The Trump administration is escalating its campaign against international students at U.S. colleges and universities, announcing that it will begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, in addition to freezing visa processing for all foreign-born students as it prepares to require additional social media vetting for every applicant. “It’s really just difficult for me to think of any conceivable theory on which this is going to help the United States,” says Jameel Jaffer, noting that international students pay a disproportionate share of tuition costs on U.S. campuses. Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which has previously sued the government over its social media vetting policy for visa applications. The policy, which began as a pilot program during the Obama administration, “is ineffective at identifying national security threats, but it is very effective at chilling free speech,” says Jaffer.

Jaffer also comments on the high-profile immigration detention of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard graduate researcher Kseniia Petrova, as well as a case brought by the Knight Institute challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestine protest.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On Tuesday May 6th, JVP Action brought nine students from Columbia University to meet with members of Congress to speak about their experiences as Jewish students who have been steadfastly committed to advocating for the safety and freedom of the Palestinian people. The students warned members of Congress that the Trump regime is using false allegations of antisemitism to crack down on dissent, and called for elected officials to do more to protect student activists from the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks, and to call for the release of non-citizen student activists being targeted for deportation including their classmate Mahmoud Khalil who is currently a political prisoner in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.

“I’m here asking my representatives to call for the release of my friend Mahmoud Khalil and to put real pressure on the Trump regime. I cannot stand to see the Trump administration smear Mahmoud as an antisemite when it could not be further than the truth,” said Shay Orentlicher, Jewish Junior at Columbia.

For the past 1.5 years, Columbia University and its student protests have remained in the public eye, yet very few Jewish student activists have been able to tell their stories. On May 6, a little over one year since the launch of the student encampment movement, these students traveled to Congress to tell their elected officials what it’s like being a Jewish student who supports Palestinian rights in an increasingly repressive campus environment. These students told members of Congress about the beautiful multicultural connection and grief that has been core to their activism on campus.

“This Passover we held a beautiful seder with not only our fellow Jewish students but also our community members in the broader anti-war movement at Columbia. Rooted in our tradition of remembrance and liberation, we came together to tell the story of Passover and offered a heartfelt prayer for Mahmoud’s freedom” said Carly Shaffer, a Jewish graduate student in SIPA and friend of Mahmoud Khalil's.

The students felt it was especially important to make their voices heard prior to today’s House Committee on Education & the Workforce hearing in which far-right members of Congress will once again operate under the guise of caring about antisemitism in order to attack the right to political dissent and free speech.

“The Trump Regime is using false allegations of antisemitism to disappear our friends, punish student protestors, and dismantle higher education. What we are seeing has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe, and everything to do with crushing dissent. Thousands of Jews on campuses across the country have spoken out in solidarity with the people of Gaza and we will not be silent.” said Tallie Beckwith-Cohen, a Jewish senior at Barnard College.

“The far-right does not care about Jewish safety. Trump and his allies in Congress are platforming neo-Nazis and Christian Nationalists, all while pretending to care about antisemitism in order to take a hatchet to our communities and most basic freedoms. This is intended to silence the Palestinian rights movement, sow chaos, and sharpen authoritarian tools that will then be used to dismantle civil liberties and democracy itself.” said Beth Miller, Political Director of JVPA.

In one of many egregious examples of its absurd claims, in a letter to Haverford College ahead of the House Committee’s hearing tomorrow, the Committee’s Republican leadership refers to an academic talk given by Rabbi Dr. Rebecca Alpert about the history of Jewishness and anti-Zionism as an example of “antisemitism”. Rabbi Dr. Rebecca Alpert is not only a Rabbi, but also a scholar of Jewish history who was invited to speak on campus because of her expertise.

“My ancestors fled fascism and taught me to fight supremacy and fascism wherever it occurs. I am seeing rising fascism here as the Trump regime lies and targets non citizens, human rights activists, and everyone who challenges their authoritarian agenda. I refuse to be silent because I know that it was silence that allowed the persecution of my ancestors in Europe.” said Sarah Boris, who is a Senior studying English and Jewish studies at Columbia University.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Photo by the author.

Thanks to Donald Trump, the 45^th AND the 47^th President of the Greatest Democracy on Earth (NOT!)—liberal white Euro-America now knows what the two-thirds world (also referred to as the Third World or the Global South)-has always known in its gut– albeit those of us from the ( so-called) global south who immigrated to the bastion of (so-called) free speech did (despite knowing better)—“have the conviction” as Omar El Akkad puts it in a must-read book of our times , One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), “that despite political opportunism, corruption, and duplicity there [was] a solid foundation”  that was “worth preserving”;  we did have faith that despite all of its problems, a western liberal democratic society like the US were based on “a rules-based order.”

Well—since his inauguration, Trump and his clown car of cronies have disabused us all of such fantasies. However, the fantasy of a liberal “rules-based order” that citizens of all faiths, ethnicities, genders and sexualities believed would protect them, had been punctured long before Trump took the reins of power for a second time.

As Mustafa Bayoumi argued persuasively in an essay published in The Guardian in May 2024, Islamophobia which has been rampant since 9/11 and is now making a big resurgence in the USA in the wake of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian protests, inflamed by the fascistic policies and daily pronouncements  of Donald Trump, is a sub-set of decades-old anti-Palestinian racism—not the other way around as most folk think.

In US history, anti-Palestinian bigotry, expressed primarily through repressive practices of the US government, almost always came first. This anti-Palestinianism then manifested into a generalized anti-Arab racism, which only later – especially after 9/11 – morphed into the more widespread Islamophobia that we recognize today.

While any student of history knows that the Palestine/Israel “conflict” is NOT a religious one, that it quite clearly and unambiguously was and remains a land grab by a colonial settler state and its imported white European and American Jewish citizens into a multireligious Arab Palestine, Zionists and their defenders would have you think otherwise. Hence the reality as CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) has pointed out in a recent report, is that the uptick in Islamophobic attacks on Muslim and Arab students at US universities and schools (K-12) has skyrocketed after Oct 7^th 2023—“the highest number of such incidents recorded in 30 years” with a total of a total of 8,061 complaints reported in 2023, most after Oct 7th.

