Students at over 130 college campuses across the country have camped out the last month demanding the university disclose their weapons manufacturing investments and divest from the Israeli genocide machine. The encampments have already had a huge impact, drawing national and international attention to the brutality of Israel’s occupation. Now students have forced over a dozen universities to the negotiating table.
Encampment victories
The concessions vary across campuses. The administrations generally accept demands like widening curriculum about Palestine, creating community spaces for Arab and Muslim students, and in some cases, disclosing investment information and supporting amnesty for arrested students. Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee got their chancellor to publicly support a ceasefire.
The demand university bosses are most afraid of is divestment. Some campuses agreed to hear students present divestment proposals, including Northwestern, University of Minnesota, and Harvard. Others promised to establish committees that will explore the possibility of divestment, like Evergreen State, University of California Riverside and Berkeley, and San Francisco State. Brown and Occidental have agreed to hold divestment votes.
Another demand they fear is cutting ties with Israeli universities. This was one of two demands out of ten that the Rutgers administration refused to concede. UC Riverside agreed to end its business school’s exchange program with Israel — but to make it less controversial, they’re cutting ties with other countries too.
Sonoma State’s president Mike Lee made the boldest agreement: a full academic boycott of Israel. He was immediately put on administrative leave for insubordination then abruptly announced he was “retiring.”
Some agreements made the mistake of promising not to reestablish encampments, like at the University of Washington. It is important that encampments either reject this stipulation or be prepared to break agreements that include them, because it is likely students will need to return to the encampments and other forms of disruptive protest in order to hold the universities to account.
More to win
No American university has divested their endowments from companies that fuel Israel’s genocide. But the victories the encampments have won are significant and shouldn’t be dismissed. Just a few years ago, it was difficult to even get a divestment vote considered on many campuses.
All successful BDS motions over the last several years are important wins. But those gains have often been confined to student associations or individual academic unions, effectively making a statement that their members support BDS and calling on their university to divest, but with no actual divestment yet taking place.
The encampment movement is building on those victories and forcing entire universities, including committees that hold the purse strings, to publicly say they will consider divestment. That the universities felt they needed to negotiate at all shows how afraid they are — as does the scale of police violence at some encampments like UCLA and Irvine.
Next steps
There’s no guarantee the universities will follow through on the agreements. In fact, we can be confident they will try to worm their way out of every promise, even the weakest ones. Many students know this. As a Tweet from Brown said: “We will not let our agreement be used to pacify this movement. Rather, we will use it to fuel us further. With the strength of our collective organizing power laid bare, this deal is far from the end.”
One encouraging development is the University of California’s grad workers union UAW 4811’s vote to strike in defense of the encampments and for disclosure and divestment. At the time of writing, only UC Santa Cruz has been called up to strike and it remains to be seen how many other campuses will be called up or how effective the strike will be. It’s the end of semester, which limits how much the strike can disrupt university business as usual.
As fantastic as the encampments are, just like the Occupy Wall Street movement they’re partly inspired by, occupations can only last so long and can only draw in so many people. Transforming this energy into an ongoing movement will be crucial.
UAW 4811 is practicing what students and university workers must all be prepared to do when school goes back in the fall. If lecturers refuse to teach, grad workers refuse to grade, students refuse to go to class, and support staff refuse to run the campuses, we will be in a much better position to pressure the chancellors to fully disclose and divest. This will also send a message to Biden and the Democrats as the presidential election nears. Our summer assignment is to prepare to camp out, sit in, and strike back for Palestine.
Marx21 US 