No Resurrection: The Life and Death of the Modern University

My first academic job was at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.  I was extremely lucky to have landed that job.  I was fresh out of graduate school and had mailed off around 150 applications between September and December.  It was 2003.  These things were still done in hard copy back then. 

I got a few screening interviews at that year’s MLA Convention—who else remembers sitting awkwardly on hotel beds, trying to describe your pedagogical philosophy to grouchy hiring committees?—but nothing came of them.  By early February, things weren’t looking good.  Then I got an email from the dean of Whitewater’s College of Letters and Sciences.  I had presented at the MLA and the dean was in the audience.  He had approached me afterward to say that he loved my research and we exchanged information.  I had a flicker of hope at the time, but it appeared that nothing had come of our encounter.  A month later, I accepted a job at Whitewater. 

After a lifetime in religious, conservative states, I was excited to move to Wisconsin.  Most of Whitewater’s faculty lived in Madison—about a fifty-minute drive, give or take—and my wife and I decided to do the same.  I had great hopes for a vibrant political life.  Madison was known to be one of the most progressive cities in the United States. 

That reputation turned out to be true, but it led to disappointment rather than vibrancy.  It didn’t take me long to understand that “progressive” came with its own problems—namely, that it is mostly just conservativism with a different aesthetic. 

The point was driven home during my second year at Whitewater.  A group of activists from UW-Madison was trying to implement divestment resolutions at the various UW campuses.  These were the early days of BDS—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—and the activists were more often met with hostility than curiosity.  One of their leaders was a philosophy graduate student named Mohammed Abed, who was an absolute dynamo.  Persistent and brilliant, Mohammed left his fingerprints all over the movement. 

It wasn’t only Zionists or individuals/institutions invested in Zionism that early BDS leaders had to persuade; many, if not most, radical faculty at the time were reluctant or lukewarm.  Some were outright hostile to the idea of boycotting Israel.  People now recognize BDS as what the youth like to call “the bare minimum,” but at the start we had a hell of a time getting leftist faculty on board.  The hesitancy corresponded to a person’s stature or the prestige of their institutional affiliation.  As is typical of professors, they came aboard only when BDS became a marketable commitment. 

Anyway, that was the context in which Mohammed and his friends were operating.  They had made significant progress in Madison and were eager to organize Whitewater’s faculty.  I met with them and explained that there was a decent chance of succeeding.  My department was filled with people who considered themselves scholar-activists and always seemed to be agitating for or against something or other. 

We managed to get the question of divestment onto the agenda of the next faculty senate meeting, which the crew from Madison would attend.  The agenda item attracted notice and I heard some of my colleagues whispering about it.  They were planning to go, I gathered. 

It was with great excitement that I turned up at the senate meeting, confident that divestment was the perfect issue for intellectuals who had opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, who were disgusted by racism, and who spent most of their time complaining about reactionaries.  Indeed, a number of colleagues from my department were there, along with folks from throughout the college.  We chitchatted until the meeting was called to order.  After Mohammed’s group had presented the case for divestment, the chair opened up the floor for comment. 

One by one, my colleagues stepped forward to oppose the resolution. 

*****

What I remember most isn’t anger or shock, but loneliness.  The feeling was pronounced.  I was saddened by what I viewed at the time as a betrayal.  (I view it now as normal protocol.)  But the sense of being alone on the issue, embedded in every Palestinian’s consciousness, felt almost brutal.  Indeed, calling Zionist colonization an “issue” feels a bit obscene.  It’s not an issue limited to rhetoric or opinion; it’s a matter of survival and sustenance, of justice and reparation, of dignity and self-respect.  How could educated people miss something so obvious?  How could society’s leading lights be so hard-hearted? 

Like many before me, I was left to wonder how Palestinians are supposed to exist in this world when the world in its current incarnation requires our nonexistence. 

