A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #19-25 - Against the university or against dissent? Trump's war on universities and its repercussions in the Western world (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The battle waged by Trump against American universities in the last 
election campaign is continuing. Agenda 47, the authoritarian plan drawn 
up by the American right for the government of the United States, has 
identified, among other things, university education as problematic for 
several points. Stuffed with patriotism, aversion to "gender" and 
discrimination, Trump's proposal envisaged a massive intervention by the 
federal government in university institutions, with the aim of 
standardizing teaching towards "the defense of the American tradition 
and Western civilization". Once in government, the practical application 
of Trump's proposals found an outlet in particular in the so-called Ivy 
League, the group of the eight most important US universities, which 
control billion-dollar investment funds.

In the spring of 2024, the campuses of the universities in question were 
among those occupied by students who were asking to divest from the 
agreements with Israel. The first key found by the American government 
was therefore ready: the anti-Semitism card, used throughout the West 
with the same ease as a "get out of jail free" in Monopoly, when a group 
of people organize to criticize the Zionist aggression that has been 
going on for 77 years in the Palestinian territory.

The deployment of repression seemed to be able to end with the cut in 
federal funding to universities, which arrived in recent months and 
continues to affect dozens of institutions, in a list that grows longer 
day after day. The reaction was twofold: there were those, with Harvard 
as the leader, who appealed to the courts trying to resist the 
government's attacks from a legal point of view; on the other hand, 
there were those who agreed to review their policies and their 
decision-making autonomy, handing over command positions of internal 
bodies to government puppets, as in the case of Columbia University, 
which surrendered to the appointment of a new vice chancellor to oversee 
the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies, 
within which the Center for Palestine Studies stands out.

But, as expected, the dissatisfied American government has extended the 
exercise of its repressive authority well beyond academic institutions, 
personally attacking those who study within them, such as Mahmoud 
Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia arrested in mid-March, who has 
become a face of the student protests for Palestine that continue to 
rage on campuses. On Wednesday, June 4, Trump issued two measures: the 
first provides for a ban on entry to the United States to citizens of 12 
countries, giving a political follow-up to the terrifying Muslim Ban 
that prevented entry to those of 7 Muslim-majority countries; the 
second, instead, strictly concerns the university issue, namely the ban 
on issuing new visas, and the revocation of those already granted, to 
foreign students at Harvard. The measure, currently suspended by a 
federal judge, has unleashed a flurry of institutional responses, 
starting from the university itself and ending with governments intent 
on defending their citizens who want to study abroad.

The quarrel between Trump and the American academy is difficult to fit 
into the Italian university system, which also tries to chase that 
neoliberal model: American universities are institutions that receive 
millionaire funding from the government and private individuals, 
experienced by students who can end up in debt for life, to pay the 
crazy fees necessary for the reproduction of campuses organized as 
perfect machines at the service of authority, within which a control by 
private police forces develops and, above all, a society based on 
excellence filtered through the capitalist sieve. Although the form of 
academic institutions may seem light years away from university 
institutions in Europe and Italy, the issue deserves reflection. 
Universities, we know, are historically places of reproduction and 
legitimization of the dominant system. However, they have also revealed 
themselves as spaces of conflict where students organize themselves to 
challenge university institutions prone to political and economic power 
and build emancipatory knowledge. Trump's attack is not only an attack 
on the universities targeted by the cultural war that the far right is 
waging around the world, but it is also an attack on dissent, on those 
who decide to organize against their governments and against authority, 
on those who decide not to lower their heads while the bombs that have 
been falling on civilians for 77 years have intensified in the 360km2 of 
the Gaza Strip, but above all on those who question the values of the 
West and those who try to denounce the horrors that it has always 
committed, as in Auschwitz as in Palestine.

Fabio Agliastro

https://umanitanova.org/contro-luniversita-o-contro-il-dissenso-guerra-di-trump-alle-universita-e-ricadute-nel-mondo-occidentale/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en