It is hardly a surprise then, that while the ADL (a leading pro-Israel advocacy organization founded in 1913)—claims that there has been a “a 360%” increase in reported anti-semitic incidents across the US, what folks generally don’t know is that they equate any criticism of Zionist ideology and the state of Israel as “anti-semitic.” This means that on college campuses, Zionist students can claim to be victims of antisemitic hatred and harassment simply because they can see/hear masses of students (including a large number of anti-Zionist Jewish students) chanting in protest of Israeli genocide and in favor of a free Palestine. This, these Jewish Zionist students claim, makes them feel “unsafe”—hence= uptick in antisemitism! Anti-semitism, in other words, gets weaponized in service of suppression of the 1^st amendment rights of pro-Palestinian supporters, and has led countless number of anti-Zionist Jews to take to the streets and social media to chant against such an abuse of their religion: “Not in Our Name!”

Meanwhile, as we have seen in recent weeks, students who have been kidnapped and arrested simply for exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of expression have been Muslim: Mahmud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri and Rumeysa Ozturk.

The role of Columbia University’s administration has been dastardly, in turning over student records to Law Enforcement, especially to the much-maligned ICE  (Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Dept of Homeland Security), whose treatment of detainees has been labelled “barbaric” and “negligent” by the government’s own experts, as reported by NPR.  Handing over student records is itself an illegal act, since student records are protected under FERPA-The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (the bar for exceptions to the rule is very high). This shameful compliance with Trump govt’s orders to oust any and all students who have/continue to protest the genocide in Gaza, dates back to last year when Zionist donors demanded the university expel such students, and then- President Minouche Shafik was ordered to do the same by the US Congress. In a bid to show how tough (and willingly compliant) she could be in executing the demands of Congress, Shafik called in the notoriously racist and violent NYPD against her own university students, permitting the latter to be shamefully manhandled and arrested for peacefully exercising their constitutionally-protected right to free speech. Despite caving in to unprincipled actors like Elise Stefanik, Shafik resigned (or was forced to)—a few short months later. As her nemesis in Congress stated gleefully on X—“THREE DOWN, so many to go.”  The other two she was referring to were ofcourse Liz Magill and Claudine Gay—former presidents of UPenn and Harvard respectively, who were also forced to resign following their pathetic performances in Congressional hearings when grilled by Stefanik, about why they were permitting “antisemitic” students to protest against the Israeli genocide of Palestinian civilians on their campuses.

But what Stefanik and her ilk don’t understand—is that the downfall of these presidents –especially Shafik whose behavior that endangered her students’ wellbeing and safety was the most egregious—wasn’t engineered by Stefanik and other rightwing politicos alone, but rather, was also a result of the resistance of those very same students that Shafik was hellbent on punishing to please her Congressional masters and mistresses. Uh-oh, wrong number! For as the Students for Justice Columbia chapter posted on X the day of her resignation, “After months of chanting ‘Minouche Shafik, you cant hide,’ she finally got the memo” and they further underscored their message of resistance by claiming, “any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did.”

Yet, clearly, the (Interim) President who succeeded Shafik, Katerin Armstrong, paid no such heed, and out of fear of losing more federal funding from the Trump administration (which had previously announced a 400 million $$ cut), Columbia University agreed to implement a host of policy changes last Friday, including an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies department. According to a PBS report,

In an effort to expand “intellectual diversity” within the university, Columbia will also appoint new faculty members to its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies department. It will also adopt a new definition of antisemitism and expand programming in its Tel Aviv Center, a research hub based in Israel.

Shortly after this display of abject grovelling at the feet of Mammon (otherwise known as Trump)—that shows deep disregard for longstanding faculty governance over curricular and departmental independence, and with clear kowtowing to Israel-backers– President Armstrong resigned, with none of the 400 million $4 returned, and Columbia still under threat of more cuts (so much for caving to authoritarian bullies). She has been replaced by yet another minion of the powers-that-be, Claire Shipman, who has known ties to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and to pro-Israel politicians.

In this historically surreal moment for Higher Ed institutions in the US, which President Roth of Wesleyan aptly compared to the Vichy collaborationist regime in Nazi-occupied France, there are only a few voices at the top rungs of administration speaking even a small measure of truth to power. Among these are President Roth of Wesleyan himself, and President Eisegruber of Princeton. The following observation by the latter is quite mild in its wording but in today’s climate, feels like a veritable manifesto for resistance in its affect:

What concerns me so deeply about what’s happening at Columbia and elsewhere right now is that the government seems to be using [their] funding stream to force concessions that are violations of academic freedom.

Just yesterday, the President of Tufts university (where I was a graduate student in the 1980s and founder of the first-ever student group to concern itself with Palestine, called Committee on Information about Palestine ( even back then our group came under attack by members of the Zionist organization Hillel on our campus), made a statement in support of the Turkish graduate student abducted and arrested from campus by the dreaded ICE agents, in what may be a precedent-setting case against the Trump government’s fascistic edicts:

In court documents filed on Ozturk’s behalf, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar asked for the Turkish student’s release without delay so she can return to complete her studies and finish her degree.

While the resistance from Presidents of elite universities, worried about their donor-funded endowments, has been slow and tepid, it HAS started, and filing court cases to demand justice for illegally-detained students is just the beginning of what it feels might lead to a turning of the tide. Indeed, the resistance from faculty all across the USA who have formed chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) at their respective institutions —in support of/with chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine—has been ongoing since the outbreak of Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza shortly after Oct 7^th 2023.

Thus, for example, the horror show that continues to unfold on the Columbia University campus—the ground zero of protest, resistance, and repression—many of its faculty have joined together to write letters of protest against the administration’s draconian actions that threaten not only student protestors (especially those of Arab and Muslim background)—but faculty (including antizionist Jewish professors)—who dare speak out: witness the forced resignation of tenured Professor Katherine Franke.

Despite well-founded fears of administrative and governmental repercussions against themselves, not only have Columbia and Barnard faculty written, circulated, signed letters protesting their university’s shameful capitulation to unjust, racist, Islamophobic and anti-intellectual orders from on-high, but so have many many other faculty from a variety of universities and cohorts.

Thus, for example, a recent letter/statement termed “emergency national faculty statement” that originated in a consortium of New England professors, is being circulated widely and garnering signatures nationally, and can be accessed here.

This letter is for US faculty anywhere to sign and/or share widely. Any faculty, affiliated scholars, instructors, fellows, program directors, librarians, or PhD alumni of US universities and colleges can sign this statement.

The National chapter of FSJP (Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, of whose Montclair State University local chapter I am a co-founder), in a recent meeting which I attended, announced that April 17^th has been designated as a new fight-back -day to form a national picket line.

There are actions big and small being planned at universities across the country on this date.

Here is a link for more information.