The moment made clear to me a yawning discrepancy between self-branding and praxis among the professoriate.  When something more than performance is at stake, or when a real threat arises against the status quo, a great many people immediately retreat into liberal orthodoxy.  Few things induce this retreat more effectively than Palestine. 

I knew this already.  I was a maladjusted kid, often in trouble.  A good kind of trouble, I’d say, though I suppose my parents would disagree.  Resisted any sort of religious indoctrination.  Didn’t want to pay homage to the flag before pep rallies.  Hated my teachers and thus made low grades on purpose. 

Despite my dim reputation, I was sharply observant.  I watched for potential allies.  The rich kids were out, for obvious reasons.  The nerds, as well.  The jocks were straight-up enemies.  That left the metalheads, the hillbillies, the minorities, and the stoners.  They also proved useless.  Black combat boots.  Snuff rings on the back jeans pocket.  Nose piercings.  Facial hair.  Unmitigated hate for the man.  But by God they always stood for the national anthem. 

I’ve known for four decades that you can’t expect anything but disappointment from self-appointed rebels.  In Wisconsin, I was hoping for something different.  The ensuing years have been unforgiving of my naivete. 

Some things don’t change but the timelines and adornments.  Now I scan an industry whose tenured stratum appears to fit the part.  Fashionably shabby or slickly stylish clothes.  Transgressive vocabularies.  Vintage glasses.  Smirks.  Tattoos.  Incredible credentials.  Lots of rebelliousness in the features.  But take a closer look.  They always go back to the Democrats.  They always disavow violence.  They always caution pragmatism.  They always soft sell U.S.-sponsored coups and counterrevolutions.  In other words, they always end up standing for the flag. 

I can sense lots of inner-monologues right now about exceptions, personal or otherwise.  Yes, of course.  I agree!  There are many exceptions.  Remember, though:  an exception by definition contravenes the norm.  We can acknowledge the exceptions.  We can celebrate them, even.  But ultimately we have to deal with the norm.  The terrible situation now facing higher education wouldn’t exist if the exceptions were significant enough to become unexceptional. 

This terrible situation I speak of should be self-evident, but I’ll highlight some of its features:  systematic persecution of students, including suspension, expulsion, police brutality, arrest, doxing, defamation, and deportation; a corresponding persecution of faculty, including job termination, cancellation of classes, and vigorous surveillance; and a virtual embargo on anti-Zionist sentiment for anybody boasting an institutional affiliation.  All this as both major political parties underwrite and frequently celebrate genocide. 

The modes of repression now on display aren’t novel; they’re more intense and overt.  Anti-Zionism, as with any other revolutionary movement, for years has evoked the wrath of universities and the centers of power they serve.  Professors long have been fired, denied tenure, or otherwise disciplined at the behest of Zionist organizations.  Each time it happened, the interested parties would plead with colleagues throughout the industry to develop sites of countervailing power.  Some tried, but most went on with life secure in the knowledge that managerial persecution would happen only to other people, most of whom were probably asking for it. 

And now here we are:  the government is disappearing student activists, outlawing certain forms of speech, revoking work and study visas, and demanding that administrators transform their campuses into police camps if they want federal money.  Everyone is rightly terrified.  But I insist on pointing out that plenty of us were terrified all along.  That should have been enough to disrupt the status quo. 

I also insist on pointing out that the current situation is no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention to Zionist tactics on campus over the past few decades, although the depth and intensity of the persecution has been jarring.  There has never been a moment when Zionists allowed for expressions of dissent.  They’ve been targeting Palestinian students and professors since at least the 1960s.  It was never quaint.  They were just as brutal thirty years ago as they are today.  Only the dynamics have changed.  

Too many people who pretended to know better humored their nonsense.  Why?  I’m not always sure.  Could be ambition, could be tacit affinity, could be self-preservation, could be old-fashioned cowardice.  Whatever the reason, not enough faculty with power, or with access to power, stood up for the vulnerable—not just Palestinians, but contingent faculty, Black people, immigrants, grad student unionizers, and workers usually absent from the conversation altogether (gardeners and custodians and cafeteria staff and bus drivers).  Some of those faculty outright aligned with management.  This compliance is how they earned proximity to power in the first place. 

