Forms of Radical Democracy
Notes from SF State on the Potentiality of College Encampments
July 5, 2024
One vision of the college campus dominated this May: violent disorder and police repression. A tumultuous academic year culminated in spectacles reminiscent of the 1968 student protests for Third World liberation and against the Vietnam War, as explosive police attacks on students, political inquisition in Congress, and faculty suspensions punished organization and protest for Gaza. Social media multiplied endlessly with bloody images: Columbia’s spectacular crackdown by NYPD at the request of university President Shafik, UT Austin’s mounted police, violent assault of students occupying Cal Poly Humbolt’s administration building, Emory’s abusive arrest of faculty and the suspension of many others, and the violent attack on UCLA’s encampment by so-called “counter protestors.” These scenes proliferated and replicated, fashioning an unimpeachable reality of the campus out of control.
This erroneous representation, however, corrupts the liberatory aim and structure that gave birth to the camp in the first place—a public, student-driven, autonomous assembly and a space where learning and practice coincided for the liberation of Gaza. This vision was visible to many across campuses: from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Union to the president of Wesleyan University, a range of community members emphasized how encampments created spaces of gathering, but also of horizontal organizing and community support.1Michael S. Roth, “Why I’m not Calling the Police on My Students’ Encampment,” New Republic, May 7, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/181341/wesleyan-president-not-calling-police-student-gaza-encampment. Refusing the imprimatur of administrations, students evaded what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls the elite capture that so often comes from being within the institution. Reclaiming universities as a public space, the camps synthesized the past of another era of organizing, from CUNY to UCLA, and beyond.2Kim Phillips-Fein, “The CUNY Experiment,” New York Review, May 23, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/05/23/the-cuny-experiment/; Riya Abiram, “‘Raising Important Questions’”: UCLA’s Long History of Student Activism, Protest,” Daily Bruin, June 10, 2024, https://dailybruin.com/2024/06/10/raising-important-questions-uclas-long-history-of-student-activism-protests.
On my own campus at San Francisco State, organizers recalled how the student strike of 1968 transformed the university, giving birth to Ethnic Studies departments that are now integral to universities across the country. Encampments thought globally—teach-ins organized by students and faculty connected the Palestinian struggle to international histories of resistance and to previous eras of uprising on campus and beyond. Rejecting disciplinary or administrative constraint, as Anahid Nersessian writes, encampments offered “another possibility for what the university might be.”3Anahid Nersessian, “Under the Jumbotron,” London Review of Books, May 6, 2024, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/may/under-the-jumbotron.
Responding to these liberatory possibilities, spectacles of campus repression nationally had a clear goal—to erase not just the camp, but also its peaceful, autonomous structure. More perniciously, scenes and images of violence reinforced state and private investment in the logics and power of “community safety” and the preservation of property—the same justifications behind the police crackdowns of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor uprising of 2020. Where universities loudly declared a fashionable liberal solidarity then, now they deploy the same neofascist police logics and tactics.
It is exactly this dynamic that Robin D.G. Kelley isolates in his brutal evisceration of UCLA’s now infamous crackdown. Kelley’s analysis addresses the deep antagonism between neoliberal posturing and revolutionary learning—but also the asymmetry of university logic and public attention that is obliterating the camp’s radical potentiality. Observing how an “unholy alliance” between Zionist sympathizers and neofascists exploded at UCLA, Kelley emphasizes a peacefulness that administrations minimize or deny outright:
April 25, it was one of the greatest examples of principled protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, collective education, and political resistance I have ever seen. The encampment was a multiracial, multinational, and gender-diverse assembly, composed of undergraduate and graduate students from across campus. Residents were required to sign a community agreement outlining shared principles and behavior, and those who were willing to risk arrest or assume security duties underwent training in de-escalation tactics. All faiths were welcome, and so were families with children.4Robin D.G. Kelley, “UCLA’s Unholy Alliance,” Boston Review, May 18, 2024, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/.
Kelley’s admiration spans but a few paragraphs, overwhelmed by the larger need to testify against a vast array of institutional failures and deceptions. The overwhelming brutality of administrations demands the lion’s share of our attention. The peace of the camp disappears, a mirage in the calamitous aftermath.
Yet Kelley’s description remains powerful in its brevity. It does so by reminding us of what sits beneath the dominating reactionary vision of the camp—a vision that extends from the right-wing mobilization and distortion of the campus itself as a site of leftist extremism. Samuel P. Catlin argues, visions of “the campus” as sites of inquiry have ceased to exist. Rather, the campus has become a “fantasy and a media trope,” a “synecdoche” for social and political scandals from anti-CRT panics, to fearmongering over gender, queer, and trans studies.5Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Doesn’t Exist: How the Campus War is Made,” Parapraxis, April 2024, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist. The campus scandal mobilized at the highest levels of American politics justifies a spectrum of political backlash, all while neutralizing academic freedom, demoting the faculty, and refashioning education in service of capital. This is a vision that campus administrations, in their zealous crackdowns, happily reinforce.