In preparation, student workers at the U of Maryland have been holding sessions alongside the Asian American Student Union on fascism, capitalism and imperialism and the ways these ideologies have intersected to create the moment of global catastrophe we are witnessing today, from Palestine to Pakistan, from the UK to the USA.

In the wake of the pathetic refusal by the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association to honor the wishes of a majority of its members to hold a referendum to pass a resolution in support of Palestinian liberation and for BDS, the Red Caucus of MLA has become more radical than ever!

In the run up to April 17th Day of Action, there was a National Immigration Solidarity Rally  Monday night March 31^st.  Hundreds of people across the country signed up for the meeting over Zoom, and 15 people spoke about next steps.

I will conclude this informational update by sharing a letter that many academics have signed to boycott Columbia University, which should be read as a gesture of resistance not just against the administrators and complicit faculty at Columbia, but to all who think, mistakenly, that capitulating to forces of repression will protect them.

It wont. If you think they wont come for you today, you can rest assured they will do so tomorrow.

The letter I post below—along with the signatories—shows clearly that the resistance to repression is strong, and growing day by day on our campuses. It is fueled by the realization that the Palestine Exception is NOT an exception—it is the motherlode of oppression—and connects all struggles for freedom and justice, everywhere.

Until Palestine is Free, None of Us are Free.

“Boycott Columbia Now”
Letter sent to Bwog [student-run news organization] on Thursday, March 27:

We, the undersigned, commit to a boycott of Columbia University in solidarity with students, faculty, and staff targeted by the U.S. Government and university administration for their principled opposition to the genocide in Gaza and support for Palestinian liberation. By violating its ethical and professional duty towards its community and abdicating its responsibility to uphold and support free speech and academic freedom, Columbia has participated in an authoritarian assault on universities aimed at destroying their role as sites of teaching, research, learning, and activism essential to building a free and fair world.

We are appalled by Columbia’s repeated failure to defend and protect Mahmoud Khalil, and their handing over of his and other students’ disciplinary records. We are appalled that Columbia disenrolled Ranjani Srinivasan when her student visa was revoked, again simply for engaging in protected speech.

We are appalled that Columbia suspended, expelled, and revoked the degrees of students for their principled protests of an ongoing genocide and that they expelled and fired Grant Miner, president of UAW Local 2710, the union that represents thousands of student workers at Columbia, on the eve of contract negotiations. We join the American Association of University Professors in condemning these acts as the “sacrifice [of] students to the demands of an authoritarian government.”

We are appalled that Columbia’s leadership has colluded with the authoritarian suppression of its students by fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration for the release of $400 million in grants withdrawn on March 7, and that it did so against the warning issued by Constitutional law scholars that this course of action “creates a dangerous precedent for every recipient of federal financial assistance.” For over a year before being presented with this extortionist set of demands, Columbia targeted and criminalized its students. Now it has also agreed to impose the IHRA definition of antisemitism and a mask ban, specifically intended to target student protestors. It also took advantage of the opportunity to widen the scope of area studies departments placed under review and, in direct opposition to calls to divest from Israeli institutions, to reinvest in the Tel Aviv Global Center.

Columbia’s actions endanger all students, staff, and faculty. These are concerted attacks on the integrity of higher education and on our ability to conduct research, teach, and learn. These attacks are fueled by anti-Palestinian racism and enabled by the dangerous weaponization of antisemitism. They expose classrooms, dorms, labs, and other common spaces to the surveillance and predation of a federal government that has declared war on higher education.

We call on Columbia University to reinstate disenrolled, suspended, and expelled students, and reverse all changes made in compliance with the Trump administration’s harmful and illegitimate demands. Until this happens, we (re)commit to the following terms of the Columbia University boycott, originally called in April 2024 in response to the violent removal of students encamped against the genocide in Gaza:

1) We will not participate in academic or other cultural events held at or officially sponsored by Columbia University or Barnard College. This includes, but is not limited to, workshops, conferences, talks, screenings, and invited lectures. Signatories will use their discretion when it comes to solidarity events, and particularly with programs and people that are under direct attack from the administration.

2) We will not collaborate with Columbia or Barnard faculty who hold positions within the university administrationin addition to their academic appointments. This includes but is not limited to: invitations to academic events at our universities; collaboration on any new grants and workshops; co-authorship of papers.

3) Some signatories may further engage in common sense boycotts of individual faculty based on their complicity with Columbia and Barnard’s repression. Likewise, some signatories may engage in common sense boycotts of publications affiliated with Columbia University.

Universities cannot pretend to hold higher education sacred while repressing students and faculty, undermining free speech and academic freedom, and prohibiting dissent. Every such act of craven suppression and compliance only further undermines the university and emboldens the reactionary forces intent on destroying it. We call on our universities to be a sanctuary for our students, and a space of unqualified academic freedom, rather than an enforcement arm of an authoritarian state.

Bullies are never stopped by acquiescence. Never has it been more urgent to dissent and stand with our students, for our profession, and for democracy and social justice.
Signed,

Organizations

1. CUNY Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
2. CUNY for Palestine
3. CUNY Graduate Center for Palestine
4. Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine National Network
5. National Students for Justice in Palestine
6. Columbia University Apartheid Divest
7. Virginia Tech for Palestine
8. Labor for Palestine National Network
9. UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine
10. Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
11. The New School FSJP
12. Stand with Kashmir
13. SDSU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
14. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim (PAM) Caucus, California Faculty Organization
15. Coalition for Action in Higher Education
16. Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)
17. Toronto Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG-TO)
18. Within Our Lifetimes (WOL)
19. Princeton Apartheid Divest
20. WeAreColumbia
21. Pratt Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
22. Cooper Union FSJP
23. Harlem for Palestine
24. University of Washington Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
25. UC Riverside Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
26. UAW 2325 Labor for Palestine
27. California Indians for Palestinian Liberation
28. Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (PAL)-Awda NY/NJ
29. Cornell Coalition for Justice in Palestine
30. Rutgers FSJP
31. Interrupting Criminalization
32. Medical Students for Justice in Palestine National
33. California Scholars for Academic Freedom
34.  Black Lives Matter Grassroots
35. Students for Palestine MDU
36. Montclair State University Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
37. University of Illinois at Chicago Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
38. U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)
Apart from these 38 organizations and groups representing those fighting for racial equality and justice (BLM) and labor rights who see their struggles as intertwined with the struggle for a free Palestine (Labor for Palestine National Network), over 1400 faculty from across the world have signed on to this letter, including Yours Truly.

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free; and with it, so will the rest of this world we  share.