Herein exists the great danger of not abiding by a set of principles vis-à-vis the dispossessed and acting on those principles as necessary.  A bunch of nobodies get punished.  Everyone shrugs.  Friends of those nobodies urge somebody, anybody, to act.  Everyone shrugs, but with a careful eye on the situation.  When the issue hits the news cycle and becomes a controversy, they finally act, but not to support the nobodies who are now somebody.  Oh, they may say the right things, but it’s the spotlight, not the injustice, that has piqued their attention.  Their role now is to temper or coopt any radical potential emerging from the discontent.  They are no longer shrugging.  Now they are intellectuals.  Now they are leaders. 

Does this sound fanciful?  I guess, if you want it to.  All I can tell you is that I lived it, more than once.  And I’ve observed the process in action dozens of times since.  It’s like an emerging fashion trend:  once you notice it the first time, it suddenly becomes ubiquitous.  I’m not trying to theorize from afar; I’m explaining in practical terms how so-called radicals can perpetuate the very system they apparently oppose. 

This culture of social climbing meant that the professorial class was completely unprepared for the Zionist genocide and the intensified persecution that came along with it.  By “unprepared,” I mean intellectually, politically, and organizationally.  Intellectual unpreparedness was evident in the many think-pieces pathologizing Palestinians as latently warlike and by the compulsion to prioritize the angst of Israeli settlers and diasporic Jews.  Political unpreparedness came about through a longstanding addiction to Westphalian buzzwords like “democracy,” “human rights,” and “authoritarianism” without a concomitant recognition that in practice they usually reify the logic of U.S. imperialism.  Organizational unpreparedness was probably the most damning problem.  Few campuses had structures in place that could repel managerial abuse.  More people needed to be strike-ready, for example.  (Not that striking appears to have been a consideration.)  Faculty should always try to develop networks that allow them to move quickly against administration in moments of crisis.  Enough faculty need to want this kind of network for it to even be a consideration, which is a proto-problem perhaps greater than the subsequent one.  

So now, as the Zionist entity continues to triumphantly steal land and terrorize its neighbors, and as universities have become open participants in this terrorization, our options appear to be twofold:  speak up and risk being neutralized or pretend that higher education will course correct because it is inherently virtuous. 

The second option no longer exists.  It never did, to be clear.  The virtues of higher education were always tethered to capital accumulation.  I’m speaking in a more literal sense:  it’s too late for nostalgia or romanticism.  The university can no longer pretend to be a benighted site of inquiry and erudition, some peaceful, hermetic landscape outside of “the real world.”  It killed its own mythology.  And it’s not getting resurrected. 

*****

The vicious campaigns of repression we’re seeing throughout the West (and in many Arab countries) are both an extension and byproduct of the Zionist genocide.  I mentioned earlier that there is plenty of precedent for what we’re currently seeing.  That precedent goes well beyond Palestine and originates with Black and Indigenous peoples, communists (or perceived communists), and so forth.  However, there are some new developments worth attention. 

For instance, we’re seeing an unprecedented marshaling of administrative resources, which allows for a large volume of repressive acts.  The repression affects both individuals and organizations.  Safety in numbers no longer exists for the activist, but the numbers benefit management because despite the increased capital it requires, mass punishment exhausts the diminishing resources of the oppressed.  Management, like the state it wishes to protect, has opted for collective punishment. 

The most noteworthy development is emphasis on Zionism as an inborn characteristic.  The notion of Zionism as somehow being an immutable feature of Jewishness has been around for a while, although Jewish scholars of various ideological leanings have cautioned against it.  Now Zionist organizations are putting it forward as an indisputable truth to be codified in law.  Maura Finkelstein, for example, was fired from a tenured position at Muhlenberg College, just up the road, based on this rationale.  According to Muhlenberg, Finkelstein didn’t create a hostile atmosphere for Jews (although this accusation was evident in the complaints about her); she created one for Zionists, which required nothing more than empathy for Palestinians. 

