As the movement for Palestinian liberation has burgeoned across campuses, the Popular University lays bare the university as an institution complicit by design. Modern universities, particularly elite institutions like Princeton, often present themselves as beacons of intellectual freedom and progressive values. We see this image reinforced in their commitments to diversity, in freshman orientation teaching us to learn from the past, in messaging for carbon neutrality, and even curating entire departments or academic programs focused on the unique experiences and contributions of various identity groups.
Undoubtedly, these are positive developments, some achieved through tireless mass mobilization and immense institutional resistance – they enhance students’ understanding of the world, including its systems of oppression, and enable a wider range of inclusion compared to the history of white-only and male-only institutions and the pervasive scourge of race “science.” However, rather than truly tearing down systems of oppression, the University tends to take this progressive façade to maintain its fundamentally exploitative aspects. The University does not operate with a tabula rasa soon after it is forced to concede on certain demands. Rather, it is designed to react slowly to humanitarian disasters that delegitimize claims of Western liberalism’s commitment to “freedom,” and to present itself as a neutral actor as it maintains the false peace of the status quo, regardless of its other commitments.
This is how universities justify the co-optation, at best, or the active silencing, at worst, of any potential for radical change. For all its rhetoric of service, the University directly oversees the subjugation of both workers and students through autocratic internal structures. These functions include enforcing no-strike clauses, restricting freedom of expression once it no longer cooperates with the institution’s material interests, repudiating transparency, and belittling those who fight for democratic and consistent structures beyond marginal compromises. For its rhetoric of non-violence, it weaponizes the violence of the police and prison state against its own community to hold onto its blood money. For all its “concern” for its students, it thrives off the disproportionate care for Jewish students “threatened” by anti-Zionism while the violence against Palestinian students and their families is normalized and anti-Zionist Jewish students are rendered illegitimate. It ignores its complicity in the violent slaughter of 186,000 Palestinians over the 11-month genocide, and the 76-year project of “something colonial” – to quote Theodor Herzel – in order to satisfy Zionist interests in the short-term.
But if Princeton University is supposed to have learned from institutional racism, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid, why is it failing the same open-book exam? At its core, the contemporary university model exists to reproduce the capitalist order. Through its endowment and the backgrounds of its Board of Trustees, the University maintains a deep financial interest to defend for-profit industry and state oppression, including to fossil fuel companies, the prison-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex. Through its employment of meddling workers simply seeking to survive on good conditions at the expense of the Board, the University has an interest to adopt union-busting tactics, hire anti-union attorneys, fund corporations that properly “manage” their employees, and suppress militant labor. With its funding from British Petroleum and the Department of Defense, of course Princeton is incentivized to study that which benefits the funders. Through its real estate, Princeton is contradictorily interested in rising, tax-free land value while the workers it relies on struggle with housing instability and rising rent—some facing displacement and even needing to sell their homes, according to a Princeton YDSA survey of campus workers. Far from facilitating a neutral environment, these factors effectively require the University to marginalize or outright suppress ideas that challenge the systems at the institution’s core.
As such, the institution allows critique only within the narrow confines of abstract debate, safely removed from the material conditions of real-world struggle. Actions that reject the comfort of this liberal model are “threatening” or even “scary” or “dangerous,” as we have seen with the rhetoric of University administrators and Zionist members of the Princeton community. Any independent working-class institutions or participatory democratic mechanisms like those found in militant labor and tenant unions, cooperatives and workers’ councils, or democratic protest movements present a threat to the maintenance of hierarchical and commodity-driven politics and economics of liberalism – including those interests resulting from the University’s material incentives and exclusive structure. This truth is most obvious in the arrest of peaceful protestors, the regulation of strike and protest to pacifism, and the eviction of conscientious objectors from their sites of struggle.
As this model presents itself as neutral, it is easy to subscribe to the theory that the apolitical academic – or even the “armchair leftist” – can simply argue a point in a formal debate and ultimately bring their audience to adopt the most logical policies. Even when the University acknowledges radical history, it does so in a way that sanitizes and depoliticizes it, instilling a selective memory of the movements of the 20th century as a relic of the past, rather than an ongoing necessity. By presenting past struggles as mere historical curiosities rather than lessons to actively apply, the University neuters their revolutionary potential and ensures that they do not pose a threat to the current order. This is not to say that academic politics is useless – it can, in fact, be used as a tool to raise consciousness and refine movement strategies. Yet, the substantive change we seek is not one that is borne of mere discussion. We can debate the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or the humanity of those outside our own respective nations all day, but debate alone produces nothing of substance.
