Solidarity Protest
“And even though I have been — I have been physically beaten up by the police of my university, I’ve been interrogated in front of Congress, I’ve been threatened with jail, and now I am suspended with pay and not allowed to teach, this is the work that we need to do in these very difficult moments. This is a genocide. This is something that is having an enormous impact not just on many of us in the United States, but on 600,000 students who have lost their ability to get to school in Gaza, on 14,000 children who have been killed in Gaza.”
For those unfamiliar with Thrasher, he’s the professor who, along with several other faculty members at Northwestern, defended student protestors from police violence by locking arms and physically standing between the campus murderpigs and the protesting students. For his troubles, he was singled out in a Congressional hearing as “a goon” by GOP Congressman Jim Banks, who effectively demanded that Thrasher and other faculty members who, again, literally protected student protestors from police violence with their bodies, be fired. Thrasher was also charged with allegedly obstructing police trying to break up the encampment at Northwestern; crucially however, those charges were dropped by prosecutors in Illinois upon further investigation. Despite this, Northwestern (undoubtedly influenced by pressure from reactionary “goons” in Congress) has suspended Thrasher and denied his ability to teach classes this fall, offering the excuse for this objectively retaliatory intimidation tactic that it’s because they’re conducting their own investigation into Thrasher’s activities to defend protesting students and the campus anti-genocide encampment.
Look, a university caving to fascist political pressure to make an example of and punish a professor for defending students protesting a U.S. backed genocide by a client state, with his own physical body, would be an alarming example of political repression, fascist fuckery, and the transformation of our universities into arms of a reactionary police state under any circumstances. But it’s even more alarming when you find out that Thrasher is an exemplary professor (who has been acknowledged as such by the very same Northwestern University that just suspended him), a published author, and the pioneering chair of the social justice in reporting department with a focus on the LGBTQ community. Ostensibly, Northwestern literally employs this man *because* of his conscience, and to help students learn about their own moral responsibility in journalism to oppose things like fascist repression, totalitarian police states, and a literal fucking genocide being conducted in Gaza, by Israel, with full backing of the American government. Indeed, the university has applauded his commitment to this worthy cause on multiple occasions in the past, but as Thrasher notes the difference this time is that he’s calling into question the moral fiber and activity of Northwestern itself:
“What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine. And so, they don’t like that. And that the Congress is putting pressure on them to put pressure on me, they’re aiding that.”
Mark my words that appeasing fascists, intimidating faulty and transforming campuses into militarized security states will not have good outcomes for Pig Empire society. The transformation of higher education centers into functional arms of a reactionary police state openly supporting a genocide not only runs counter to the very purpose of those institutions, but it will also produce “leaders of tomorrow” who only know how to repress dissent and conform to dictates of authoritarian structures. As I’ve posited elsewhere, I believe this is by design because if we’re going to continue extractivist capitalism on a world being boiled to death by that very same capitalism, our education system must be geared towards churning out “little Eichmanns” to administer that genocidal, authoritarian order in advance. This is literally how fascism “happens here.”
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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