What’s Next for the Student Movement?

Opinion | Columbia Students

On March 21, Columbia University announced its decision to comply with the Trump administration’s demands, detailed below, in hopes of reversing a $400 million federal funding cut. The university’s decision follows a March 13 letter from the administration outlining steps Columbia must take to restore its funding, which was abruptly slashed the week prior. After complying with the orders, Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong stepped down after less than a year in the position, following in the footsteps of her predecessor Minouche Shafik and signaling a deepening of the administrative crisis at the university.

As part of its compliance, Columbia has banned masks on campus and hired 36 special officers with the authority to remove or arrest individuals. While the university avoided the term “receivership”, as used in the demand letter, it appointed a Senior Vice Provost to review academic programs—starting with Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies, conceding in everything but name.

Columbia will also adopt the definition of antisemitism recommended by its Antisemitism Taskforce in August 2024, which includes vague language such as “certain double standards applied to Israel.” Simultaneously, the university will expand the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies under the guise of promoting “intellectual diversity.”

Additionally, though not part of the demands letter, the university announced accelerating the launch of a Tel Aviv Global Hub and the adoption of a policy of “institutional neutrality.” The latter, which will be developed under the guidance of the Provost’s Office and a faculty committee, is expected to further restrict political expression on campus.

Columbia has been the vortex of the student Palestine solidarity movement, and what happens there is already proving to be a testing ground for other campuses. Across the country students, university administrations, and the government are watching closely to see how the latest repressive measures will play out—will the students fall into line and succumb to the repression, or will they develop new forms of struggle to meet the latest attacks and continue to escalate?

Capitulation to Fascism vs Continued Reactionization

While some have labeled Columbia’s move as a capitulation, such an analysis hides the fact that the university and the Trump administration have the same aims. Though Trump’s methods come into contradiction with the university’s attempt to maintain a veneer of liberal neutrality and academic freedom, Columbia has long used both open violence and low-intensity counterinsurgency in its repression of student and faculty anti-imperialist activism.

Likewise, some have claimed Trump’s actions are an example of his “fascism”. Rebellion against the imperialist-in-chief is justified, but such an analysis ends up individualizing the trend of reactionization inherent to the era of imperialism while giving maneuvering room for the Democrat mafia under the lie of being the “lesser of two evils”. Trump’s policies are not unique to him but they do represent the deepening economic and political crises.

The mask ban, for instance, continues New York’s history of anti-mask regulations that began with an 1845 anti-mask law originally passed to suppress tenant farmers’ resistance to feudal oppression. The law has more recently been used to repress movements like Occupy Wall Street and was only rescinded with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has since been re-implemented elsewhere in the state and was used last September to arrest a pro-Palestine protester in neighboring Nassau County.

Similarly, the use of financial control as a repressive tool recalls state takeovers of universities during fiscal crises, such as the 1970s austerity measures at CUNY that eliminated free tuition and targeted student activists. In the 1940s, a receivership was imposed on Iowa State University’s economics department at the behest of the dairy industry after the school promoted alternatives to dairy products for wartime food production, forcing mass faculty departures.

Likewise, the US government has historically wielded immigration laws as a tool of political repression, from the Palmer Raids of 1919, which targeted immigrant activists involved in the labor movement and anti-imperialist protests, to the McCarthy-era deportations of foreign-born students accused of communist sympathies. During the civil rights and anti-war movements, international students who participated in protests faced surveillance and expulsion, just as post-9/11 immigration crackdowns disproportionately targeted Arab and Muslim students under the guise of counterterrorism. Today, calls to deport international students for pro-Palestinian activism follow the same playbook.

Beyond Columbia, the Trump administration’s actions reveal the contradictions at the heart of its administration. While claiming to champion states’ rights and limit federal bureaucracy, Trump has only furthered the trend toward presidential absolutism, continuing where his predecessors left off. The cuts to Columbia are not an isolated incident but part of a broader project of austerity, mass layoffs, and the increasing consolidation of power by a handful of imperialists. The interests of all those opposed to imperialism converge, and the task is to unite these various sectors behind internationalist working class politics.

Organize More Broadly and Persevere in Campus Occupations

The repressive methods of the ruling class have historically failed to quell rebellion, because such rebellion is not only justified but is a historical necessity. The ruling class creates its own gravediggers in the working class it generates and lives off of, and secondarily in the working class’s allies that are forged in struggle against oppression and poverty. At Columbia, as well as campuses across the country, students, workers, faculty, and anti-imperialists in their cities have advanced their rebellions to new levels in response to repression. The victory of progressive and revolutionary forces is an inevitability: the tenant farmers overcame the feudal mode of production, and student activists won their demands to divest from the Vietnam War and South African apartheid through their resolute struggles in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Trump’s increased attacks have mobilized more forces against him, allowing the struggle in solidarity with Palestine to increasingly combine with the struggle in defense of the right to education. While the working class and its allies will ultimately triumph, the outcome of a specific battle is uncertain; here, victory is determined by whichever side is better organized and more persistent.

The basic principle of war is to annihilate the enemy and preserve one’s forces, and to organize to win the whole war and not just this or that battle. Applied to the student struggle today, this means maximizing disruptions to the university’s endowments and funding while minimizing losses through suspensions, expulsions, and firings. The past year of encampments have taught us that student occupations are an effective way of shutting down school functioning while forcing the school to take big financial hits by tarnishing its reputation and pushing billionaire donors to pull their investments. At the same time, they have been costly to the student movement through its mass arrests and disciplinary measures.

As the student movement searches for new methods to escalate its resistance, it will be useful to learn how student movements operating abroad in more repressive conditions managed to escalate while preserving their forces. The revolutionary student movement in Brazil points toward guerrilla occupations, where students were able to takeover buildings for a period of time before outmaneuvering the military police and escaping with minimal repercussions. At the same time, the movement is well-integrated in the broader revolutionary movement in the country, linking up with the agrarian revolution in the countryside and the workers’ struggles in the city, making them an important detachment serving Brazilian liberation from imperialist and feudal domination.

This opens up perspectives for the US student movement to draw on: increase coordination across campuses and cities and heighten escalation through quick takeovers to cause maximal disruptions while allowing students to retreat in an orderly manner with minimal losses to concentrate their forces again and again. As universities increasingly transform into military barracks, perseverance in such tactics will, over time, inevitably expose the treachery of bourgeois academia, plummeting its reputation and investments, and forcing concessions to the anti-imperialist student movement.

Photo: Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in 2024.

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