The explosion of campus protest movements against Israel’s siege of Gaza, especially during the April 2024 encampments, has been historic. These movements showed the whole world that swaths of young people across the U.S. stand in solidarity with Palestinians who are facing a genocidal assault. The encampments created crises for college administrators who purport to defend values of justice and human rights while also looking to appease their trustees and donor bases who back Israel’s brutal war.
A generation has been galvanized and politicized, experiencing extreme repression for simply demanding their institutions cut ties with one of the great human catastrophes of modern times: Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of people and injuring of many more, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and the annihilation of Gaza’s universities.
A lesser known thread stretching across this campus upsurge has been the critical role of power research in supporting movement organizing, labor struggle, political education, and protest strategy. Across universities and colleges, grad workers and undergrad students have done the nitty-gritty work of digging into their endowment’s investments, researching the financial ties between the Pentagon and campus labs, and mapping out the connections between university trustees and the war machine.
Not all this research is new. It builds on years of work by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other campus divestment campaigns. But there’s no doubt that this moment, marked by a heightened awareness of the tight relationship between university power structures and the corporate-military-political bloc upholding occupation and apartheid against Palestinians, has generated new urgency in the longtime craft of mapping corporate power.
These new research efforts that are unmasking university ties to militarism and war crimes are being carried out by union graduate workers from California to Michigan to Massachusetts who are organizing to stop the flow of their research — their labor — into military projects and military technology. They’re being done by undergrad organizers from New York to Rhode Island who are campaigning for divestment and building out power maps to illustrate university ties to weapons’ companies. These organizers are forming research committees and working collaboratively. They’re sharing findings and skills through teach-ins and meetings. They’re building national networks and communicating across geography through group chats and webinars.
These new research efforts are also drawing direct inspiration from past models of campus power research — anti-South African apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, but especially from the 1968 pamphlet, “Who Rules Columbia?,” which mapped out the Columbia University power structure during that campus’s historic uprising against war and racism over five decades ago. Indeed, some campus researchers today are communicating with and learning directly from the veteran researchers who quite literally wrote “Who Rules Columbia?”
Thus, grad workers and campus organizers for Palestine today are not merely doing research — they’re upholding and expanding a proud movement tradition of power research that stretches back to the the civil rights movements and the SNCC Research Department and to the Vietnam antiwar movement and National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC).
In charging forward with a new and broad effort to map out university power today, grad workers and campus organizers are also reviving an analysis of the militarized corporate university that was pioneered by activists in the 1960s and 1970s. This analysis understands the university not as a site of harmonious apprenticeship, but as an employer that relies on graduate labor to function everyday and to serve the imperatives of military production; not as an idyllic site of learning, but as a power structure governed by corporate elites, interlocked with influential blocs of capital stretching from finance to real estate to technology, with close ties to the war machine and with endowments that operate like hedge funds, ready to undermine its own purported values and students at the whims of wealthy donors and war industry partners.
As Israel’s siege of Gaza intensified in the fall of 2023, flattening and starving the enclave while killing tens of thousands of people, students across the U.S., from Stanford to NYU, began protesting to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and that their institutions divest from and break ties with Israel.
Grad workers, as laborers within their universities, wondered how to respond.
“A lot of the research workers and grad students here were really struggling to metabolize our grief and figure out what sort of interventions on behalf of Palestine we were positioned to make,” said Isabel Kain, a fourth-year union graduate worker in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Specifically, Kain was thinking about the connections between her own workplace at UCSC and the war on Gaza. “The research that we do can go on to create the killing machines of tomorrow,” she said. “We are the very beginning of the military supply chain.”
Universities are a critical part of the U.S. war machine. Billions of dollars from the Department of Defense flow annually into labs whose research findings advance weapons’ systems. University endowments invest in military-tied corporations and many university trustees are interlocked with war profiteers.
“The U.S. military-industrial complex “could not function without American universities,” wrote Harry Zehner in the Nation. “It needs college-educated engineers and scientists. It relies on thousands of research projects, funded by the Pentagon and carried out by academics around the country.” Moreover, it relies on thousands of graduate workers and postdoctoral fellows to carry out the research labor and lab work behind those research projects.
Heeding the call of Palestinian trade unions in late 2023 to “end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes,” including “halting the arms trade with Israel” and “all funding and military research,” UCSC grad workers started looking toward their own workplace to take action.
They weren’t the only ones. At Columbia University, some grad workers were also thinking along the same lines.
“We were looking at our science and saying, ‘This is pretty messed up,’” said Kelsey Harrison, a third-year Chemistry PhD student. “Our government is sending weapons that are being used by Israel, and our science is contributing to advancing those weapons.”
Toward the end of 2023, these grad workers were increasingly connecting with each other across campuses to discuss what they could do, as university workers, about Israel’s war on Palestine. This connecting was made easier because many of these grad workers were already plugged into a preexisting network of cross-campus union solidarity.
The past few years have seen a historic wave of bottom-up grad worker organizing. Thousands of grad workers have unionized and gone on strike. This new campus labor militancy has been driven by militant,........