American Universities Are Complicit In Their Own Destruction

Last spring, university administrators facilitated the mass arrest of over 3,000 students on more than sixty campuses—an extraordinary repressive response to one of the largest student protest movements in U.S. history.

By Eric Ross

To call what we are witnessing in this country an unprecedented assault on basic democratic freedoms would be an understatement. Universities are being strong-armed by the ruling regime to abandon even the pretense of academic freedom and submit to an authoritarian, ideological takeover. Students are being abducted, criminalized, and held as political prisoners for the exercise of their right to free speech. Others are targeted, detained, and stripped of rights simply for who they are—for being international students in a xenophobic police state.

In their standoff with the Trump Administration, Columbia University chose the path of surrender and capitulation. Elsewhere, university leaders perform outrage at the intensifying crackdown on higher education and the erosion of civil liberties. And yes, they should be outraged. But this liberal indignation obscures an uncomfortable truth: this did not begin with Trump. It began with the universities themselves.

Last spring, university administrators facilitated the mass arrest of over 3,000 students on more than sixty campuses—an extraordinary repressive response to one of the largest student protest movements in U.S. history. These actions were not isolated incidents but a coordinated assault on a generation refusing to remain complicit in a genocide unfolding in Gaza. In doing so, the university betrayed not only its students but its core commitments to serving as laboratories for critical thought, democratic action, and social change.

Worse still, universities themselves weaponized the charge of antisemitism—invoking “Jewish safety” as a hollow pretext to quash dissent and criminalize protest. As a Jewish graduate student, educator, and organizer at UMass Amherst, I experienced firsthand how this narrative was not only disingenuous but dangerous. Jewish students are overrepresented in the Palestine solidarity movement—yet we were told, in effect, that we were threats to ourselves.

The irony was glaring: the greatest threats to Jewish students on campus were not the protesters, 97% of whom engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience, but the very institutions that claimed to protect us. At UMass an “independent investigation” into the excessive police response during the encampment, which led to 134 arrests, included the baseless conclusion that “by acting as quickly and decisively as it did, the Administration provided relief to students and other members of the campus community, especially some (possibly many) Jewish students and faculty, who felt threatened or alienated by the Encampments.”

Nowhere in the report is there any acknowledgment of the many Jewish students—not to mention Arab, Palestinian, or Muslim students—who participated in or supported the protests, and who were not merely made to feel uncomfortable, but were actively threatened by an administration with a documented history of anti-Palestinian bias. That UMass is now one of sixty universities facing a cynical federal investigation for its alleged culture of antisemitism—an accusation invoked by university itself to justify its repression—should come as no surprise.

While the Trump administration has escalated this campaign, it was university administrations that initiated it. They were the ones who conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. They were the ones who demonized student protesters. They were the ones who broke with precedent and called in militarized police on students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against a genocide. They were the ones who denied students any meaningful avenues to enact democratic change.

In placing themselves in opposition to their students and aligning themselves with state repression, universities abdicated their moral and historical responsibilities—and, in the process, helped author the Trumpist playbook they now claim to reject. Their belated disavowals ring hollow. The irony—if we can call it that—is that through their hypocrisy and collaboration, the universities helped sow the seeds of their own destruction. Should they ultimately not survive this sustained attack from Washington, their autopsy will read: murder-suicide.

As an American and as a Jew, as a historian and as an educator, I know where ethno-nationalism and militarism lead. I know the dangers of criminalizing dissent, of bending education to the will of the state, of deploying fear as a tool to silence voices of conscience.

Whatever stance our universities take, we will not be terrorized into submission. We will continue the struggle for a more just and truly democratic world—one centered on the inherent dignity and humanity of all people. We will continue to raise our collective voice and demonstrate our collective power with unwavering resolve. No to fascism. No to genocide. No to imperialism. No to white supremacy. No to xenophobia. No to deportation.

Not in my name. Not now. Not ever.

Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, researcher, and PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst