Michelle Chen
Truthout / December 20, 2024
Organizing for labour protections and academic freedom is crucial to combat higher education’s creeping authoritarianism.
On a crisp November morning in Ithaca, New York, scores of young people gathered on the sidewalk to cheer their classmate, Sriram Parasurama, a second-year doctoral student in horticulture at Cornell University. He should have been working on his research on the connection between trees and fungi, but instead, he was wrapping up a court hearing downtown. He had been banished from campus since his arrest by the campus police department, following his participation in a Palestine solidarity protest on school grounds in September.
Parasurama’s supporters met him and two other students facing similar charges outside the courthouse. A legal advocate for the students announced that after pleading not guilty to charges of “obstructing government administration and unlawful assembly,” Parasurama and another student, Yihun Stith, were offered a deal: a community service stint in exchange for reducing the charges to disorderly conduct. A third student’s case was dismissed on a technicality. The court’s response seemed relatively light compared to Cornell’s initial crackdown on the protest, which triggered disciplinary proceedings and suspension for several participants, whom the administration had condemned for supposedly creating “an environment of intimidation and fear.”
Campus activists remain locked in a protracted battle with the administration about the freedom of expression in higher education, amid some of the largest campus political mobilizations in a generation. Having been stuck in a plodding disciplinary review process since September, Parasurama told Truthout that university administrators are “definitely trying to drag this out, make this as miserable as possible, both … to diminish some of the attention and interest from students and other[s], as well as, I think, just make the process more miserable for me, so that I then agree to [a settlement] that I wouldn’t have [agreed to] a month and a half ago.… Their goal is to get me to shut up and commit to not protesting anymore and just focus on research, or the alternative of kicking me out of the school.”
Expressive activity
Cornell (where the author is a postdoctoral associate) is one of dozens of universities that have introduced new regulations on when and how protests can take place on campus, erecting bureaucratic barriers for planning and registering protests. Cornell’s enforcement of such rules has created a Kafkaesque review process, leading to extraordinary penalties for student activists, including indefinite suspensions and three-year bans from campus.
But Cornell’s treatment of activism among employees — including teachers, researchers, clerical and custodial staff — is more complex. Graduate student-workers, faculty and staff report that they have faced surveillance, retaliation or job loss for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. The university’s punishment of Parasurama, for example, has not only led to his disenrollment but has also upended his federal grant funding and pre-empted his employment as a researcher and teaching assistant. Another graduate student worker in Africana studies, Momodou Taal, was also temporarily suspended due to his participation in campus protests and was barred from teaching earlier this semester. However, facing protests from faculty and students, the university eventually backed down from its initial threat to disenroll him, which would potentially have triggered his deportation to the United Kingdom.
Cornell’s “Interim Expressive Activity Policy” has been widely condemned by progressive faculty as a dangerous overreach. While couched in bromides about encouraging “the free exchange of ideas,” the rules explicitly restrict protests that may “disrupt the regular conduct of university teaching, research, business, or other activities”; impede access to university spaces; or engage in “Heckling, interruptions, and other acts that intentionally attempt to disrupt speakers or events.” The policy appears to be a direct response to pressure from pro-Israel politicians and major donors, who have advocated for the suppression and criminalization of Palestine solidarity protests. The targeted application of these rules to student and worker activists on campus has crystallized the fundamental power imbalance in higher education.
The protesters’ goal on September 18, admittedly, was to “disrupt.” Banging pots and pans as they marched into the career fair at the university’s Statler Hotel, activists with Cornell’s Coalition for Mutual Liberation delivered letters “indicting” two employers featured at the fair for “war crimes and genocide.” The companies, Boeing and L3Harris, are major weapons manufacturers that have supplied military technology to Israel with the support of U.S. military aid, and have been linked directly to attacks on civilians in Israel’s war on Gaza. That the protesters were disruptive is not in question — what is in question is the rationale driving the administration’s crackdown. (In an emailed response, Cornell stated that its policy is undergoing a review process, that it has solicited community input, and that it could not comment on individual disciplinary cases.)
“It’s about the university trying to create an image for itself that it can take to donors, take to alumni. And staff, faculty and students are expendable in the process,” David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, told Truthout. And in light of the vitriol Donald Trump and other conservative political figures have heaped onto the Palestine solidarity encampments in recent months, Bateman said, “there’s a real worry that the university will become an arm of the MAGA state in coming years.”
The protest aimed to challenge the business model of the neoliberal university: a corporation that is ostensibly devoted to education but is financed and directed through lucrative industrial partnerships and influential donors. The Department of Defense is one of the top federal agencies funding research at Cornell, contributing about $50 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to the latest research data report. One branch of the university, Cornell Tech, has collaborated with the Israeli military through its partnership with the Israeli research institute Technion, known for developing technologies that have been used in Israel’s military assaults on Palestinian civilians.
