Last spring, campuses across the country became flashpoints of anti-war resistance, as thousands of students mobilized in a powerful demonstration of moral conscience and collective action. Their demands were clear: an end to U.S. complicity in the genocide in Gaza and the dismantling of the war machine that sustains it. This wave of activism commanded both national and international attention.
Yet, in recent months, despite the ongoing slaughter and the White House’s egregious proposals to further orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, mainstream coverage of the student movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people – and in opposition to what Martin Luther King Jr. condemned as “the madness of militarism” – has steadily faded from the headlines.
Despite the relative media silence, and amid an intensifying campaign of institutional repression, the campus-based fight against the intolerable status quo has not ceased. Students remain at the forefront of the struggle for a more just, less militarized, and truly democratic world.
What coverage remains has largely functioned to reinforce the narrative that universities – initially caught off guard by the spontaneous protests of the spring – have successfully reasserted control over their campuses from what they have long framed as unruly agitators.
In November, The New York Times framed administrators’ crackdown on campus protests as a success, reporting that their efforts “seem to be working.” These draconian measures have had a chilling effect on campus expression – undermining free speech, stifling dissent, and betraying the university’s role as a laboratory for democracy and social change.
Nonviolent civil disobedience – a cornerstone of student activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the anti-Vietnam War and anti-Apartheid struggles – is now being met with the heavy hand of repression, as both the legal system and university conduct boards enforce arbitrary, vague, and inconsistently applied punitive measures.
These crackdowns have disproportionately targeted advocates for Palestinian liberation and their allies. This assault on Palestine-related dissent has already prompted multiple complaints over civil rights violations.
Hellbound and Down 