Other universities have run with the precedent.  Currently, politicians across North America and Europe are rushing to make “Zionist” a protected category even as they roll back or eliminate hard-fought civil rights victories for other minority groups.  It’s a curious move.  Although it will clearly have some short-term benefit to the pro-Israel crowd, it has potential to be a long-term disaster.  It used to be that anti-Zionism was conflated with antisemitism to create a pretext for recrimination; now the anti-Zionism itself is verboten on grounds of racial intolerance.  I can see no happy ending for either Jews or Palestinians in this scenario. 

Speaking of “antisemitism”—and here I put it in quotation marks to denote the accusation and not the act itself—let me speak directly to self-described anti-Zionist Jews who insist on shoehorning antisemitism into conversations about Palestine.  I don’t know how else to say it, so I’ll just say it:  nobody’s interested in entertaining that bullshit any longer.  Nobody has the capacity to entertain it any longer.  We’ve spent eighteen months watching corpses pile up in Gaza.  Our families.  Our friends.  Our compatriots.  We’re seeing the Zionist entity steal more land by the week and bomb four countries at the same time.  We’re being silenced with brute force throughout the Global North.  All in the name of safety and security for the Jewish people.  Pardon us for not being in the mood to humor the rationale for our own obsolescence. 

Not to mention that for decades these haphazard allegations of “antisemitism” have caused us—Palestinians, Muslims, Black people, dissident Jews—tremendous harm, as individuals and communities.  Nevertheless, out of courtesy and a sense of compassion innate to our politics, we went out of our way to reassure you that our opposition to Israel has nothing to do with animosity toward Jewish peoplehood or to Judaism in general.  We often set aside our own concerns to highlight these distinctions.  We wanted an inclusive space and I’m deeply proud to have been part of many movements boasting a multi-ethnic and -confessional disposition.  We tried to practice a vision of liberation and more often than not we succeeded. 

And still countless people had their reputations destroyed, lost their jobs, got snatched up and deported.  Now we can see the endgame.  It wasn’t just our problem as Palestinians or Muslims or Black people or as anti-Zionists in general.  No, it was an obvious prelude to rightwing dominion.  Phony charges of antisemitism led to the destruction of Corbyn’s movement in the UK; while that movement had some flaws, it also showed real promise and offered a sense of hope to people otherwise treated as surplus.  These phony charges are a reliable way to undermine revolutionary Black politics and have been used to impede the momentum of every decolonial formation in recent history.  Now they’re the main justification for police brutality, expulsion of students, revocation of degrees, cancellation of visas, travel bans, speech restrictions, and judicial hostility.  “Antisemitism” has become the soundtrack to fascism. 

I also want to point out that the Palestine solidarity movement never needed to be educated about the distinction between Zionists and Jewish people, certainly not by Westerners with little to no understanding of Palestinian culture and history.  Our intellectuals and freedom fighters already made that distinction.  It’s there in Antonius, in Habash, in Kanafani, in Bernawi, in Said, in Khaled, in Odeh.  It’s there in the communiques of every single political party formed in Palestine since 1900.  The inherent racism of Zionism, even in its humanistic iterations, should have been a much greater focus.  Instead, well-meaning (and bad faith) observers spent decades excusing Zionism as a mere disagreement.  This emphasis on the ontology of the settler is a source of great frustration in the Palestine solidarity movement.  Gratuitous accusations of antisemitism have functioned as the one of the most effective counterrevolutionary tactics of the past hundred years.  

Those accusations merely provide the government a reason to make lots of good people miserable.  

*****

We don’t need to resurrect what once was.  Yes, academe has visibly gone downhill, but the past can be seen precisely in what exists today.  The endpoint we want arises from a different beginning. 