The protesters not only embarrassed Cornell by exposing its collusion with Israel’s military industries but also called attention to the university’s role in supplying graduates to the workforces of firms like Boeing and Technion.
“I think Palestine generally as an issue kind of targets the core of imperial structure that … underlies a lot of university institutions, not just Cornell,” Parasurama said. “This Statler [Hotel] rally … was targeting weapons manufacturers, and our own trustees at Cornell have investments in weapons companies. And so this is really striking at the heart, I think, of what’s valued by institutions like these.”
The end of teaching
This crackdown cannot be separated from the business agenda of U.S. higher education, which has over the past generation eclipsed the intellectual agendas of its scholars and students. It’s becoming harder not just to protest the war on Palestine, but also teach about it. Under the new expressive activity rules, mobilizing to stop a genocide may likely be interpreted as an offensive act that could lead to dismissals or suspensions. There is also the looming threat of students filing federal Title VI civil rights complaints against academic workers who have publicly criticized Israel, based on allegations of antisemitism.
According to Paul Kohlbry, a postdoctoral associate in anthropology specializing in Palestine’s political ecology, “Rather than ever saying, ‘You can teach X and not Y,’ … they allow the popular outside pressure, through Title VI and other kinds of things, to really chill speech. And then, behind the scenes, they just don’t give funds for [teaching about Palestine].” In practice, he noted, the systematic marginalization of progressive scholarship and pedagogy on Palestinian history and politics sends a warning to faculty that “if you try to teach about Palestine like that, you won’t have the backing of the higher ups at Cornell.”
Currently, Kohlbry argues, official programs and events on Cornell’s campus that focus on Israel and Palestine feature a sanitized, “both sides” framing, presenting Palestinian suffering not as a roiling human rights crisis but rather as a question of rival viewpoints between pro- and anti-Israel camps. Kohlbry himself became the target of a police investigation into his involvement with the Palestine solidarity encampment, which was later dropped.
One of the latest targets of the administration’s intensifying scrutiny is “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” a course scheduled for the spring semester with Eric Cheyfitz, a professor in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. Cornell’s Interim President Michael Kotlikoff recently remarked that while he would not try to block the course from being taught, he “personally [found] the course description to represent a radical, factually inaccurate and biased view of the formation of the State of Israel and the ongoing conflict.” The Cornell chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association assailed the comments as a breach of academic freedom and political interference with a course that had already been approved by Cheyfitz’s department.
Cheyfitz still looks forward to teaching the course, as he has seen many students express interest in learning about Palestine. “I know people get intimidated because their jobs are on the line,” he said. “But the only way to resist is to teach those courses,” instead of letting outside political pressure circumscribe their curriculum. “Once that is closed down, there’s no point in teaching anymore. What are you doing? You’re just silencing yourself. And that’s the end of teaching.”
The idea that higher education should be insulated from commercial or governmental interference is a relatively modern phenomenon, growing out of a 1915 declaration by the AAUP outlining professors’ freedom to research, teach and engage in “extra-mural utterance and action” without restraint or censorship. These principles went hand in hand with the institution of tenure, which shields professors from retaliation or dismissal without cause.
That kind of intellectual autonomy is “a freedom that sort of sustains and underpins the very enterprise of research, teaching and learning,” said Bateman. However, he noted that the scope of academic freedom has receded steadily as the majority of instructors in higher education become contingent, short-term, or part-time — and excluded from tenure. He advocates for making academic freedom more inclusive and interconnected with other issues of democracy and justice in the education system, so that “anyone who is engaged in research, teaching or learning has to be able to have this freedom.” Academic freedom, in other words, should be embedded “within these other principles [that] apply more generally, such as economic security, workplace economic protections … free-speech principles generally.”
At the same time, most workers at institutions like Cornell have neither workplace protections nor academic freedom. Typically working as at-will employees, they can essentially be fired for any reason at any time, as long as it’s not directly outlawed (for example, not based explicitly on gender or racial bias). So for adjunct instructors, office staff, and others who do not have access to tenure, speaking out on Palestine is riskier. Could they be denied a promotion or harassed by coworkers for hanging a Palestinian flag in their cubicle, or attending a campus protest?
