The Elite Fascism of US Universities

As newly-inaugurated US President Donald Trump’s name is being floated for the Nobel Peace Prize for ushering in the temporary ceasefire in Gaza, US college students and faculty protesting the genocide and occupation for the past year are facing collective punishment.

Days into his second term as the country’s 47th head of state, Trump has also reinstated his so-called ‘Muslim ban’ from 2017, now beefed up with provisions that seem to offer grounds to deport pro-Palestinian protestors. With students returning to college campuses nationwide for the spring semester and organising actions demanding a permanent ceasefire, the real estate mogul and immigration hardliner has an unlikely ally in campus crackdowns – liberal US universities.

Crackdown at Columbia and NYU

Within the first week of the new semester and Trump’s second term, a Columbia University professor has been terminated from her position and 13 New York University students face suspension with 20 others on probation – all for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

“We call upon President Mills to stop penalising our students for speaking and acting in the spirit of what they learn in our classrooms,” read the NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine’s (NYUFSJP)  January 6, 2025 press release lambasting the institution for declaring faculty and students Persona Non Grata (PNG) and barring their campus access for “vague and inconsistent reasons” ranging “from unsubstantiated references” to “security issues and disruption” in the aftermath of a peaceful protest on December 12.

“We’re delivering this petition because our students who have been exiled from their campus cannot deliver it themselves,” Association of American University Professors President Anna McCarthy said in a  January 23 follow-up, adding “the administration’s reliance on law enforcement to deal with peaceful protests should be concerning to everyone at NYU. I have never seen anything as ruthless and aggressive in my 27 years at NYU.” 

The December 12 protest at NYU’s Bobst library led to the arrest of Professors Andrew Ross and Sonya Posmentier by the NYPD, and the faculty members were declared PNG by NYU along with Professors Lisa Duggan, Rebecca Karl and Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Also read: Columbia University Collaborates With Enemies of Academic Freedom, Says Professor Who Quit

Pressure from over 1,500 academics has led to the lifting of faculty PNG classifications “albeit with a warning attached,” the January 6 press release notes. However, the PNG label continues to apply to students, a reality against which the FSJP is pushing back saying, “As long as our students are still facing the threat of punishment for exercising their speech rights on campus, we will continue to make ourselves ‘unwelcome’ in the eyes of this administration.”

Last April, students at NYU – like their peers at 116 other US universities – set up encampments at campus public spaces in downtown Manhattan demanding that the institution “disclose investments in genocidal states and military industries, divest from those investments, and close down the NYU Tel Aviv campus,” professor of History at NYU Rebecca Karl summarised for me.

The reasons behind the calls to disclose and divest are self-evident, and the reason behind the call to close the Tel Aviv location is simple, said Sociology Professor Dr. Andrew Ross. “There are all sorts of people who can’t travel to Israel among our student and faculty body, and the university should not be operating any part in violation of its own campus codes against discrimination.” 

After calling in the NYPD in spring 2024 to arrest over a hundred student and faculty protesters, the university administration allegedly agreed, on tape, to a meeting in the Fall semester to disclose its Israeli investments. Seeing the promise never pan out, NYU students staged a sit-in at the library at the end of the semester, a protest that was observed by Queer Studies Professor Lisa Duggan and other faculty who were present in their official capacity, “not to interfere, not to speak for them, not to mediate on their behalf, but just be there for whatever support and observation we can offer, respecting the autonomy of the students.”

Disputing not only that the protest was peaceful but also that the administration had ever agreed to disclose Israeli investments in the first place, NYU spokespeople attributed the arrests to “targeted threatening graffiti,” which as Duggan notes, “said the words that the guy who had killed the United Healthcare CEO had put on his bullets – Delay, Deny and Depose, first the CEOs, then the board of trustees.”

Duggan said that anonymous graffiti scrawled on a bathroom wall could easily have been the work of a provocateur, adding that it is “unprecedented that they used that as their rationale for not following due process, or even offering any explanation for issuing the sanctions and making these arrests.”

Pattern of disciplinary actions

The recent NYU arrests fit within a national pattern of disciplinary action on dubious charges against students and professors over the past year in the US, which Ross – a decades-long activist on the steering committee of the National Network for Justice for Palestine – confirms is unprecedented.

CNN reported in May 2024 that over 50 professors had been arrested by police across the US at campus protests, including several instances of excessive force on top of skirting due process. Furthermore, besides the “viral moments” as Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, notes in that report, there were even more “chilling” instances of faculty removal from teaching without explanation or process.

