Taking on the University-State

Drin Shapiro

A few months ago, a friend of mine employed at the University of Michigan was talking to her boss about the extensive repression she faced due to her involvement in the campus divestment movement. Her boss, a self-proclaimed ally who would describe herself as pro-Palestine, sympathized with my friend’s concerns but questioned her priorities. “Why focus on fighting the University? Why not Amazon?” This deflection is all too familiar to those active in the campus pro-Palestine movement. Her question, though, is still worthy of consideration—why have universities become the main target of the pro-Palestine movement in the US? Certainly, we are constantly surrounded by institutions that are equally if not more complicit in Zionism and US imperialism, whether it be Amazon, the police, arms manufacturers, lobbying groups, finance capital, or the state at-large. Many of us within the student movement consciously acknowledge it, yet even after we graduate it becomes difficult to stay active without remaining in the campus’s orbit. Are we wasting our time focusing on campus divestment?

Of course, it has long been the norm for social movements to center on colleges and universities. Historian Eric Hobsbawm attributes the prominent role of students in the radical 1960s movements to three key factors: 

They were easily mobilized in the enormous knowledge-factories which contained them, while leaving them much more free time than workers in giant plants. They were usually to be found in capital cities, under the eyes of the politicians and the cameras of the media. And, being members of the educated classes, often children of the established middle class, and—almost everywhere but especially in the Third World—the recruiting ground for the ruling elite of their societies, they were not so easy to shoot down as the lower orders. ¹

It is no wonder then that students, despite their social class baggage, heralded radical social movements, and that the “Student-Worker Alliance” became a slogan of the 1960s. 

What Hobsbawm does not mention, however, and importantly, is that the university campus provides a platform for the wider community to engage in radical, grassroots politics. Campus movements, after all, are more than just students. People from across the larger community —typically unaffiliated with the university—provided essential support to divestment coalitions. When college presidents claimed that many encampment activists had no connection to the institution, they were often right. People quickly recognized the energy on campus and joined their nearest encampment, even if that meant driving across the state to find it. It is hard to imagine how our encampment could have sustained itself without people from across Southeast Michigan coming to provide food, labor, or simply their presence in protest. What had been a student movement before the encampment quickly attracted a much wider community.

The importance of the campus as an essential site of community organizing is, in my view, crucial to understanding how the pro-Palestine movement in the US has fixated on targeting higher education. It is not only that students generated momentum by escalating against universities, but  additionally that pro-Palestine supporters flocked to campus from across the state to challenge an institution even if they had no direct affiliation to it. We saw in Ann Arbor how our encampment drew in people of conscience from Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, and even farther. I do not think this is solely due to the leadership of the students, but also because the campus movement offered an avenue to reclaim political institutions through confrontation and grassroots organizing, rather than electoralism, which many found appealing. 

After all, the University of Michigan is widely seen as a social institution which ought to be publicly-controlled (especially given that it is nominally a public university) yet is not. It is in fact hopelessly elitist and corrupt, in contrast to its stated values. This perception has been further justified by the massive expansion and corporatization of the University, which now governs entire communities in metro-Detroit with little social accountability. Protesters are right to see the campaign against universities as against the state itself. Thus, at our Gaza solidarity encampment, we imagined a People’s University that would serve as the socially-run institution that we expect higher education to be. By doing so, the encampments offered an approach to reclaim our political institutions through a mass organizing strategy.

Student activists have long appreciated the role of universities as supporters of U.S. imperialist projects and an arm of the state. What deserves as much attention is the functions of the university as an autonomous governing body in their  own right. In our local context, the University of Michigan’s massive expansion throughout metro-Detroit has led it to oversee essential social services that normally a state would manage, yet with even less public input. A key feature of our encampment was to unmask the political nature of the university and to demand it serve the priorities of its community.

Like many other state and even private colleges, the University of Michigan closely resembles a municipal government in its size and functions. The depth of its control over public resources greatly exceeds that of its own city government, and its leaders exercise more decision-making power than the mayor. For instance, the University of Michigan Board of Regents owns vast and expanding swaths of public land, which it has coerced the county into selling without paying property taxes or following zoning laws. As of 2012, the University of Michigan owns 8.4% of the land in Ann Arbor and 22% of the downtown, all of which is tax-exempt.² In the last two years, UM has attempted, despite popular pushback, to force through the purchase of public land and construction of a $1.2 billion data center in nearby Ypsilanti without public scrutiny.³ These acquisitions have blurred the line between what belongs to the city and what belongs to the university. Residents of Washtenaw County are acutely aware of the ever-present role of the university in their city, whether they are affiliated to it or not.

In fact, UM runs various key public services in Washtenaw County that municipal governments usually operate. Just last year, the University of Michigan bankrolled $32 million in financial support to the city of Ann Arbor, most of which went to the improvement of the city water and sewer services.⁴ In this case, the obscene financial wealth of the university came to the aid of its host city, suffering from a deficit, in order to maintain its most basic operations. UM additionally runs the majority of Washtenaw county’s hospital infrastructure, employing over 30,000 people and placing it among the largest employers in the state.⁵ The university’s ownership of the hospital network makes an encounter with the institution virtually inevitable for local residents. Crucially, UM possesses ‘legitimate means of violence,’ Max Weber’s defining characteristic of the state, by operating its own police force in the county. Ann Arbor residents could reasonably consider the UM Board of Regents as their political leaders rather than their Mayor or City Council.

Much like the state itself, the University of Michigan is highly resistant to social accountability. The TAHRIR Coalition, the movement for divestment at the University of Michigan, has underscored in our research the absence of any mechanism for the public to provide input on the endowment. The massive $17.9 billion pool of public funds (as of 2024) is ultimately determined by the Board of Regents.⁶ Michigan residents elect regents to eight-year terms, while parties typically choose candidates from a pool of their most eager donors to run in rarely-contested primaries. For example, this process has stuck the University of Michigan with Regent Jordan Acker, an affluent Detroit-area lawyer with ties to the Israeli government. Despite Acker being widely reviled on campus, this undemocratic system of leadership precludes any public input, especially on Palestine. For this reason, the Regents became the central target of our encampment, as we prompted people to consider how the university could ideally allocate its $17.9 billion fund, symbolizing elite control over resources that ought to be public. It is easy to see the parallels between our university leaders and national political leaders. 

With this framing of the university structure in mind, the encampment offered a platform to reclaim the university as a political institution, emphasizing grassroots action rather than electoralism. From the outset, we signaled a sharp break from electoral politics by declining to host politicians as speakers, including relatively sympathetic ones. This approach encouraged mass participation in every aspect of the encampment, since that was central to the premise of the ‘Popular University for Gaza.’ Anybody aligned with the cause of Palestinian liberation was able to volunteer and contribute. By design, participants in the encampment were able to demand social ownership of institutions through confrontation rather than the ballot box, marking a significant step away from liberal methods of political change.

Campus divestment movements must continue to offer their communities an alternative path to political change that emphasizes organizing and confrontation. Since the encampments, SJPs have notably retreated into quieter steps as the result of repression and declining momentum.⁷ Certainly, these difficulties are substantial. Currently, however, there is a tremendous lack of organizing campaigns happening for the Palestinian liberation movement in the US. I have anecdotally talked to several people, including many former student organizers, who have complained about not knowing how to take action for Palestine. There is potentially a lot to gain by transforming the student movement on campus into a community one.