Many academic workers, especially staff earning hourly wages, “feel like they can’t attend rallies on campus at all; even if they might get a lunch break in the middle of the day, they feel like they have to be accountable for all of their time on campus,” one staffer (who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of their position) told Truthout in an interview. They added that, although workers have been told that what they do outside of work time is their prerogative, they are wary of political exposure. In reality, workers at Cornell and other institutions have faced surveillance, public smears and retaliation from management over their activism around Palestine. As hourly staff, they said, “in some ways, I have a pretty strong divide between my working life and my private life, but if the university is saying that anything I post on social media could be subject to scrutiny from HR, then it’s like, okay, well, do I really have a private life?”
The ongoing suppression of teaching and dialogue on Palestine hinges on the exploitative economic structure of the corporate university. A four-year liberal arts education has become less about learning than about maintaining a financial and commercial vehicle for corporate and philanthropic investment; an academic machine for generating and laundering profits and political influence. Meanwhile, undergraduate study increasingly centers around preparing students for lucrative corporate careers, while saddling them with wildly inflated tuition rates and crushing student debt.
Yet the drive to corporatize and commercialize higher education hasn’t stopped the right from demonizing colleges as bastions of rabid ultraliberalism. Paradoxically, the conservative caricature of academics as an elite “woke” mob has fuelled attacks on affirmative action, diversity initiatives, and other efforts to make academic and campus culture more inclusive, even though in reality universities are becoming more reactionary, authoritarian and — as the crackdowns on Palestine-related dissent have shown — aligned with a right-wing foreign policy agenda.
“There’s something important about not silencing ourselves ahead of possible censure,” said Mike Bishop, a doctoral student in developmental sociology and former staffer who worked on Cornell’s community engagement programs. A crucial challenge to the administration’s “dehumanizing” treatment of Palestine solidarity activists will come from students and workers organizing to “advance this conversation even just a little bit, toward a direction where humanity of all people, especially the people who are most oppressed, is centered,” Bishop added.
Academic labour
The suppression of activism and teaching about the plight of Palestinians represents how the academic labour force has been subordinated to the business of the university. And it reveals the need for a much more expansive definition of academic freedom and academic labour rights. As long as the freedom to think, speak and organize is seen as the earned privilege of a tiny sliver of the academic workforce, academic freedom will ultimately be treated as disposable whenever the administration deems it inconvenient. Academic freedom cannot be protected or practiced in an academic environment rife with economic inequity. The challenges of organizing a campus community around a cause like Palestine — economic instability, a lack of democracy and autonomy in the workplace, the transience of precarious faculty jobs — are exactly what a strong academic labour movement can help overcome, especially as more and more of the academic workforce is relegated to adjunct or contingent positions.
Calling out the commercial interests and corporate exploitation at the heart of the university — as the career fair protesters did — is a crucial part of challenging the neo-liberalization of higher education. But so is strengthening the leverage that faculty, graduate workers, and others can wield within the ranks of the academic workforce — through unionization, collective bargaining, and when necessary, withholding the labour upon which higher education’s political economy depends.
Cornell Graduate Students United (CGSU), a recently formed union representing more than 3,000 graduate employees, has pursued academic freedom within the framework of labour rights. Last July, CGSU negotiated a memorandum of agreement that commits the administration to bargain with the union over any changes to working conditions that have been imposed through the Interim Expressive Activity Policy. That has provided a layer of legal protection for members like Taal and Parasurama as the union tries to negotiate their reinstatement. (So far, CGSU reports Taal has resumed his studies but remains barred from teaching, while Parasurama’s academic future remains in limbo post-disenrollment.) More broadly, in ongoing bargaining negotiations, the union is advocating for just cause protections, to protect members’ ability to “express themselves as members of society or as representatives of their fields of instruction, study, or research, free from [Cornell’s] censorship or retaliation.”
It is no coincidence that the mobilization of students and workers against the Gaza genocide parallels a surge in labour organizing in higher education, with more than 100 academic worker unions emerging over the past decade and about 20 strikes in the 2022-2023 academic year alone. The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions has identified 35 academic collective bargaining agreements, out of a random sample of 135, that explicitly protect union members against discrimination for political activity. Alongside CGSU, academic worker unions at Rutgers University, Brown, Harvard, the University of Southern California and the University of California system have mobilized, filed federal unfair labour practice charges, and in some cases, launched strikes, in response to their administrations’ restrictions on Palestine-related campus activism.
The protests over Gaza have catalysed resistance to the corporatization of the university. Yet in the long term, the most effective challenge to the creeping authoritarianism in higher education may be organizing for labour protections in tandem with academic freedom. Because, while university administrations treat higher education like a business, academic workers can reclaim academic freedom and educational democracy in a world of conflict and repression, and redefine what a college campus should provide for everyone who comes there to work, learn and live together with dignity.
Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at Dissent Magazine
