This is the choice Barnard is making, and I cannot for the life of me understand it
We run clubs, we start projects, we advocate for ourselves and for fellow students. We have watched the most documented genocide in history play out, have watched our international friends be targeted and disappeared, have watched a countrywide assault on free speech and higher education, and have been pushed to action by the social justice education we have received, and by deep fear for our friends, our community, our world. You want to believe we are the exception—that we are a few ill-intentioned troublemakers instigating disruption across campus out of malice—but that is just not true! We are what makes Barnard, and you have chosen to abandon us.
To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in the world, they came to know the world as it was; with some courage, they could imagine it as it could be.
The goal is to crumble popular support for public education.
An organic crisis collided with a conjunctural crisis, and only the political right had both the sense and the power to take advantage of it. Now the conspiracist structure of feeling—the recognition of one’s own relative disfranchisement, combined with a resentment toward the tremendous power and resources that a small class wields exclusively over everyone else—textures our political reality thoroughly, and not just for the right’s ideological foot soldiers.
There will still be addictions, relapses, traumas, betrayals, interpersonal dramas, and sudden deaths the day after the revolution. Comrades will still let us down, and we’ll still hold grudges and harbor resentments. Parents will still be uncomprehending or oppressive or worse, and we’ll still wish that we’d never said that to her or walked away that night or gone home with him again or fought with them or failed.
The Temple University strike’s template for organizing the public university
The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone—not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty—under academia’s current system.
Then the parents threatened a class-action lawsuit. The students occupied a university building. The full-time faculty began rumbles about a vote of no confidence against the president. They had nowhere left to go.
