United States: Trump ramps up attacks on universities

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In February, the Trump administration announced the “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.” Its supposed goal is “to root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” In reality, it’s nothing but a smokescreen for attacks on democratic rights and cuts to education funding.

[Originally published at communistusa.org]

The task force’s tactic is: threaten funding first, ask questions later. For example, they canceled $400 million of federal money for Columbia University in March. Columbia caved to the task force’s demands, but as of now, the funds have not been restored. Other schools under attack include Brown, Princeton, Northwestern, Cornell, and Harvard.

In April, the task force sent Harvard University a letter of demands. To retain billions in grants, they must enforce a total ban on wearing masks; stop funding and recognizing pro-Palestine student clubs; stop any identity-based preferences in hiring and student admissions; and screen all international students to weed out anybody “hostile to American values” or “supportive of terrorism or antisemitism.”

Harvard’s lawyers replied that the demands are “unlawful” and accused the government of overstepping its authority, which in turn responded by freezing over $2 billion in grants. Trump directed the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to stop them from admitting international students—a big source of profit for the university, accounting for 27% of total enrollment.

Attacks on democratic rights

What’s particularly disgusting is that the task force paints pro-Palestine protesters as violent bigots, infringing on the civil rights of Jewish students. This doublespeak is easy to see through. What’s really happening is the crushing of peaceful Palestine solidarity actions—which are often led by Jewish students.

Targeting international students adds another layer to their tactic. Just as they blamed the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on “out of state” agitators, the White House would love to pretend “antisemitic” international students who “support Hamas” were behind last year’s encampments. But protests against Israel’s US-backed genocide have mobilized plenty of American citizens—not just students. A majority of Americans across all demographics no longer sympathize with Israel and support the formation of a Palestinian state.

Why is the government pressuring universities to further crush the democratic rights of students and faculty who dare oppose the war on Gaza? In times of relative class peace, “democratic rights” are useful for the capitalists to provide a safe outlet for social discontent that won’t threaten their system as a whole. But now, with capitalism in its death agony, they are preemptively preparing to confront future explosions of class struggle. Trump is particularly enthusiastic about this, but things were not so different under Biden and the Democrats, who demonized and brutally repressed the Palestine movement.

Fight back with class struggle

Communists fight for democratic rights, but not out of a commitment to “democracy” in the abstract. We fight for the democratic rights of the working class as a weapon for organizing against the capitalists. Going through the courts is a dead end, because they are tools created by and for the class enemy.

If we want to win genuine freedom of speech and assembly, workers and students must fight back with class-struggle tactics, including strikes and demonstrations, with the goal of putting campuses under the control of the staff, faculty, and students themselves. If the bourgeois government threatens to take away funding, we reply: expropriate the billionaires and bankers! A workers’ government would use that wealth to fund education and research to solve humanity’s greatest problems.

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