Left unchecked, this hegemonic specter of the campus threatens to eradicate the alternative the camps were crafted to embody—a space towards the goal of liberation, ceasefire, and a free Palestine, but also a space of political awareness both uncommon in and threatening to the status quo of our civic and political lives. We have the immediate work of testifying to the horror in our moment. But in tandem we also must remember and repeat the possibilistic vision of the encampments that Kelley briefly saw.
What follows is not the chaotic spectacle conjured in media by the phrase “college encampment.” It is rather a return to the camp’s revolutionary potential, a potential that I witnessed on my own campus at SF State. There, I saw an embodiment of the ephemeral, autonomous, adaptable, and prescient politics that emerged abruptly to meet a moment of crisis. What follows takes SF State as one reminder of why we gathered in the first place—for a liberatory project embodied by the chants of activists that Palestine will be free. It is a reminder that our freedoms alike can’t be severed from that project.
Exceptional Democracy at SF State’s Encampment
At San Francisco State University’s Gaza Solidarity Camp in May, the scene was peaceful. After delivering over demands for disclosure and divestment of financial assets, and a declaration against genocide to campus administration, students waited for a response. Faculty provided support, even brought their classes, as students met in a community circle to strategize on the delivery of their demands. Ever conscious of the threat of violence subsuming so many campuses, student security planners organized for defense and community support, hoping it would be unnecessary. Meanwhile, student organizers coordinated food donated from community members as well as security and supplies, as other students lingered, studied, or perused books donated to the Edward W. Said/Refaat Alareer Memorial Library. Heavy against the backdrop of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, our camp came to feel almost natural as a space of gathering and solidarity for campus community.
As local NPR station KQED described, while campuses nationwide exploded in conflict, SF State was notable not just for its calm, but its remarkably open, public, and democratic bargaining strategy.6Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, “SFSU President Begins Negotiations with Campus Gaza Protestors,” KQED, May 6, 2024, https://www.kqed.org/news/11985130/sfsu-president-begins-negotiations-with-campus-gaza-protesters. A week after establishing camp, University President Lynn Mahoney joined students in an open bargaining session—modeled after union bargaining strategy—in Malcolm X Plaza. In a remarkable gathering, moderated by supportive faculty, eight representatives from the encampment presented demands and follow up questions to the President in public view by hundreds of students, faculty, and community members. Students composed community agreements to keep the gathering peaceful and focused on the negotiation at hand. Describing this encounter later, Keith Bower Brown, wrote that SFSU modeled “an exceptionally democratic student Palestine movement” demonstrating the potential of open, horizontal democratic organizing to point a way forward for engaged community-centered politics.7Keith Bower Brown, “At San Francisco State, a Democratic Movement for Palestine,” Jacobin, May 9, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/05/san-francisco-state-student-protest-palestine.
Our testimony must be about atrocity in Palestine. But it must also be about the world we build when atrocity ends and the knowledge we need to make that world possible.
One day I reflected with a student about the peacefulness and solidarity our camp represented, feeling fortunate but also proud of the work required for this peacefulness to be possible. We wondered if the relative peace at SF State was because of violence elsewhere. After all, our university invokes the 1968 strike at SF State for Third World Liberation so frequently that a police crackdown would have been a particular self-indictment. After I spoke in admiration of their organizing, the student responded that this work wouldn’t be possible without the organizing we had been doing together all year, as the faculty union prepared for two strikes, as we protested layoffs on our campus, and as students protested fee increases.
The student’s comment reminded me that none of this positive energy at SF State emerged from a vacuum. In fact, we’ve been building capacity through coordination between student and faculty organizers intensely over the past few years. In the past year alone, students and faculty at San Francisco State collaborated on faculty strike efforts against the backdrop of brutal layoffs, building a CSU student union, against a 34 percent hike in student tuition approved by the CSU Board of Trustees, and for active investments in student learning and living conditions. These actions built an infrastructure for our collective power: student organizers joined in incredible numbers with faculty for our strike in December. When students organized walkouts in protest, faculty joined them. Where our admin suggested that student fee hikes were necessary to support higher faculty wages, we built a narrative showing the connections of our working and learning conditions.
As Paolo Freire reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, education is “fundamentally narrative in character.” But the narrative is often one sided, suppressing the “poles of contradiction” where we are “simultaneously teachers and students.”8Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000), https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf. At SF State, our collaboration evinced the possibilities outside of strict hierarchies. It also evinced the political power of constructing an infrastructure of organizing that enabled action. We built a shared knowledge base: as faculty learned both that $12 Billion in Cal State University funds were being hoarded and that these funds were built on the diversion of student fees to investment portfolios, students on the encampment’s Divest Committee connected the fee hikes impacting them to the investments of SF State and the CSU that are imbricated in the genocide in Gaza.
We also connected the past to the present. Faculty organizers from the country’s first College of Ethnic Studies, formed in direct response to SF State’s 1968 strike, advised students on demands. We shared strategy—SF State’s union called for open bargaining with the CSU administration last year, and that strategy informed students’ public hearing with SF State’s administration (to my knowledge the only one of its kind). Years worth of organizing paid off in the mutual support shared between faculty and students to create a space of learning and of safety where administrations saw only disruption.
