Ancient/Now - Who owns university campuses? Property, Ownership and Patriarchy
In the aftermath of protests at UCLA, protesters are painted as immoral vandals
UCLA Protests Aftermath: Property, Ownership and Patriarchy
I know a lot of you were up late last night watching the UCLA campus get stormed by police, watching the game of chicken: police getting repelled by the mass of students again and again until finally finding their way back in, using flash bangs and rubber bullets to stun the students, breaching the barricades, and clearing the encampment. All of this violent oppression of free speech was done in the void between east coast tv newsfeed and west coast tv newsfeed. It was very cleverly done, and leadership waited until there weren’t any CNN cameras trained on everything, doing their dirty work against our own students at a time when most Americans were sleeping.
I noticed a lot of things through the day and night of the UCLA crackdown. I watched prison vans and police cruisers head down the highway to arrest students—students who were doing nothing more than peacefully protesting, demanding that the university divest from war. I watched how the police waited for their attack, trying to tire the protesters (and their protectors) out. And I watched how the police were pushed back by a mass of thousands of students, until finally, the rubber bullets flew at them, bloodying them, breaking them. But I watched those students fight with the heat of a thousand suns, and it was pretty extraordinary to behold.
Well, now we’re in the aftermath, and the story that is being spun needs correction. News video shows Royce Hall tagged with things like “Free Gaza,” “Fuck Israel,” all kinds of protest art and protest speech. And I’ve seen people who would normally be in favor of peaceful protest express shock and consternation at the vandalism of Royce Hall, which has become this sacred space of learning in alumni eyes. People are upset; they are blaming those who vandalized this space. But let’s be clear: this isn’t the first time Royce Hall has been tagged by protestors, and it won’t be the last. And more importantly, this whole contest between students and UCLA leadership—the encampment, the demands for divestment, the calls to free Palestine—are all about property, ownership, and patriarchy. It's about the property and who owns it, who is a good steward of it. And we are being told that a bunch of confused, bratty kids destroyed precious, irreplaceable buildings.
The detritus of encampment and protest strewn about the quad has also been featured in every news report, an aftermath that somehow proves that the students deserved their comeuppance, that this was the right and proper thing to do, that they do not protect their campus. (We could discuss all the one-use plastic packaging that corporations produce with their food and beverages, not to mention camping supplies, and talk about how the consumer is always blamed for their production, not the manufacturer, but that’s another blog comparing trash in the ancient world to the modern, I think). In short, tv sets across the land are telling all sorts of Boomers and Boomer-adjacents (because who watches television anymore anyway?) to be profoundly rattled at the destruction of their property. Some are upset about the upheaval of their children’s education in real time, the disruption of their commencements, too, but most seem upset at UCLA students for destroying university property. What this powerful generation is not seeing—or what they are purposefully overlooking—is exactly what this younger generation is most traumatized by: the property, the occupation, the money, the scarce resources, the buildings, the stuff they have little access to. Their entire movement is about who owns what—whether it be the campus, or a building or an entire land. And it’s about the lineage of people (because patriarchy!) privileged enough to express ownership of a campus or any other space (like Gaza!).
The Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA Darnell Hunt went into the encampment hours before they cleared it, and there he had a dialogue with the students inside. When they asked him not to clear the encampment but to work for divestment instead, he said he didn’t have the ability, that only the Regents of UC have the power to divest. One brilliant young woman pointed out, “If you don’t have the power to do it, then why didn’t you send in the person who does?” There was no response to that question, but the conversation clarified that all of this is about ownership and power. Who gets to own a university? Well, right now with the current police occupation of UCLA, it seems the state does, however you want to define that. The state has taken ownership through violence. Many California citizens say they own the campus because their tax payer dollars pay for it. But tax funds actually pay very, very little of the University of California budget and at this point post Ronald Reagan, who decimated state investment in higher education, it is less than 8% and diminishes more each year. Many alumni and donors say they own the campus. Circumstances would agree with them. The special interests and investors and donors do indeed seem to be running the show. Leadership not only left a giant Jumbotron playing disturbing Israeli propaganda funded by Bill Ackman and Jessica Seinfeld on campus for days, they didn’t arrest or stop the outside Zionist elements who gathered around that Jumbotron with violent intent against UCLA students. When the students asked that Darnell Hunt stop the police, he said he didn’t have that power either. The police had already been called. The situation was already unsafe (made so by UCLA leadership, of course, by allowing Zionists to attack). And here we see that the police serve the ownership class who actually own this space. These people can do the required lip service that UCLA is for education, but it’s become quite clear that the police were brought in to protect the private financial interests of a very few, not to protect larger community or global interests of the many. We see who owns this campus. It’s not the students. It’s certainly not the faculty who are screaming into the void while their leadership looks only to protect power based on lineage and smash and grab capitalism (usually white and masculine).
It is essential for those in power to paint the students not only as vandals and destroyers of property, but also as agents of Hamas, of terrorism itself. This makes the destruction of their movement that much easier. It’s easy to shoot a terrorist in the face with a rubber bullet or two, much harder if that same student is fighting for the rights of the downtrodden.
But it’s hard to dehumanize such idealistic and brilliant students. And so people in power use other tactics too, like claiming that these student groups have been infiltrated by adults with bad, radical, intentions. People like David Axelrod, for instance, say, well let’s see how many of the protesters at Columbia were actually students (all of them, it turns out, but the people in power aren’t counting; they just need their innocence maintained). The people in power need to believe the students were infiltrated because they are tear gassing them and slamming them to the ground and shooting them in the face with rubber bullets. So you’ve got to believe them infiltrated by someone else in your mind so that you can rip them apart with a clear conscience in the dark of night. There is a powerful need to dehumanize these young people. They need to show everyone that they are not your children, but something radical and dangerous that needs to be controlled.
And here we come to the point: this is exactly what these dissenting students tell us we are doing to the children of Gaza, to the people of Gaza, to the children of the West Bank, to the people of the West Bank. When the students claim and occupy a property by force on a college campus, at UCLA or anywhere else, they do it to highlight such occupation in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the Golan Heights, aided by our bombs and our guns and our weapons.
A university is an interesting thing. It’s alive in a way. It’s a beating heart. It’s an imprisoned voice that needs to free. And at hundreds of universities all over the country—Columbia, South Florida, UT Austin, UT Dallas, Ole Miss, UCLA—campuses are being forcibly reclaimed by the state, claimed by a police force, claimed as property that needs to be protected from the rabble and given back to the powerful who should have it by rights. The administrations of these universities, men like Darnell Hunt and lame duck chancellor Gene Block, serve their more powerful masters—those who give to the endowments, the Bill Ackmans and Jessica Seinfelds of the world. These administrators only respect the money and the power while claiming to serve education. It comes down to this: what we have seen over the last 48 hours proves without a shadow of a doubt that these college administrators would rather shoot their children with rubber bullets than divest a cent from genocide. And so let’s end this depressing diatribe with the bright hope of David Bowie:
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware of what they're going through.
Yes, we serve a capitalist society that connects the safety of property to morality and anytime somebody claims that property they are presented to us as immoral and deserving of a good crack down. Yes, it’s a fucking tough day at UCLA, certainly for all the students, let alone the staff and professors. But when someone tells you who they are, you should believe them. The holders of university power are revealing themselves as slaves to hedge fund managers and real estate slum lords and corporate weapons manufacturers. This is useful information to determine in which direction we go next—because a university is not just property to be owned and hoarded by the powerful. A university is a much larger entity that extends beyond the physical campus, into hearts and minds. Otherwise, they woudn’t have cracked down so hard.
Follow events on social media:
UCLA R&F for a Democratic Union
Students for Justice in Palestine, UCLA