Real change has never emerged within these official channels; it has always been driven by militant organizing operating outside of the boundaries of institutional control. Consider the now mainstream example of the Civil Rights Movement. While universities, governments, corporations, and all forms of mainstream institutions now celebrate figures like Martin Luther King Jr. as symbols of peaceful resistance, they were not at the forefront of supporting the movement when it mattered. Instead, universities punished students with suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and even physical violence. In their view, the Reconstruction Amendments were enough in bringing about racial equality, and King’s unpopular socialist vision of racial justice was simply too “extreme.” In the movement against apartheid in South Africa, protestors at Princeton University were regularly harassed by eating club members while administrators failed to act on the clear injustice of the apartheid regime. Across the country, the process of concession was slow and met with substantial friction. Even when divestment was achieved, universities often framed it as a moral decision rather than a political victory, thus stripping the movements of their radical implications. This pattern of co-optation and suppression is endemic to the university system as a whole and is essential for the satisfaction of prevailing interests. And yet, we are expected to trust the same university model that failed to move in these historical moments to have learned and reformed to the correct position.
Only through the tireless efforts of activists, often actively opposed by university administrations, did the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements achieve their gains. To confront the systems of oppression that the university model upholds, we must reject the “liberal autocracy” it upholds. Rather than finding comfort in its concession of some rights of “free speech” and incremental changes under a fundamentally undemocratic system, it must be radically rejected and completely overthrown. The Popular University is a model rooted in building counterpower that leverages increasing pressure against the official structures in favor of radical democracy. Instead of passive consumption of knowledge as an end in itself, students engage in active learning, applying their studies directly to real-world struggles and actively organizing to expand independent structures that can create a new world. This approach dismantles the artificial separation between academia and activism and develops a critical pedagogy – following in the tradition of Paulo Freire – that cannot blindly accept systems simply because they are what we were given.
In place of the university, we must envision a revolutionary model of education – one that challenges the global systems of capitalism and imperialism at their roots, instead of being complicit in their worst forms. While there may be no such thing as a “blueprint” for our specific circumstances, the Zapatistas in Chiapas as well as Rojava in autonomous northeastern Syria offer two powerful models of how education can be reimagined to serve the people rather than the ruling class. Both rooted in their respective revolutions in 1994 and 2014, these models of democratic education move beyond the mere absorption of knowledge.
In Chiapas, the Zapatistas have established autonomous schools that reject the Mexican state’s capitalist and colonial curricula, instead prioritizing education that is deeply connected to the community’s needs and struggles. Their model of education is not about producing individuals who will succeed within the capitalist or elite party context, but about cultivating collective knowledge that empowers people to resist and dismantle these structures of oppression. Students learn in a system of educational democracy where they and their families direct their own learning to serve social needs. Here, education is not merely about literary knowledge, but “abstract” knowledge interacts with direct education by means of community engagement and the practice of revolution in everyday life.
In Rojava, the revolutionary project has integrated education into its broader goals of self-government as well. The education system in Rojava is meant to respect a diversity of identities as part of a participatory democratic system that focuses on self-liberation and international solidarity. This model of education is not confined to classrooms but is a lived practice, embedded in the daily life of the community. It challenges the very foundations of capitalist and imperialist education by placing the power of knowledge production in the hands of the people through their own innovations. Both of these models place community protection in the hands of the people themselves, ending the professional role of police in favor of autonomous self-defense structures and restoration of victims and perpetrators to undo harm. Rather than replicating autocratic structures of securitization, they have practiced radical democracy, self-empowerment, and rehabilitation to build the structures for a rupture against dominant systems in favor of a free society.
These models offer a stark contrast to the universities of the Global North, and even of much of the Global South, where education is commodified and knowledge is treated as a product to be consumed rather than a tool for liberation. The elitism and commodification of education in institutions like Princeton serve to perpetuate the power dynamics that maintain the global order of capitalism and imperialism. By limiting access to those who have the resources for prior education or to those who have the unique opportunities afforded to the average Princeton student, these universities give false credibility to “meritocracy” and entrench hierarchies that ensure the benefits of higher education remain the privilege of the few. In challenging this, there must be a fundamental transformation of the purpose of education itself, while eliminating the compromises it makes on and off campus with capital, the state, and imperial domination. A truly revolutionary model must be rooted in not only a radical critique of systems, but also direct action. It must break down the artificial barriers between academia and activism, between theory and practice, and between the classroom and the community.
The path to this model will be difficult, and it certainly won’t materialize simply out of an article, but it will not come from within the existing structures. It must be forged through militant organizing and movement building that challenge the contemporary university at every level. We must develop democratic movements that simultaneously resist the traps of structurelessness and the replication of authoritarian structures, creating spaces where students, workers, and community members can engage in active learning through direct experience, potentially following the models of the encampment, daily town halls, democratic education, and other forms of collective action.
Divestment campaigns cannot simply be considered in the context of “improving” the existing structures, such as by tweaking university investments to reinvest in the oppression of another group of people, or to perpetuate the same system with different representatives. The task before us is to dismantle and replace them with something radically different – structures with material interests consistent with collective action rather than maintenance of the status quo. The time for polite critique is over. It is time to take active steps toward abolishing all those structures which postpone liberation. It is time to get involved in building the worker leverage, the protest democracy, and the community necessary for something beyond genocide and beyond the university.