"The AIC [Academic Industrial Complex] framework brought renewed attention to the role of the academy in directly supporting criminal punishment systems and military industrial complexes. [2] At the same time, if non-profits have been essential sites for access to life-saving and sustaining resources, universities have remained important locations for generating critical dissent. In recent years, students and teachers have found that space shrinking and made vulnerable through attacks on critical and ethnic studies programs, centers, and faculty members; the elimination of tenure track lines and adjunctification of labor; and the cutting of state funds and increased privatization on the backs of students in the form of unbearable debt. [3]"

— Incite! Women of Color Against Violence: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, p. xii

Also timely, given that universities have been sites of struggle against the ongoing genocide in Gaza in retaliation for the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. The universities' implicit bargain with the capitalist ruling class of funding-for-workers, at the expense of an education-first model, has left these sites painfully vulnerable -- and sadly, largely ineffective at making material gains.

#palestine #gaza #israel #FreePalestine #academia