On Leaving Columbia - and Resisting the Regime

ICYMI: This month, I had an article published in The Nation, titled "A Step-by-Step Guide to Trump's Deportation Machine." You can check it out here or here.

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A permanent resident of Palestinian descent detained on my campus — allegedly for having taken part in antiwar protests — then locked in a Louisiana prison, far away from his pregnant wife.

A postdoctoral scholar of Indian origin at Georgetown​, on a J-1 visa, rousted from his home in the dead of night in connection with his relationship with a Palestinian woman.

A Turkish graduate student at Tufts​, on a Fulbright scholarship, accosted and arrested by undercover agents in retaliation for an op-ed she authored in support of the Palestinian cause.

As I write this, the Trump regime continues to disappear my colleagues — students, faculty, dissidents against US foreign policy — and dispatch them to what can only be described as 21st-century concentration camps.

In so doing, this regime has effectively declared war against all who stand in the way of its foreign policy aims in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, those institutions that are supposed to defend the rights and liberties required of a free society — the universities, the media, the political parties — have capitulated in the face of the fascist offensive. Even the “left” opposition has utterly failed to hold the line.

As it happens, I now find myself at the frontlines of this assault. The first institution to fold was my own employer, Columbia University. Earlier this month, Columbia officially bowed to the demands of the regime, moving to surrender control of the university to those who would dismantle it.

The terms of surrender: suspensions and expulsions of dissident students; expanded powers for campus police; a ban on the wearing of masks; and the hostile takeover of an entire academic department.

Yet the fascists’ spring offensive has not stopped at the gates of Columbia. This administration’s disappearing acts have targeted international students, workers, and permanent residents across the country.

What their targets have in common is the fact that, in one way or another, they dared to raise their voices in protest against the parties of war and occupation, of apartheid and attempted genocide.

Thus has the regime revived the ghosts of McCarthyism and other homegrown forms of fascism that have historically cast the foreigner as an enemy of the people. Yet it has, at the same time, invented something new: a kind of image of the future.

The disappearing acts we are seeing in our streets, and on our campuses, are warning signs of what’s coming for the rest of us if we fail to take heed and take action to stop them.

The history of homegrown fascism in this country teaches that an attack on any one group of people is a prelude to an attack on others — that an injury to one is an injury to all.

In light of the Trump regime’s recent offensive, and in view of our own institution’s complicity in these attacks on higher education, some of us who work at Columbia are ready to draw a line in the sand.

Some have called for a boycott, and I join them in that call. Others have called for a strike, and I join them in that, too.

For my part, at the semester’s end, I will be leaving Columbia for good.

My contract is up, and I no longer wish to work for this or any other institution that would elect to collaborate with a regime such as this.

I hope I can count on your support, going forward, as I and others affected by these attacks on the academy endeavor to forge an alternative.

Those of us who know a little history know that more is required of us in times like these — more than merely marching, rallying, or registering our protest with the traditional repertoires of contention.

We will have to learn how to withhold our dollars. We will have to learn how to withhold our labor. We will have to boycott. And we will have to strike.

With non-citizens facing the threat of arrest, detention, and deportation for the slightest offense, it falls to US citizens — especially those who maintain the vestiges of a certain degree of privilege — to raise the social costs of cooperating with this regime, and to withdraw their dollars, their labor, and their support for its deportation machine.

Then, and only then, will we see Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and others like them freed from the cages in which they are being held. And then, and only then, will we be able to speak of free speech, a free university, or a free society in any meaningful sense of the word.

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