Looking at the state of things on campus these days, it would require some pretty strong denial or servility to say that academic freedom is real; to view labor conditions as acceptable; to be satisfied with the job market; or to envision a stable path forward for the industry.  Whatever any of us might imagine to be the glory days aren’t getting resurrected. 

This moment constitutes what we might call a revolutionary impasse.  Two forces are struggling to implement wildly different visions of higher education.  One of those forces has the weight of militaries, governments, and corporations on its side.  The only option for the opposing party is to vanquish the more powerful force altogether.  Obviously this is a tall order, perhaps fantastical in both rhetoric and action, but we should nevertheless position it as our ultimate aspiration.  A reformist approach will at best reinforce the impasse.  Let’s not allow our imaginations to be constrained by bourgeois common sense.  If all we manage to accomplish is a legacy sustaining the idea of freedom, then we will have fulfilled a critical responsibility to ensuing generations. 

Because of the revolutionary impasse, more anti-imperialists are being forced to understand that the modern university is central to the system they oppose.  The university isn’t a world apart or a parallel entity.  It is both a guarantor and beneficiary of U.S. power.  We don’t agitate against campus policies without also proffering opposition to capitalism and militarism, intentionally or not.  If we fail to make the connection, then we’ll eventually lose the energy and vision needed to sustain us. 

As a student, I was active in various organizing efforts, mostly to do with Palestine.  This activity continued into my academic career, although I’ve slowed down in recent years.  Or maybe I’ve become active through different ideas of engagement.  Somewhere along the way, I realized that we weren’t organizing against corrupt campus administrators; we were up against capitalism distilled into its most beautified form.  Everything about campus presented a utopian veneer at odds with a simmering class antagonism.  This kind of realization is easy to come by.  Now that management and their wealthy donors again have decided to bare their teeth, the antagonism is out in the open. 

We should bare our teeth in return.  I suggest moving away from civil liberties as an organizing principle and intellectual approach.  Access and redistribution are more important goals.  More difficult, yes, but more impactful, with much greater potential.  Faculty have to seriously think about various forms of refusal or withholding labor altogether.  Forms of refusal might include walkouts, cancelling classes, not turning in grades, and declining to participate in assessment and other bureaucratic hassles (this one should be an easy sell).  Any refusal should come with an explanation highlighting its purpose and specifying what is needed to resume operations.  Withholding labor can come in the form of authorized or wildcat strikes.  Sometimes a campus needs to be shut down.  When a university is actively harming its own students and employees, then making that university inoperable is more than a strategy; it is an ethical commitment to the well-being of those suffering the harm. 

I would also recommend refusing to collaborate with anyone known to back the genocide, whether the backing is loud or lowkey.  This tactic is less impactful than direct action, and might be seen as a form of personal satisfaction, but if it’s widely adopted as a practice then it will prevent Zionism from being accepted as normative, one of the few sources of power available for us to leverage.  

Likewise, go ahead and quit paying dues to scholarly associations that refuse to adopt BDS or are otherwise complicit in Zionist aggression.  Workshops 4 Gaza has a page set up where you can direct the money to organizations working on the ground in Palestine, instead.  Donating in general is a good idea.  Money is never not useful to the oppressed. 

In any case, we’re not at a disadvantage because we lack ideas, but because we lack power.  Human beings have incredible capacity to devise creative forms of resistance.  The best contribution I can make to the process is a firm suggestion that amid the current impasse, we cannot let revolutionary sentiment be lost to nostalgia about a free and open-minded university that never actually existed. 

*****

I still believe in the ability of universities to serve the collective good.  I hope to someday inhabit a society in which this kind of university can exist; the current one is salted against the possibility.  The universities in the United States are too invested in imperialism—that is, extraction and accumulation—to serve the needs of the people.  Because of Palestine, they no longer bother to hide their allegiance. 

I spent five years away from campus and when I returned in 2022 it was a different scene.  Many things were the same, of course.  Some students are serious, some are immature.  Some know what they want to do, some are waiting to decide.  Some are ideologues, some are apolitical.  Almost all immerse themselves in the excitement of new relationships.  As a group, they possess an infectious sense of curiosity and promise.  These things, I reckon, are universal. 