Constructed around these immediate needs, the camp also embodied a pluralistic synergy. From the horror of the genocide in Gaza, and the failure of universities across the country to recognize student protest as permissible speech, the camp also reflected the many communities who have and continue to suffer colonial violence. SF State is a diverse, international campus of working-class students from regions ranging from Palestine to the Philippines. Students embraced these connections, showing how to fight for Gaza connected to their own communities. This work demonstrated what Chantal Mouffe finds possible in democracy, conceived of not as constitutionally rigid, but as a “purposive association” whose “allegiances to specific communities” are less about group affiliation than the idea of imperfect association—association that thrives on the learning brought of difference.9Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1992), 232–33.
In these associations, students testified to Gaza and saw connections to their own colonial histories. I’ve seen Filipinx student organizers coordinating demonstrations against the American imperialism inherent in the neoliberal trade policies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco (APEC). I’ve seen how new organizers learned from our campus’s General Union of Palestinian Students about the history of Palestinian liberation and strategized about escalation of our actions and demands. I’ve seen how YDSA members helped coordinate with student workers on campus and helped to foster both tactical goals and transparency. I’ve seen how queer student groups responded to anti-trans speaker Riley Gaines and Turning Point USA by mobilizing collectively to critique policies of campus free speech that permitted hate speech.
These coalitions didn’t always move harmoniously—they held space for disagreement that learned from past actions to align with the needs of the present. If outside the classroom, classroom learning guided our way. Students shared how our courses informed their activism. From the moment that students decided to establish an encampment, they proceeded with the knowledge that students and faculty could rise through, but also despite, the inclination of the university that was the site of our gathering.
The Camp as Worldbuilding
This model of collectivity is more important than ever because of the multifaceted attack on “the campus” that Gaza solidarity encampments have intensified. Following Columbia’s crackdown, an expanding array of faculty have written about the threat to academic freedom, student free speech, and rights to assembly that were already attenuated in the University’s turn towards neoliberal corporate management and its attention more to the revanchist politics of Washington than to the safety, rights, and demands of students. As Freire reminds us, it’s easy for the authoritarian figure—the neoliberal university—to “forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people in order to recover the people’s stolen humanity.”10Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
That dynamic is evident now. Student and faculty speech, as Katherine Franke explains, has become a canard: we are now “fully constrained by a web of rules regulating speech and expressive conduct—and a bureaucracy determined to enforce those rules abusively.”11Katherine Franke, “Columbia is Waging War on Dissent,” Nation, April 1, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/columbia-lawsuit-israel-antisemitism/. At UCLA, the free speech commitment of a public university was refashioned into the active enabling of fascistic speech. As Kelley elaborates, UCLA “not only failed to direct law enforcement to arrest and remove the armed mob but indirectly incited the violence by inviting ‘counter protesters’ to come on to our campus, hold inflammatory rallies a few feet from the encampment, and allow them to remain in the name of protecting ‘free speech.’”12Kelly, “UCLA’s Unholy Allliance.”
Even while our attention has turned home, the genocide in Gaza reaches ever more horrifying degrees of calamity, violence, famine, and death. The demands of protesters, much less the clear and present need of Palestinians in crisis, disappear behind the neofascism of safety and order deployed by the right. At the university, investments in university brand and in donor relations justify repression—and remake the encampment’s liberatory space into a scene of violence. Administrators cannily erase their own instigating role. Franke wonders “how we can get from the place we are in now…to forming a unified front in defense of the very idea of the university.” Universities are not, in the end, up to the task.13Franke, “Columbia is Waging War on Dissent.”
But I want to revisit Kelley’s vision at the outset, and to consider the context of testifying not just to violence, but to possibility. In this spirit, I draw from an essay I teach every semester by Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez on queer form. In the essay, they call for a kind of queer worldbuilding that moves beyond an interpretation of queer art that demands the marginalized and oppressed produce work that “testif[ies] to the sociological conditions of their own disempowerment” and that presumes it is “all content and no form.” As they warn, the tendency from the majoritarian view is to erase the worldbuilding potential of minoritized art and artists, of people building another cultural political world, of the work to gesture towards horizons beyond the horrors of the now.14Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez, “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social,” ASAP/Journal 2, no.2 (2017): 227–39.
The camp is a form, and it gestures towards another world. Born out of atrocity, the camp offers an autonomous vision, beside but not within, in critical conversation with authority and institutions, but doing work discrete from the institutions we’ve inherited. They evince adaptability, attention to scale, and the truest forms of learning, community, and empowerment. Students build a nexus for broader communities—from the campus, to the community, connecting organizers for Palestine across the country. What happened for us at SF State—through students who had already modeled transparent, involved, and adaptable politics in open bargaining and community circles—in turn modeled the mutable, revolutionary shape of community power. Our testimony must be about atrocity in Palestine. But it must also be about the world we build when atrocity ends and the knowledge we need to make that world possible. For a moment, we gave that possibility a start. We can’t allow the campus against which we work to obscure the future that the camp began to imagine.