We have always been here. At the university mobilising the police in its persecution of anti-colonial thought. At the suspensions and “talking to” of anti-colonial professors, the arrest of the conscientious dissenters and the pimping of concepts of anti-racism and forcing them into the service of colonial violence. At appropriating the fight against anti-Semitism, forged from Warsaw to Crown Heights, to make of it a human shield for settler conquest so that even the political party brimming with Holocaust deniers, who only yesterday were fear-mongering about George Soros, “Jewish lasers” and the “banking elite”, can seamlessly be recast as crusaders against anti-Semitism.

I am not surprised that my, as they say, alma mater, is a central campus site in the battle between universities and protest. Nor am I surprised that my mentors and dissertation adviser remain in settler power’s crosshairs.

Like many, I chose Columbia University for grad school not because of its Ivy League stature or its illustrious reputation; and certainly not because of “legacy admission”. I knew little about these things.

I chose the school that had the most dangerous academics, according to a list generated by famed “right-winger” David Horowitz which I inverted and used as a “Guide to Best US Colleges”.

If the man who would go on to smear “I can’t breathe” protests as a “racial hoax” thought a professor or school was “dangerous” to his cause, I was there. Which were the most hated academic programmes by those who trivialise our lynching? Sign me up. Who were his most hated professors in the MA and PhD programmes? I sought them as my........

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