Also read: ‘In Standing With Palestine, We Are Also Standing Up For Ourselves’

In September 2024, the Intercept reported that Anthropology professor Maura Finkelstein was fired from Muhlenberg College where she had been teaching nearly a decade, for reposting a quote from Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi that said, “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.”

The liberal arts college in Pennsylvania has not disputed that termination of Finkelstein – who is Jewish herself – is a result of her repost, setting an ominous precedent for “the Orwellian double-speak” of conflating “anti-Zionism and antisemitism”. “[This] functions as a bulwark of the Israeli state’s denial of Palestinian freedom and, at this moment, of that state’s genocide in Gaza,” Jewish Voice for Peace said in their statement condemning Finkelstein’s firing.

Hence, while Ross sees neither his nor his “comrades’ actions as particularly singular” and questions why his silent colleagues are “not more active given that they have a platform and are protected by academic freedom,” the landscape he describes is hostile.

In February 2024, Ross was named in a lawsuit brought against NYU in which he was accused of “egregious acts of antisemitism” for speaking at a pro-Palestine protest. “When it comes to Palestine,” he says, “if you speak out, you are subject to a barrage of hate mail, vilified on social media, and accused of all sorts of things, antisemitic being only one of them. Whatever you have achieved professionally up until that point doesn’t really matter. You can be torn to shreds as a result of highly organised pro-Israel attacks on your person and reputation.”

Karl’s treatment as usual suspect by NYU administration on December 12 further testifies to this singling out of supporters of Palestine as grounds for disciplinary action. Heading to the last day of her graduate class in the Bobst Library basement, Karl was in for a rude awakening when she couldn’t enter it using her access card and was escorted away by campus security guards who informed Karl that she had been designated PNG.

After making some calls to the provost and the dean, Karl learned that since she had not even participated in the protest for which the administration was penalising faculty and students, her PNG status was “erroneously applied.”

“The first big crackdown at Columbia was after five billionaires called Eric Adams [Mayor of New York City], told him something needed to be done about the encampments, and the crackdown came the next day,” Duggan said. She was referring to leaked WhatsApp texts that revealed CEOs of Starbucks, Dell and Kind urging the Adams to act against protests, with someone even offering to hire private investigators to do the dirty work.

‘Couldn’t have been prouder of my students’

It is common knowledge after the 2016 Amnesty International report that US police departments train directly with the Israeli Defence Forces. The Guardian reported last year that “US law enforcement agencies for decades received analysis of incidents in the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli think tanks, training on domestic ‘Muslim extremists’ from pro-Israel non-profits and surveilled social media accounts of pro-Palestine activists in the US.”

According to Duggan, the reason universities such as NYU want to crush student protests is not because student groups are infiltrated by Hamas, but because “they connected what’s happening in Palestine with police brutality, gentrification and the history of settler colonialism in the US” as part of activities in the encampments. Students also explicitly trained in de-escalation techniques, contrary to their popular media portrayals as a violent mob, she said.

“I couldn’t have been prouder of them, and it really felt like they were my legacy as a teacher,” Duggan said. Currently undergoing cancer treatment, the septuagenarian is thankful that her PNG status has been lifted. Even earlier, she was relieved that her access was barred only to the lower Manhattan campus and not to the cancer centre located in midtown.

Neither non-tenured faculty nor students are as fortunate, as Duggan, Karl and Ross all maintain that the composition of student protestors at NYU akin to other schools nationwide skews towards minorities, many of whom are international students whose US residency will be severely impacted by these disciplinary actions.

Nearly 5,000 students comprising almost 20% of all international students at NYU are of Indian origin. In April 2024, Coimbatore-born graduate student Achinthya Sivalingam was barred from Princeton University over her support for Palestine. In October 2024, British-Gambian PhD student Momodou Taal was suspended and barred from Cornell University, facing deportation that he evaded ostensibly helped by high-profile media appearances.

However, international students on F1 visas face heightened scrutiny as university campuses collaborate with intelligence firms with ties to the Gaza genocide to police campus activities. First amendment rights to freedom of expression notwithstanding, doesn’t punishing students for holding a point of view shared by all but a handful of UN members run contrary to the inclusive image that elite US universities portray in their brochures?

Citing new scholarship from Barnard Professor Janet Jakobson – who has also spoken out against her institution’s restrictive speech policies – Duggan points out that US universities are largely funded by research grants not only from the government but also pharmaceutical, defence and tech giants, such that they could do without students altogether, let alone those from around the world. “It’s kind of like CVS,” she says, “where all the products are locked down and you have to ring a bell to get them to open those, because they don’t want customers anymore: they make all their money from health insurance and the pharmacy.”