The post Student and Faculty Repression on US Campuses: the Palestine Exception appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fawzia Afzal-Khan.

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In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures.

But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.

“Sometimes plants grow along here,” Bull Chief said nonchalantly as he turned down a hallway in the student union building.

Little Big Horn College appears to be in better condition than most tribal schools, but expensive issues lurk below the surface. One of the newest buildings, a gym and wellness center, needs $1 million in repairs to its leaky roof. And with the day care center and cafeteria closed, it’s harder to attend classes for students with children and those who live too far away to drive home for meals. Sharon Peregoy, who teaches education and is a member of the Montana House of Representatives, lamented the chronic underfunding of tribal colleges and universities: “This is an atrocity. We’re getting pennies on the dollar.”

While the school appears to be in better condition than most tribal colleges, its roofs leak, sending rain through skylights in the gym and wellness center, which needs $1 million in repairs. An electronic sign marking the entrance has been sitting dark since a vehicle hit it months ago. College leaders said they have no idea when they will be able to afford repairs.

It’s a reality faced by many of the 37 schools in the system, which spans 14 states. Congress today grants the colleges a quarter-billion dollars per year less than the inflation-adjusted amount they should receive, ProPublica found.

President Joe Biden declared early in his term that tribal schools were a priority. Yet the meager funding increases he signed into law have done little to address decades of financial neglect. Further, the federal Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, has never asked lawmakers to fully fund the colleges at levels called for in the law.

The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the “most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country.” At a time when their enrollment is rising, the schools lack money to update academic programs and hire enough qualified instructors to train nurses, teachers and truck drivers and to prepare students to transfer to other universities. As they expand degree programs, their researchers are trying to conduct high-level work in old forts, warehouses and garages.

The laws that authorized the creation of the tribal colleges also guaranteed funding, which was set at $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, with adjustments for inflation. But the federal government has never funded schools at the level called for in the statute, and even experts struggle to explain the basis for current funding levels.

Since 2010, per-student funding has been as low as $5,235 and sits at just under $8,700 today, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies on behalf of the colleges in Washington. Had Congress delivered what’s required by statute, tribal colleges and universities would receive about $40,000 per student today.

The Bureau of Indian Education has not asked Congress for major funding increases for the bulk of the tribal colleges in the past three years, according to the agency’s budget documents, and congressional negotiations have done little to increase what they get.

The Bureau of Indian Education said in a written statement that when requesting funding, it follows guidelines set by the Department of the Interior and the White House. A department spokesperson directed ProPublica to the White House budget office for an explanation of the colleges’ funding; a spokesperson for the budget office declined an interview request and directed ProPublica back to the Interior Department.

Biden called the colleges “integral and essential” to their communities in a 2021 executive order that, among other things, established a tribal college initiative to determine systemic causes of education shortcomings and improve tribal schools and colleges. But while it has led to some forums and largely ceremonial events, that initiative has done next to nothing substantive, advocates say.

As funding has fallen behind the need, even the American Indian Higher Education Consortium — the schools’ primary pipeline to Congress and the Bureau of Indian Education — has asked for far less than the law says the colleges are entitled to. Its recent requests have been for around $11,000 per student.

Some people advocating for the tribal colleges have noted a frequent topic of debate: Should the schools ask for what they’re owed and risk angering lawmakers or just accept the meager amount they receive?

Separately, the colleges get very little for maintenance and capital improvements, money that isn’t part of the per-student funding.

Asked why the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t better understand the facilities needs at tribal colleges, Sharon Pinto, the agency’s deputy director for school operations, said, “We really wouldn’t know that because the buildings located at these tribal colleges are not necessarily federal assets and they’re not in an inventory system.” In a follow-up email, the bureau said it was waiting for the colleges to let it know what their facility needs are.

Several college leaders and researchers said such responses are typical of a federal government that has routinely ignored its promises to Indigenous communities over the past two centuries.

Meredith McCoy, who is of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent and taught at the tribe’s college in North Dakota, noted that Native education is guaranteed by federal law and at least 150 treaties. Neglect of tribal colleges reflects a conscious decision by Congress and the federal government to dodge accountability, said McCoy, now an assistant professor at Carleton College who studies federal funding of tribal schools and colleges.

“The patterns of underfunding are so extreme that it’s hard not to see it as a systematic approach to underfunding Native people,” she said. “We’re teaching our children that it’s OK to make a promise and break it.”

To evaluate the impact of the federal government’s underfunding of tribal colleges’ and universities’ academic mission, ProPublica sent a survey to the 34 fully accredited schools, of which 13 responded, and visited five campuses. Our reporting found classes being held in a former fort constructed more than a century ago; campuses forced to temporarily close because of electrical, structural and plumbing problems; broken pipes that destroyed equipment and disrupted campus life; and academic leaders who lack the resources to adequately address the issues, build new facilities and keep pace with growing enrollment.

The colleges that responded to the survey reported that they commonly have problems with foundations, roofs, electrical systems and water pipes because they couldn’t afford maintenance. One campus put the price tag for repairs at $100 million. Several noted they don’t have money to upgrade technology so students can keep pace with skills required by the job market.

The country’s oldest tribal college, Diné routinely faces flooding, leaks and electrical outages on its main campus, not far from Canyon de Chelly National Monument. College leaders recently spent $30,000 to locate the source of a leak in the cafeteria, where the floor is criss-crossed with cracks. The school’s rodeo grounds are pocked with prairie dog holes, and roads to the mobile home park and hogans that house employees are mostly unpaved. Classes are sometimes canceled because of electrical outages. “I sleep with my ceiling fan going because I know if that stops, I’ll be getting a call,” said Claude Sandoval, a facilities manager.

The Bureau of Indian Education stated in its 2024 budget request that delays in addressing the problems only makes them more costly to fix. Continuing to ignore them could in some cases create “life-threatening situations for school students, staff, and visitors” and “interrupt educational programs for students, or force closure of the school,” the bureau told Congress.

But that same document did not request enough funding to fix the issues, college leaders say.

In 2021, Congress began providing $15 million per year for maintenance, to be shared by all tribal colleges. That has since increased to $16 million — less than $500,000 per college. The same year, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium estimated it would cost nearly half a billion dollars to catch up on deferred maintenance. Construction of new buildings would cost nearly twice that amount. The organization acknowledged the actual price tag could be far higher.

Tribal colleges are not allowed to raise taxes or use bond measures for basic academic or building costs.

The schools receive no federal funding for any non-Native students who attend. Their budgets were stretched even tighter by the COVID-19 pandemic, when non-Native enrollment rose sharply as classes moved online. It has remained above pre-pandemic levels.

The Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act of 1978, which funded the schools, contributes to confusion over what they should be paid. While it specifies base funding of $8,000 per student, it also notes that colleges will only be given what they need, without explaining how that should be calculated, and only when the government can afford it.

“When we think about the funding, it was set up for something that was needed 40 years ago,” said Ahniwake Rose, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s president. “What a school looked like and needed 40 years ago is absolutely not what it looks like and needs now.”

Though colleges and their representatives fault the Bureau of Indian Education, they say primary accountability falls on Congress.

ProPublica contacted 21 members of the U.S. House and Senate who either sit on an appropriations or Indian Affairs committee, or who represent a district or state with a tribal college to ask if they were aware of the condition of the campuses. Only Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke to ProPublica. The others either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.

Leger Fernández, a member of the Indian and Insular Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said she has pushed for the colleges to receive more funding but has been shut down by members of both parties, partly because of a lack of understanding about how they are funded.

“Our tribal colleges are part of our federal trust responsibility,” said Leger Fernández, whose district in northern and eastern New Mexico is home to three tribal colleges. “We made a commitment. This is an obligation the federal government has.”

Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before retiring in 2005, said the colleges lose out to louder voices in Washington, D.C. “Federal money is always caught in a tug-of-war between needs,” Campbell said. “The needs are always higher than the amount available.”

Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.

Many of the colleges are far from industrial centers and have few wealthy alumni, college leaders say, so private donations are rare and usually small.

The campus on the Pine Ridge reservation is beset by leaks that flood hallways and cause mold to grow on the walls. Employees in the library, housed in an old warehouse, use trash cans to catch rain and safeguard the archives packed with tribal artifacts and documents. The college is proud of its STEM programs, which operate out of another warehouse with bowed ceilings and no insulation, making for brutal winters. A lack of space makes it difficult to use scientific equipment, which often is stored in hallways. “We have good stuff, just a shabby place to put it,” said Misty Brave, whose jobs range from teaching to community outreach. “But we make do. It’s something our ancestors taught us to do.”

“We don’t have the alumni who can afford to donate,” said Marilyn Pourier, the development director at South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota College, which is perched on a hill on the Pine Ridge reservation. “We get a pretty good response, but it’s not enough.”

The schools’ tuition is among the lowest in the nation, but college leaders are hesitant to raise it because most reservation residents already can’t afford it.

Naomi Miguel, the executive director of the White House tribal college initiative, said she plans to press states to contribute more to tribal colleges and universities. At the moment, most provide little or nothing.

“If the states would support the TCUs, they’d be supporting jobs in their communities,” said Miguel. “It benefits them overall to create this sustainable workforce.”

Proof of the value of tribal colleges and universities, advocates say, can be found in what they accomplish despite their meager funding.

Many are the only places teaching their tribes’ languages at a time when nearly all of the 197 Indigenous languages in the United States are endangered.

They are often among the few places in their communities with access to high-speed internet. Nearly 28% of residents of tribal lands lack high-speed internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And some Native students find that the schools are a more welcoming place to pursue a degree and prepare for a career.

Shyler Martin, who grew up on the Navajo Nation near Navajo Technical University, enrolled there after leaving New Mexico State University during her second year there. Now entering her senior year, Martin said it’s been a relief to learn from instructors who understand the pressures she faces as the oldest child of a Navajo family, with whom she shares responsibility for raising her younger sister.

“They’re culturally sensitive and understanding,” Martin said of Navajo Tech’s staff. “I’m a parent, and they do what they can to help you continue school.”

Yet her time at the college has included winter days when classrooms were so cold that students had to bring blankets and classes that were canceled at the last minute because of a shortage of qualified instructors.

Tribes would be in dire straits without the colleges, said Carmelita Lamb, a professor at the University of Mary in North Dakota who has taught at and studied tribal colleges.

“The tribal college has been a saving grace,” said Lamb, a member of the Lipan Band of Apache. “Had we never had the tribal colleges, I really shudder to think where we’d be now.”

The colleges keep doing the best they can, but some are finding it increasingly difficult.

Mostly squeezed into a decrepit former rehabilitation center, the 7-acre campus’s infrastructure problems are visible the moment students approach the crumbling concrete stairs at the entrance. Snow pours into hallways through doors that don’t seal and wind whistles through electrical outlets. “When I want to keep my lunch cold, I just put it here,” said Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs, pointing at a plug behind his desk. Chairs roll across a sloped office floor, and the metal-and-wood outer walls of the main building are rusted and rotting. Without money for new classrooms and residence halls, the college has trouble attracting students and maintaining sought-after programs such as nursing.

At Chief Dull Knife, college leaders planned three years ago to build a modern structure with classrooms and a ceremonial arbor, but the estimated price — $14 million at the time — was already out of reach even before it ballooned to more than $20 million because of inflation. The plans haven’t been scrapped, but Bill Briggs, the dean of academic affairs, talks about them in the past tense.

“If we’re going to change the course of this country, everyone needs to have an opportunity,” Briggs said. “All we’re asking for is an opportunity to educate our students.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

The post The Legality of Genocide: On International Law & Thoughtcrimes on US Campuses appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In a post on the California Public Agency Labor and Employment Blog, David Urban explained in 2018 how:

At a public college or university, students and employees can assert First Amendment claims against the institution if it tries to discipline or censor them for speech activities.

However, students, faculty and staff at a private institution, according to Urban, “do not have that option, because the institution is not bound by the First Amendment” because private universities are not government entities.

This explains why the most extreme clampdowns on vocal critics of the Israeli genocide unfolding in Gaza since Oct 8, have occurred on campuses of elite private colleges and universities, among them Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis, Columbia. When members of these campus communities who support justice for Palestinians point out in rallies and social media posts and during teach-ins and in classes, the inhuman disproportionality of Israeli attacks on the civilian population of Gaza, which have claimed 15,000 lives to date, over 6,000 of these being children, contrasted with 1200 lives and 250 hostages taken by Hamas during their Oct 7th attack, which precipitated what can only be termed as Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign– well, these supporters of Palestinian human rights are quick to be branded by many including university authorities as anti-semites.

The chants by student, staff and faculty protestors to “free Palestine from the river to the sea” are weaponized by Israeli supporters as damning evidence calling for the annihilation of the Jewish citizens of Israel, the use of words like “intifada” (which literally means to rise up)–depicted as a call to arms to commit genocide on Israeli Jews. Clearly, such tactics are designed to obfuscate the actual genocide of Palestinian children, women and men unfolding before the world’s eyes in real-time on a daily basis over these past eight weeks.

