The president of the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers, Grant Miner, was expelled from Columbia University on Thursday.
His punishment is part of a systematic crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists that includes arrests, expulsions, detentions, “self-deportation“, and degree revocations.
Miner’s expulsion occurred days after Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist, and expectant father, was abducted by US immigration agents at his university-owned apartment in New York City on 8 March.
A permanent resident, he now faces deportation by the Department of Homeland Security, though a district judge in Manhattan federal court has temporarily blocked his forced removal.
Either way, the Trump administration is ignoring judicial orders, as seen in the case of Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University.
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On Tuesday, Khalil issued his first public statement since his unlawful detention, drawing attention to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the “quiet injustices” that many incarcerated people face today.
Well before Trump, Columbia – an elite corporate university – had demonstrated its failures in upholding student and worker rights, ethical investments, and academic integrity
As a former graduate student and academic worker at Columbia University, I am disgusted but not shocked by the university administration’s refusal to protect its students while embracing cops on campus.
Well before the Trump administration, Columbia – an elite corporate university – had long demonstrated its failures in upholding student and worker rights, ethical investments, and academic integrity.
They include anti-Black gentrification; apologism for sexual violence; student evictions; union-busting; financial investments in genocide, fossil fuels, and prisons; the casualisation and degradation of academic labour; the trivialisation of the humanities; and the criminalisation of political activity.
All of this takes place amid a celebration of past protest traditions – including 1968 and its legacies – culminating in an anti-intellectualism that imagines itself as intellectual.
Columbia’s failures
While Zionists are intent on making an example of Khalil, he is part of a widespread historical movement and contemporary conjuncture – one of many political prisoners held in the US.
The university and the state (and the statist university) are buttressed by civil society and vigilante Zionists. This was evident last week when right-wing pro-Israel groups published “deportation lists” of so-called foreign nationals active in the Palestine solidarity movement.
Studying these collaborations further exposes the connections between repression in the imperial core and Israel‘s ongoing annihilation of Palestinians. This includes its renewed mass killing after violating the ceasefire, its blockade of essentials such as food and water in Gaza, continued air strikes, and the mass demolition of homes in the occupied West Bank.
Because student activists have mobilised in opposition to this genocide and the structures that sustain it, they have faced relentless repression and doxxing for more than two years for their participation in protests.
These collaborations expose the connections between repression in the imperial core and Israel’s ongoing annihilation of Palestinians
In the face of dissent being crushed by the state, we must strengthen our defences – not succumb to the continued tone-policing and infantilisation of student opposition disguised as “concern”.
In the days prior to Khalil’s abduction, the administration of Barnard College – an affiliated Columbia undergraduate college located across the street – sent cops to brutalise their students, leading to the arrest of nine protesters.
On 5 March, protesters staged a sit-in at Barnard’s Milstein Library, renaming it the Dr Hussam Abu Safiya Liberated Zone in honour of the imprisoned and tortured paediatrician and former director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Not long after, the Trump administration cancelled $400m worth of federal grants and contracts to Columbia, citing what it described as “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
This is not the first time the university – quick to expel, suspend, and discipline students for their participation in protest – has called on the NYPD to violently arrest its own students.
Notably, last year, former Columbia president Minouche Shafik invited the NYPD’s notorious Strategic Response Group, in full riot gear, onto campus the day after she appeared before Congress, grilled by politicians who described the university as “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred”.
Targeting students
As an Ivy League school located in a liberal media capital, Columbia is a high-profile example, but thousands of students across the US have been arrested and otherwise subjected to police violence.
Yet these events are not confined to the US.
Where I work as a professor at York University, the encampment was cleared by Toronto cops less than 24 hours after it was erected. The university invited the largest municipal police service in Canada onto its campus – where a significant portion of the student body is racialised.
If it seems as though we are at war, we are at war.
Rather than argue that this kind of management is hypocritical in higher education, we must emphasise that knowledge production has long been a key part of American hegemony.
The teaching of “critical thinking” has often provided cover for corporate and imperial interests. Asking the university nicely to adhere to its supposed humanist values is a lost cause – not for lack of trying.
Many are also relying on the terms of the state to fight against the state.
I don’t just mean Columbia interim president, Katrina Armstrong, who announced in a 10 March statement that the university’s administration “will follow the law”.
