Commentary
Gabrielle Hosein
FOR MANY generations, university is where young politics is nurtured. Part of universities’ unique contribution to society is that, unlike primary and secondary school, religion, family, and the workplace, universities are where a generation emerging into their power can be taught to question everything, value the relationship between knowledge and justice, and develop practices of resistance and solidarity.
Student encampments, consciousness-raising, protests, and movements have confronted totalitarian regimes, war, and apartheid, and are historically the most radical voices of their time. My Indo-Caribbean parents participated in sit-ins at the Sir George Williams University in Montreal in 1969, a significant Caribbean student-led, Black Power challenge to white supremacy.
In the US, in this moment, university students have led some of the most principled, well-informed, strategic, and courageous protests against US funding of Zionist occupation of Palestinian territory, with all of the multigenerational death and destruction such militarised colonisation has entailed. They have risked loss of scholarships and faced suspension, expulsion, arrest, detention, and deportation.
Universities have responded with a bureaucratic authoritarianism that has betrayed their crucial social role, though there are provosts, presidents and faculty that have pushed back. Such university censorship is not unusual, particularly in politically extreme contexts, whether communist, theocratic, or fascist, where governments pressure universities to repress dissent. We must be vigilant even in democracies. Think of Jamaica’s expulsion of Walter Rodney and the UWI student-led “Rodney riots” that followed in 1968, galvanising Rastafarians, working classes and youth.
However, spearheaded by the US and its tech and billionaire broligarchy, such repression has reached a global frontal attack on this generation of university students. This will spread, deepen, and become more tyrannical. We need to name it for what it is and be clear how it is impacting our own in the Caribbean.
Students applying to universities in the US are being required to make their social media public and there are wide-ranging risks associated with speaking out, particularly in solidarity with Palestine. Indeed, while there are numerous other decisive struggles being waged around the world, Palestinian solidarity is the litmus test of our time. Students can be denied visas, have visas revoked, be denied scholarships, have scholarships revoked, be detained by border officials and unidentified state agents, disappear in detention centres, and be interrogated about the political activities of friends and peers.
Anything they like, share or post becomes a risk and it is to be expected that the same holds for their friends and families. It is an attempt to cut the throat of the young where they are most vocal, and where such vocality has had power all over the world.
Military power, Zionist politics, and right-wing republicanism are normalising this and, as with all experiments in Palestine, will export it to other governments so that it becomes a familiar danger of contemporary university student life. One could say that surveillance has always existed, but the ability to track everything, from online articles reviewed to private WhatsApp messages to password-protected private photos, is unprecedented.
There are other places to attend university in the North and Global South. For example, The UWI has a chance to show it’s a safe house for the historic politics it champions – from Daaga to Makandal Daaga.
How will our students planning to start university in the US (and soon elsewhere) survive? Keep their heads down. Distance themselves from struggles for justice. Retreat to apolitical and religious conservatism. Wrap themselves in an algorithmic entertainment bubble. Mistake war for peace. Expand student life as a climb to the top rather than a dismantling of its inequalities. Excel in a neoliberal experience bereft of rich and necessary student politicisation.
These considerations are not hypothetical. At 14, Ziya is beginning to think about subject selection, careers, and universities, and I find myself telling her to be careful about what she posts in the next few years as it could affect her access to visas, scholarships, university acceptance, and jobs, even if she is not applying in the US (which, for example, has an agenda to dismantle diversity and equity protocols globally). I find myself wondering if my public writing presents a risk to her because of its straight-shooting honesty.
I like to tell her a lioness raises a lion cub, not a sheep, but she is facing an era of muzzling which requires careful strategy. Fighting a sense of loss for student freedom, I wrestle with how to raise the kind of future university student that, more than ever, the world still needs.