In several cases, these virulent campaigns to tarnish Palestinian human rights advocates have led to calls for the firing of tenured distinguished scholars (a prominent case in point being Joseph Massad of Columbia University)–whilst many faculty without the protection of tenure have been fired, student activists have been doxxed by pro-Israeli donors and their acolytes and hired thugs (in several cases leading to a withdrawal of job offers) and some elite universities have banned Palestinian student organizations such as SJP (Brandeis was the first to do so)–as well as progressive Jewish organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace who also have been chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” This ubiquitous chant for freedom indicates the true meaning of this phrase. Rather than calling for genocide or removal of the Jewish population of Israel, it is calling, quite simply, for the creation of one indivisible secular and democratic state where ALL of its inhabitants can enjoy the same rights and privileges, and live in peace and dignity, together.

The belief that, at public universities such as the one where I am employed, faculty are comparatively secure in our ability to exercise our First Amendment rights, so that we may educate and debate civilly on contentious issues such as those triggered by this latest chapter on the Palestine/Israel conflict (an extension of the war on Palestine that started 100 years ago, according to Columbia University’s preeminent historian of Palestine, Rashid Khalidi), was punctured last week.

A respected colleague, who along with myself and a couple of others, has been unflagging in his attempts to get pro-Zionist faculty on our campus Discuss listserv to confront their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (an overwhelming number of whom are children), has been publicly silenced.

I woke Thursday morning to an email from this colleague informing me that he had been charged with violating the university’s Title IX code in a complaint filed against him by someone on the campus listserv. As a result, while the complaint winds its way through the system, he is not permitted to post or participate in any further discussions on this forum.

Title IX is a federal law that was passed in 1972 to ensure that male and female students and employees in educational settings are treated equally and fairly. It protects against discrimination based on sex (including sexual harassment). It also protects employees and students from discrimination on the basis of religion, race, disability or sexual orientation.

On the face of it, the allegation of any such harassment by my colleague against anyone on our campus faculty listserv is so absurd as to be laughable and one hopes, easily dismissed.

My colleague after all, is not the employer harassing an employee! All views expressed in this public forum are exchanged voluntarily between faculty colleagues who are all equal participants on a level playing field (despite differences in professorial rank.)

If anything, it is we who have been critiquing the apartheid Israeli state’s actions that have unleashed a murderous assault on thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, who are being harassed on this listserv, as we are accused of antisemitism by several of our pro-Zionist colleagues.

Yet, I suspect that one of the latter who is unable to defend her views in any coherent or rational way in response to my colleague’s repeated questions about her moral stance on the genocide of Palestinians, has decided that because she cant hide from the ethical implications of his arguments which she has failed to challenge– well, then, the next best thing is to find a way to remove campus-wide access to his voice of reason and humanity.

Orwell would have understood our current landscape only too well. The Zionist propaganda machine is in overdrive creating all manner of diversions, false narratives, and attempts to convince the world that up is down and wrong is right. While indeed these are scary times for any and everyone trying to speak truth to power, the irrefutable fact is: the court of public opinion has already ruled in favor of justice and liberation for Palestine from the chokehold of zionist imperialism backed by the US and former colonial western powers.

My colleague and scores of others like us are the vanguard of a new day; our voices can not be silenced. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

The post The New McCarthyism on US Campuses  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fawzia Afzal-Khan.

"The Chinese Communist Party will again be indoctrinating and spying on students on American college campuses this academic year in an organized effort known as 'cognitive warfare,’" according to an online seminar run by the Hudson Institute.

"Its objective is to suppress criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his policies, promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda, spy on and intimidate Chinese exchange students, shape American views about the United States, and steal scientific, technological, and military research," the institute said.

Recent pushback over Beijing-funded language and cultural centers – known as Confucius Institutes – embedded on American university campuses has prompted many schools to terminate these agreements, and the number of Confucius Institutes has plummeted from more than 100 to around a dozen, it said.

But experts told the seminar that the Chinese government has switched up the bureaucracy and continued its influence operations in other guises, including via the government-backed Chinese Students and Scholars' Associations, which the State Department has warned engage in the monitoring of international students from China, and in political mobilization on U.S. soil.

"Not all college administrators act to stop Chinese Communist Party interference on their campuses," the Institute warned in a summary of the seminar.

Varied motivations

Chinese infiltration can be motivated by anything from wanting to project a positive image of China and its government to getting hold of technology that has potentially military applications, said Ian Oxnevad, Senior Fellow, Foreign Affairs and Security Studies at the National Association of Scholars.

"Part of it is also access to American universities more broadly, for fundamental research purposes, because that has an impact on China's ability to obtain dual-use technologies," Oxnevad said. "Those are technologies that have uses for military or commercial purposes."

There is also a longer game in play, he said.

"You also have sort of an elite capture issue, ... looking at shaping the views of future policy-makers and key individuals in America in the future by shaping the views of students today," he said, adding that Confucius Institutes were just one phase in an ongoing overseas influence operation by Beijing.

"Since there's been a massive pushback on Confucius Institutes, [many] have basically shut down. Oftentimes, they're being rebranded as different programs, in a non-systematic way [though] it is systematic on the Chinese side," he said, warning: "They erode intellectual freedom."

He said the institutions "have in some cases allowed China to continue to monitor dissidents abroad and continue ... soft power initiatives."

Military ties

Meanwhile, the Hanban, the body under the State Council that was responsible for the centers, has been renamed.

Oxnevad said China is now focusing more on bilateral cooperation agreements with universities that attract defense or security funding, noting a clear correlation between universities engaged in government-funded research and the number of cooperation agreements with Chinese universities.

"What's happening is that many schools in the U.S. are forming bilateral ties with Chinese universities that have military ties to the People's Liberation Army in China," he warned.

"Oftentimes, these are coincidentally American universities that have some sort of defense-related program or department involved. That's what's happening now."

Oxnevad cited the recent case of Alfred University in upstate New York, which recently shut down its Confucius Institute.

"It had received a multimillion dollar contract from the U.S. government to help perfect hypersonic missile technology, and some of the same individuals involved in the engineering ceramics program at Alfred University were also tied to the Confucius Institute," he said.

U.S. campuses that receive Department of Defense or National Security Agency funding or government funding to expand their cybersecurity programs also seem to attract more ties with China, he said.