But technology and politics had moved into new territories since my last gig in 2017.  Machine learning models were just hitting the market.  Bureaucratic obligations for faculty had increased.  Contingent and part-time teachers took on an even greater load.  Upper administrators had proliferated.  Many of our tasks were now automated, which ironically increased the amount of time they required.  And the youth somehow seemed older.  They understood, if only implicitly, that they were entering into a world of economic scarcity, a world of ecological precarity, a world of ideological crisis.  I had experienced some rough times in academe, but still I found it to be more depressing than ever. 

Palestine remained a controversial topic, but student activists had done a terrific job of making it legible to their peers and working for policies to address their institutions’ complicity in Zionist colonization.  I nonetheless had a distinct sense that management adhered to a tenuous detente which would collapse if activists became too unruly.  The events following October 7 bore out the feeling. 

There was always a latent hostility to Palestinians underlying managerial professions of tolerance and inclusiveness, punctuated by moments in which the hostility became explicit.  Now the hostility has become the default and I can’t imagine any path to reconciliation in the current environment. 

We’re talking about places that are punishing students and employees for opposing a genocide.  Let me repeat:  they are punishing students and employees for opposing a genocide.  A genocide which their government underwrites.  A genocide in which the same universities they attend are implicated.  The only way this observation fails to resonate is if you don’t appreciate the exceptional gravity of genocide, a problem that seems to afflict lots of people in the Global North. 

What does an education mean amid so much brutality transmitted onto our screens?  And what does it say that we view attending class and concern for the genocide as separate pursuits, if not dialogic opposites?  Sure, there can be overlap and even synergy, but the reality is that those of us who follow the news about Palestine find education to be a distraction or a nuisance.  What we do suddenly doesn’t feel so goddamn important.  Indeed, it feels almost vulgar to be padding around campus while so many people are suffering, their pantries empty, their universities destroyed. 

We’re long past the point where we should have dropped the notion of a sanctified campus, but now the very idea of the university is in question.  Gaza has no universities left.  Class mobility through education only applies to people located in centers of wealth, and even then wealth accumulates unilaterally.  We shouldn’t abide notions of uplift that are predicated on destitution. 

It’s hard anymore to pretend to students that our classes should be the most consequential thing in their lives—and this was the case before the Zionist genocide.  More and more I’m making allowances for aspects of life that are meaningful in a world filled with dread and sorrow:  iftar dinners, childcare, family visits, fieldtrips, and so forth.  It’s not always the outside world that creates distress.  Campuses are now part of the hostile externalities from which students need an escape. 

I’ve put aside whatever allure I once associated with life on campus.  It’s a job.  I used to think of being a professor as an avocation, but I can no longer append a sense of passion to an industry so corrupted by greed that it suppresses opposition to genocide.  I haven’t grown cynical, only more devoted to the ideals of justice and liberation that originally led me into this profession.  I’ve merely realized that those ideals are incompatible with our surroundings.  I’m happy that others are coming into the same realization. 

This is the time of year when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  It’s an excellent occasion to reflect on questions of violence and renewal.  The story of the resurrection has a universal dimension that goes beyond the political dominance of Christendom.  Everybody contemplates the implications of the story, whether they consider it literal or metaphorical.  In the narrative, humanity’s sinfulness is interpolated onto one person who is then humiliated and killed by an unjust government.  By returning to life, the one who suffered intends to redeem us of our wrongdoings and allow for the emergence of a better society. 

It is a resonant story.  We constantly resurrect fantasies of salvation, whether spiritual, economic, or ideological.  It’s one way that we manage to keep going despite the seeming impossibility of change.  There’s an important analytical component to these fantasies:  we have to figure out what is worth resurrecting and what is beyond redemption.  What better place to contemplate this question than our temples of higher education?  After all, the death of belief was always the lifeforce of the modern university.