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I am sitting on a fire escape across the street from Columbia University with three organizers of the Columbia University Gaza protest. It is night. New York City Police, stationed inside and outside the gates of the campus, have placed the campus on lockdown. There are barricades blocking streets. No one, unless they live in a residence hall on campus, is allowed to enter. The siege means that students cannot go to class. Students cannot go to the library. Students cannot enter the labs. Students cannot visit the university health services. Students cannot get to studios to practice. Students cannot attend lectures. Students cannot walk across the campus lawns. The university, as during the Covid pandemic, has retreated into the world of screens where students are isolated in their rooms.

The university buildings are largely vacant. The campus pathways deserted. Columbia is a Potemkin university, a playground for corporate administrators. The president of the university — a British-Egyptian baroness who built her career at institutions such as the Bank of England, World Bank and International Monetary Fund — called in police in riot gear, with guns drawn, to clear the school’s encampment, forcibly evict students who occupied a campus hall and beat and arrest over 100 of them. They were arrested for “criminal trespassing” on their own campus. 

These administrators demand, like all who manage corporate systems of power, total obedience. Dissent. Freedom of expression. Critical thought. Moral outrage. These have no place in our corporate-indentured universities.

All systems of totalitarianism, including corporate totalitarianism, deform education into vocational training where students are taught what to think, not how to think. Only the skills and expertise demanded by the corporate state are valued. The withering away of the humanities and transformation of major research universities into corporate and Defense Department vocational schools with their outsized emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, illustrate this shift. The students who disrupt the Potemkin university, who dare to think for themselves, face beatings, suspension, arrest and expulsion.

The mandarins who run Columbia and other universities, corporatists who make salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, oversee academic plantations. They treat their poorly paid adjunct faculty, who often lack health insurance and benefits, like serfs. They slavishly serve the interests of wealthy donors and corporations. They are protected by private security. They despise students, forced into onerous debt peonage for their education, who are non-conformists, who defy their fiefdoms and call out their complicity in genocide.

Columbia University, with an endowment of $13.64 billion, charges students nearly $90,000 a year to attend. But students are not allowed to object when their tax and tuition money funds genocide, or when their tuition payments are used to see them, along with faculty supporters, assaulted and sent to jail. They are, as Joe Biden put it, members of “hate groups.” They are — as Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer said of those who occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia renaming it Hind Hall, in honor of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was murdered by Israeli forces after spending 12 days trapped in a car with her six dead relatives — engaged in “lawlessness”.