There are also implications for anyone with ties back in China who does anything – even on U.S. soil – that Beijing doesn't like, according to Cynthia Sun, a researcher for the Falun Dafa Information Center linked to the spiritual movement that has been banned in China as a "cult."

"We saw a lot of physical and digital surveillance by Chinese proxies," Sun said of a recent survey of transnational repression targeting Falun Gong practitioners on U.S. campuses.

"Nationwide, there are at least 45 universities and colleges with students or faculty who practice Falun Gong on campus," she said. 

Falun Gong persecution

Campus Falun Gong clubs typically host events, petition signings, film-screening and exhibitions, to try to raise awareness about 24 years of persecution at the hands of the Chinese state, Sun said.

"Some are second-generation, American citizens who have family, elderly relatives back in China, and then there's also Chinese international students who have to go back to China after their studies," she said.

"Out of this pool of people, 20% said they felt uncomfortable self-identifying as a Falun Gong practitioner because of the reprisals that they faced, and because of all of the fear they have, the indoctrination, and the propaganda surrounding their practice."

She quoted a Chinese international student in California as saying: "Family members in China were called regarding my whereabouts, my phone number, or where I was studying or working."

Several other students reported feeling watched, and their families were harassed due to their activities in the United States, Sun added.

"So they're using that as blackmail to threaten and intimidate these students to try to get them to stop holding these activities, holding these events," she said.

"It's the control of what the [Chinese Communist] Party wants people to think and say, through controlling the activities of Falun Gong practitioners, Hong Kong activists and ... ethnic minorities," Sun told the seminar. "And it's possible for them to also bring that here, to bring the surveillance, the slander, the censorship, to the United States of America."

Sun described Chinese Students and Scholars Associations as "funded by the local Chinese consulate, and they receive direction also, from the Chinese consulate."

"They carry forward this message of continued self-censorship, of continued surveillance," she said.

"It's really hard to fathom how this could be happening in American universities, but through the CSSAs and through the presence of Confucius Institutes, it's very much alive, this continued party thought," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jing Wei for RFA Mandarin.

The post Test-Optional College Admissions Policies Aren’t Necessarily Increasing Student Diversity on Campuses appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The post Making Campuses Platforms for Labor Renewal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph A. McCartin.

I've dedicated much of the past decade to growing and empowering civic engagement at Miami Dade College—the largest community college in Florida and home to one of the most racially, ethnically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse student populations in the country.

"Students come to MDC's campus expecting to hear about how they can participate in their democracy, and know where they can vote."

Every election season we run into an unfortunate reality about our state and country's democracy: It wasn't designed for our college community.

Many, if not most, of MDC's students face what's known as a "civic empowerment gap." They have had relatively few opportunities to gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence necessary to be active and influential participants in civic and political life. Many are non-native English speakers, were born in other countries, or are first-generation US citizens. Many grew up in working-class households, where issues related to government and politics seemed far-fetched compared to much more pressing and immediate needs. Most of them work in addition to studying at MDC.

Add in the fact that much of MDC's student body is made up of young and new voters—a demographic that faces its own set of systemic barriers to democratic participation—and it becomes clear that, although elections should represent the entire population, MDC's community is often underrepresented compared to voters who don't face a civic empowerment gap. Yet, MDC is representative of Miami. And if there's one thing we know how to do in Miami, it's celebrate.

That's why every election season, we celebrate the vote.

2022 marks the fifth year that MDC has taken part in Campus Takeover, the nationwide campaign, led nationally by the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and the Alliance for Youth Organizing, to mobilize students around elections and to create a culture of civic engagement on college campuses during the Civic Holidays—which began with National Voter Registration Day on September 20, continued October 3-7 with National Voter Education Week, and culminate with Vote Early Day today and Election Hero Day on November 7—the day before Election Day.

If you passed through MDC's campuses during National Voter Registration Day or National Voter Education Week, you likely saw DJs performing, stilt walkers roaming, photo booths, food trucks, and exciting giveaways, all to spread joy and awareness about the vote. And if you're a member of the college community, you've likely experienced other institution-wide efforts, such as the election-readiness modules that more than 200 MDC professors have developed to foster voter engagement, poll worker recruitment campaigns, "decoding the ballot" events both online and in person, and wearable gear for students to visibly promote their voter participation. That includes today, when we're doing everything we can to ensure our community knows how, where, and when they can vote early.

All of it—both the festive and the more academic aspects of MDC's Campus Takeover celebrations—is based on the idea that voting is a cultural practice as much as any other facet of a community. When people can see and be a part of what's happening around them, they take part because it feels normal, expected, and even comfortable. It's what people like us do.

So, instead of trying to bridge students' civic empowerment gap by changing their behavior, the MDC community and its community partners work to change the voting experience to one that fits into their lives—and celebrates what makes the MDC community powerful and unique.

That extends to closing physical gaps as well. In 2018, after local elected officials initially denied MDC on-campus early voting sites, we led a successful campaign to bring early voting to our two largest campuses, ensuring that a majority of MDC students had access to voting sites within walking distance of their classes for weeks leading up to that year's midterms. In fact, that campaign and the resulting celebrations were a part of MDC's first-ever Campus Takeover. Since that campaign, more than 40,000 votes have been cast at these early voting sites.

In the years since MDC has created a one-stop election-ready website accessible to all students, recruited more than 100 students to be poll workers at local precincts, secured funding for dozens of nonpartisan voter engagement internships for students, and registered thousands of students with support from local nonprofits including the Engage Miami Civic Foundation and the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County. And—of course—continued celebrating whenever possible.

The results speak for themselves. MDC's voting rate increased by more than nine percentage points from 2016 to 2020, outpacing the overall population's turnout growth despite demographics that dictate a much lower expected turnout rate—clear proof that investing in community colleges and their students' civic engagement can produce a strong return.

More importantly—though harder to quantify—voting and civic engagement are now a part of MDC's community culture and fabric. Students come to MDC's campus expecting to hear about how they can participate in their democracy, and know where they can vote. Their professors make it a part of their academic life, and through Campus Takeover, students can celebrate in a way that maintains its presence beyond the classroom. This week specifically, different members of MDC's community, including Engage Miami Civic Foundation, have mobilizations prepared for each of the five separate daily themes of National Voter Education Week—#VoteReady (registering to vote), #MailReady (preparing to vote by mail if you intend to do so), #VotePlanReady (making a plan to vote, whether by mail, early and in-person, or on Election Day), #BallotReady (understand who and what is on your ballot—it's not a pop quiz!), and #ElectionReady (mobilizing your network and community to make their voices heard as well).