In the same disingenuous letter, Armstrong invokes “the values of higher education” – freedom of speech, the sharing of ideas, democracy, community – as a cure-all for the university’s woes, which, for the university, are primarily a crisis over money and public relations.
Repression and resistance
Over the last week, Khalil’s arrest has understandably created considerable dismay among members of the public, including academics.
While many of the state and extrastate actions involved in Khalil’s arrest (concerning warrants, lawful permanent residency, citizenship, due process, and other democratic accoutrements) are vicious – let alone dubious under codified policies – I am also wary of when and where we advocate for the sanctity of the law, as it is itself imbued with much of the violence we seek to combat.
Where, for example, does an appeal to lawfulness leave the many undocumented refugees and migrants fighting for a free Palestine?
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The legal system is not a site for genuine justice and certainly not the place to determine proper modes of protest and dissent. Appealing to narratives of the perfect student or the upstanding, law-abiding citizen – white mythologies – only reinforces logics of punishment, criminalisation, racism, state violence, and repression against the most vulnerable and precarious.
A similar framework of negotiating with the enemy is at play in the multi-pronged attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
At my institution, the administration recently suspended enrolments in 18 programmes, including Indigenous Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies.
The distorted narrative of economic restructuring and austerity looms large.
While it might be easy to argue that York is not fulfilling its stated commitments to what it calls its Decolonising, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (DEDI) or Canada’s “decade of disappointment” – marked by the lack of meaningful progress on Truth and Reconciliation commitments – a “seat at the table” seems only possible with immense compromise.
These patterns of appealing to a lost order of things rely on a myth of purity. In the preface to his 1980 book Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, the late scholar Cedric Robinson critiques the intelligentsia for clinging to the illusion that “beneath the chaos, ordered systems reign administered by political institutions and fundamentally resilient cultural and economic integrations”.
But there is no stable society, no just legal framework, no coherent socio-political order, no competent leader to restore things to how they supposedly were. The very idea of returning to order is itself a delusion.
The Trump administration’s political spectacle, for example, should not obscure how liberals themselves have normalised border imperialism, militarisation, mass detention, white supremacy, and securitisation, as Harsha Walia clarifies in Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021).
Radical demands
We can continue to set the terms of the argument.
We must, in fact, be bolder and broader in our demands: Free Palestine. Free Mahmoud Khalil. Free them all. No cops on campus. No ICE on campus. Free tuition. Reinstate the students. Abolish debt. Divest from the Israeli state. End the Nakba. Land back. Sanctuary campus now. Abolish borders.
We must be bolder and broader in our demands: Free Palestine. Free Mahmoud Khalil. Free them all. No cops on campus. No ICE on campus
This list continues to grow, insisting on the interconnections between repression in the core and liberation struggles in Palestine, willing itself to blossom into insurgent slogans of a radical future.
Of the demands, “support students” would seem to be the most benign, agreeable, and straightforward – the simple task of an educator, merely part of the job, a pedagogical imperative.
Yet, in practice, it has proved to be the most obscure. It is more than a job; it exceeds the parameters of professionalisation. This solidarity demands we move beyond our positions and align ourselves with struggle.
As the academic Nasser Abourahme wrote last May, true support means standing with students “not as teacher or writer but shoulder-to-shoulder as comrade and accomplice”. He continues: “What an honour to witness this courage and this clarity, to be just a small part of the life-affirming time you have opened up in this asphyxiating genocidal present.”
Solidarity in action
It is true that the wealth-hoarding university holds immense power and resources. But we, too, have the collective power to shut it all down. Students are showing the way, remaking the way.
What does it mean to truly stand with them?
While they are chastised and told their “dreams” are impossible, they are, in fact, practising modes of freedom – warning us all that if we continue to make compromises, the future, not just for education but for everything, will swing ever further to the fascist right.
Indeed, such attempts to stifle creativity and protest serve only to protect the status quo. This repression is not just about crushing dissent – it is about making the very act of solidarity seem unattainable.
But solidarity insists otherwise. It is a promise – an impossible but urgent commitment to sharing interests, responsibilities, and risks – none of which can ever be equally distributed.
I express my solidarity not only with a belief in the radical power of the discursive terrain but with the admission that statements alone are insufficient for stopping bombs.
Declarations of solidarity must be accompanied by sustained action, boycott, and refusal – efforts that can only be co-authored.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
