It is no Surprise That Genocide-Supporting Universities are Highest in the Rankings
Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe, constructed through the exploited labor of serfs to enforce feudal obedience, these temples of corporate power prove their descent into moral bankruptcy.
Image: Columbia University has a history of funding the tools of death of the US Empire.
The stark scenes of militarized police forces deploying riot gear, tear gas, and rubber bullets to brutalize student protesters encamped across American university campuses expose the reality that the nation's elite institutions of higher learning are little more than tools of empire.
From the University of California to Columbia in New York City, the supposed bastions of intellectual discourse have readily revealed their true nature - adherents to the dictates of corporate capitalism, enforcers of the ruling ideology, and committed to indoctrinating new generations of young men and women into the dominant orthodoxy. Any form of substantive dissent, free inquiry departed from sanctioned dogma, or challenge to underlying institutional violence is met with the very mechanisms of coercive state power.
The vicious police crackdowns on students protesting taxpayer investments in Israeli apartheid lay bare this reality with disturbing clarity. As campuses across the country have filled with encampments calling for divestment from companies profiting off the genocidal oppression of Palestinians, administrators have responded by siccing security forces and legions of militarized law enforcement agents on their own student bodies.
At Columbia University in Manhattan, campuses were militarized by the NYPD, officers took over buildings, and reports of sexual assault committed by police against student activists began to surface. The University President herself invited the police invasion, militarizing the campus until after graduation in a furious campaign to crush the nationwide Palestine solidarity movement.
These institutions, ranked among the most elite and prestigious in the world, have enthusiastically revealed themselves as part of the 21st century architecture of fascism. Intolerant of dissent, reliant on militarized state violence to impose institutional obedience, working in collusion with legions of extremist Zionist organizations to vilify and besmirch vocal critics, all while benefiting from the profits of apartheid and occupation - the similarities to past fascist regimes become ever more apparent and ominous.
And yet, despite the brutality and intimidation, despite the blackmail and threats of academic sanctions, despite the cynical use of loyal media outlets to paint them as miscreants and distraction-mongers, these student activists remain steadfast and defiant. As one recounted, "They have no strategy, because the world is with Palestine. Every time an encampment is swept, another replaces it."
Indeed, the refusal of this new generation to submit to the draconian diktat of their received institutional realities is perhaps the most chilling prospect for empire's gatekeepers. Having seen through the hollow pretenses to democracy, justice, and freedom that veil their schools' complicity in industrial neocolonialism and continued subjugation of the global poor, this defiant cohort of young people have definitively lost the fear that once paralyzed meaningful opposition.
Where past generations of students may have retreated in the face of administrative intimidation or been cowed by baton-wielding foot soldiers of law and order, today's activists understand they are a front line force in the global struggle against the interlocked capitalist and colonial forces that produce such obscene barbarity as that inflicted on the Palestinians. With strategic vision honed by luminaries like Edward Said and rooted in an unshakable conviction of the justness of their cause, they are wholly unmoved by the frantic counter-measures of a decaying order whose tools of violent coercion no longer inspire the terror intended.
In an era where the edifices of American imperial hegemony crack and fray by the day, these young people are left to reckon with the fact that they have inherited a global system of rapacious resource extraction, militarism, and subjugation of the many to serve the wealthy few. The encampments, the solidarity demonstrations, the disruption of university operations are not matters of mere political protest, but the stirrings of a new global awakening whereby those meant to be guided into the hierarchical machinery of capitalist domination have instead turned its methods of manipulation and coercion into a visible, undeniable, and revolutionary rejection of the entire edifice of imperial violence, oppression and greed their elite educations were meant to perpetuate.
When the top-ranked universities in the world, the purported exemplars of critical thinking and cultivators of tomorrow's leadership, so readily reveal their role as institutional enforcers of empire's wrath, no amount of mendacious public relations can conceal the fundamental rot. Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe, constructed through the exploited labor of serfs to enforce feudal obedience, these temples of corporate power prove their descent into moral bankruptcy with every pepper spray canister, every rubber bullet fired, every student beaten and arrested for taking a moral stand.
All that remains is naked force, wielded in desperation against the rising tide of global solidarity that sees the Palestinian struggle as the struggle for all human emancipation in the 21st century. Like all dying regimes, the university systems lash out with the clumsy violence of solipsistic self-preservation. But to any observing this unfolding generational struggle with open eyes, it is clear whose hands ultimately wield the levers of moral, ethical, and historical justice.
The age of American imperial and corporate hegemony, with its attendant ideology of neoliberal capitalist fundamentalism, is passing into the violent death throes of fundamentalist retrenchment. On campuses, streets, and public squares around the world, those who have seen through the myths can recognize the university quislings for the enemy collaborators and tools of oppression they have become. What remains is for their moral disintegration to reach terminal crisis, so that something new and humane may take the place of their decaying citadels and decadent hypocrisy.