All of this is accomplished with the modest resources of a public community college—an unfortunate fiscal reality that many major public institutions in our country face, but one we know is not insurmountable. Communities of all kinds can help their members make their voices heard by bringing civic engagement to them, incorporating it into the local culture—whatever that looks like where they are.

On college campuses around the country, that means working year-round to make civic engagement a presence in their students' lives. It also means establishing partnerships with organizations in our communities and tapping into national programs like Campus Takeover that help college communities mobilize and celebrate the vote.

Whatever form that takes, the result should be the same: A democracy designed for the people you serve in your community.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Monica A. Bustinza.

When it comes to corporate power and control over their lives, now and into the future, today’s college students are perilously dormant. When it comes to putting pressure on Congress to counter the various dictates of corporatism, there is little activity other than some stalwarts contacting their lawmakers on climate violence.

Much of campus activity these days focuses on diversity, tuition, student loans, “politically correct” speech demands and conforming conduct.

This campus environment is strangely oblivious to the corporate abuses of our economy, culture and government. This indifference extends to the endless grip of corporate power over the educational institutions that the students attend.

Companies see universities and colleges as profit centers.

Corporate vendors influence or control the food students eat on campus, down to the junk in vending machines, along with their credit cards, iPhones, very expensive textbooks and, of course, student debt.

College Boards of Trustees are dominated by corporate executives or corporate affiliated people. Corporate science is – as from drug companies, biotech, military weapons and fossil fuel companies – co-opting, corrupting or displacing academic science which is peer-reviewed and unencumbered by corporate profiteering (See Professor Sheldon Krimsky’s books: https://sites.tufts.edu/sheldonkrimsky/books/).

Corporate law firms dominate law schools, with few exceptions, seriously distorting the curriculum away from courses on corporate crimes and immunities and courses that show how corporations have shaped public institutions such as Congress, state legislatures, and the Pentagon along with state and federal regulatory agencies.

Business schools, except for a few free-thinking professors, are finishing schools for Wall Street and other businesses. They operate in an empirically starved environment regarding what is really going on in the world of global corporate machinations, while feeding their student’s dogmatic free-market fundamentalism.

Engineering departments narrowly orient their students toward corporate missions, without educating them about the engineering professions’ ethical and whistleblowing rights and duties. (See, Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Nicholas Sakellariou and Rania Milleron, CRC Press, 2018).

Social science courses are largely remiss as well. There are very few courses on plutocratic rule and uncontrolled big-business ways of getting commercial values to override civic values. Teachers may be wary of raising such taboo topics, but the enthusiastic student response to Professor Laura Nader’s course on “Controlling Processes” at UC Berkeley over the years might indicate deep student interest in courses on top-down power structures.

Active students in the nineteen sixties and seventies took their environmental, civil rights and anti-war concerns directly to Congress. They, with other citizen groups, pushed Congress and got important legislation enacted.

Students in about twenty states created lasting full-time student advocacy groups called Public Interest Research Groups or PIRGs (See: https://uspirg.org/).

Today the PIRGs are still making change happen in the country (See, Right to Repair Project: https://uspirg.org/feature/usp/right-repair). However, few new PIRGs have been established since 1980. Students need to embrace how important, achievable and enduring such nonprofit independent PIRGs can be. With skilled advocates continuing to train students in civic skills and provide students with extracurricular experiences for a lifetime of citizen engagement, the PIRGs create a vibrant reservoir for a more functioning democracy.

As a leading European statesman Jean Monnet said decades ago – “Without people nothing is possible, but without institutions nothing is lasting.”

Students need to think about the civic part of their years ahead and focus on building the pillars of a democratic society that dissolve the concentrated power of giant corporations and empower the citizenry as befits the “We the People” vision in our Constitution.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Much of campus activity these days focuses on diversity, tuition, student loans, “politically correct” speech demands and conforming conduct.

This campus environment is strangely oblivious to the corporate abuses of our economy, culture and government. This indifference extends to the endless grip of corporate power over the educational institutions that the students attend.

Companies see universities and colleges as profit centers.

Corporate vendors influence or control the food students eat on campus, down to the junk in vending machines, along with their credit cards, iPhones, very expensive textbooks and, of course, student debt.

College Boards of Trustees are dominated by corporate executives or corporate affiliated people. Corporate science is – as from drug companies, biotech, military weapons and fossil fuel companies – co-opting, corrupting or displacing academic science which is peer-reviewed and unencumbered by corporate profiteering (See Professor Sheldon Krimsky’s books).

Corporate law firms dominate law schools, with few exceptions, seriously distorting the curriculum away from courses on corporate crimes and immunities and courses that show how corporations have shaped public institutions such as Congress, state legislatures, and the Pentagon along with state and federal regulatory agencies.

Business schools, except for a few free-thinking professors, are finishing schools for Wall Street and other businesses. They operate in an empirically starved environment regarding what is really going on in the world of global corporate machinations, while feeding their student’s dogmatic free-market fundamentalism.

Engineering departments narrowly orient their students toward corporate missions, without educating them about the engineering professions’ ethical and whistleblowing rights and duties.¹

Social science courses are largely remiss as well. There are very few courses on plutocratic rule and uncontrolled big-business ways of getting commercial values to override civic values. Teachers may be wary of raising such taboo topics, but the enthusiastic student response to Professor Laura Nader’s course on “Controlling Processes” at UC Berkeley over the years might indicate deep student interest in courses on top-down power structures.

Active students in the nineteen sixties and seventies took their environmental, civil rights and anti-war concerns directly to Congress. They, with other citizen groups, pushed Congress and got important legislation enacted.

Students in about twenty states created lasting full-time student advocacy groups called Public Interest Research Groups or PIRGs.

Today the PIRGs are still making change happen in the country (See “Right to Repair Project.”). However, few new PIRGs have been established since 1980. Students need to embrace how important, achievable and enduring such nonprofit independent PIRGs can be. With skilled advocates continuing to train students in civic skills and provide students with extracurricular experiences for a lifetime of citizen engagement, the PIRGs create a vibrant reservoir for a more functioning democracy.

As a leading European statesman Jean Monnet said decades ago – “Without people nothing is possible, but without institutions nothing is lasting.”

Students need to think about the civic part of their years ahead and focus on building the pillars of a democratic society that dissolve the concentrated power of giant corporations and empower the citizenry as befits the “We the People” vision in our Constitution.

1. See Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Nicholas Sakellariou and Rania Milleron, CRC Press, 2018.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.