No Life in the Master’s House: Lessons on Selling out from the Northwestern Encampment

A critical reportback and analysis on the student solidarity encampment with Palestine at Northwestern University. Originally posted by the Lake Effect Collective.

This reportback was submitted to us by comrades involved in the Northwestern Gaza solidarity encampment. Their encampment was the first in the Chicago area to go up and to come down, and its disappointing end informed the initial approach of many of us at UChicago; we felt that including this reportback alongside our own provided valuable context. In the spring, social media directed our attention to the violent reprisals university and state security forces inflicted upon student encampments, leaving many unprepared to deal with the less flashy counterinsurgency tactics used by universities like Northwestern to pacify them. Dangers to militancy, however, come from within and without the movement. Though written before the DNC, the authors’ description of liberal capitulation and co-optation, and the turning of “risk” and “escalation” towards pacification, presages the March on the DNC Coalition’s peace policing and denunciations of militants. As the fall semester begins, Northwestern has not stopped its repression efforts. The suspension of journalism professor Steven Thrasher for his efforts protecting students from cops and the school’s new “demonstration policy” and “Student Code of Conduct” that squeeze acceptable speech into ever tinier and more controlled boxes show what we lose in “ceaseless capitulation to an unmeetable goalpost.”

-Lake Effect Collective

Since April 17, 2024, Gaza Solidarity Encampments for divestment across American campuses have shown the world a truth we already know: the university and the police protect and serve the interests of the genocidal war on Gaza that had started long before October 7. With no universities left in Gaza, Gazan students have given these encampments the title of the Student Intifada. Those serious about Palestinian liberation will look to the most inventive and combative of these encampments to refine their sense of what is possible in this struggle and how to transcend its present confines. However, university presidents, professionalized activists, and “movement leaders” may look to Northwestern University for different lessons. They will find a record-setting case of counterinsurgency, in which the encampment’s self-appointed leadership cooperated with university administration to neutralize the movement by undemocratically forcing through a treacherous “deal” in exchange for dismantling the camp after just four days.

How to Lose an Encampment in Four Days

At 7 am on Thursday, April 25, Northwestern students and non-student allies set up a sizable encampment on Deering Meadow and successfully defended it in a scuffle with NUPD barely two hours later. By that afternoon, unbeknownst to most at the camp, negotiations had begun between the administration and a team comprised of two university-appointed faculty (both members of the President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism & Hate) and six undergraduate and graduate representatives selected by a small ad-hoc group of students. At 11 pm on Sunday, April 28, this negotiations team, urged on by an undemocratically elected steering committee, successfully sold a deal with the university to a lecture hall full of clapping and cheering student activists.

This infamous agreement, announced first by President Schill over email on Monday, April 29, to much local and national outrage, did not include divestment from the zionist war machine. In exchange for non-binding promises of disclosure, a Muslim/MENA house on campus (for “equity” with Jewish students and students of other ethnicities and faiths), and small-scale aid programs for Palestinian refugee students and scholars, over a hundred tents would be dismantled, and the encampment defanged into a sanctioned, non-disruptive daytime presence in a small corner of the meadow with an expiration date of June 1.

To seal the deal, the camp’s de facto leadership barred non-Northwestern students from the Sunday evening assembly, held on the fourth day of the encampment, which was only selectively shared with parts of the student organizer body. Students who made it to the meeting had their school IDs checked—twice—by the most physically imposing person the organizing clique could find, who was not himself a student. Two tenured professors (one from the Kellogg School of Management and another from the School of Education and Social Policy) dominated the stage, leveraging their identities to actively campaign for the deal as the best possible outcome of the camp, leaving space for dissenting voices only in a brief Q&A at the end of the meeting. This dissent was preemptively pathologized as being opportunistic, racist, and “If you have problems with the decision, go see a therapist.” Those suspected of harboring doubt or disaffection were precluded from speaking under the pretext that the goal of the encampment and the movement was “centering Palestinian voices.”

The weaponization of truisms assumed to be self-evident helped establish a culture of acquiescence, compliance, and inaction that allowed the evening to culminate in what some students retrospectively described as a “coup”—the near-unanimous “election” of 12 internally nominated candidates for 12 designated seats on a new steering committee that would make decisions for the entire camp. Those who weren’t in the room to vote were cast as “bodies” and passive audience members for endless speeches and cultural programming, whose job was to stand by waiting for an emergency or a decision to be announced. The hierarchical division between organizers and participants, students and non-students, good community members, and bad “outside agitators”—divisions that have been forcefully rejected at other campuses—were reasserted at every instance of imagined threat. Framed as necessary to enforce order and show “good faith” to the administration, it obstructed any on-the-ground development of action outside the parameters of bargaining established by the university on the first day. These maneuvers enabled negotiators and encampment leaders to prove to the administration that they could manage and eventually dissolve the camp peacefully—their only bargaining chip for a bad seat at a cursed table.

On May 23, 2024, President Schill claimed under oath before a Senate subcommittee that his administration “did not give in to any of the protesters’ demands” and was “fortunate to have students who were willing to negotiate and willing to give up the demands.” Over a single weekend, an encampment that was the first to be set up in Chicago and had drawn many thousands of participants and tens of thousands of dollars in donations ushered in its own shameful end, allowing the university to continue serving zionist interests without resorting to violent police attacks. As would soon become clear with deals cut by organizers at Brown, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, and other universities, the Northwestern agreement was a landmark victory against the fast-growing student movement for Palestine, which might stand a chance of living up to the name of Intifada in the heart of empire. Northwestern’s openly zionist and liberal approach to killing the movement presents a seemingly nonviolent “soft power” model of counterinsurgency that outsources the work of policing to activist collaborators with managerialist aspirations. Of course, to a belligerent zionist appetite for violence, this liberal façade of free speech tolerance proved as offensive as an invocation of armed resistance.

Victory to the Enemies

We have repeatedly asked ourselves where things went wrong and what we could have done differently. Did we botch a chance of overturning the logic of contract bargaining on the first morning before negotiators were sent out without the knowledge of the participants who had just defended themselves, their friends, and the camp? Could we have stopped the leadership clique—eager to demonstrate good faith to admin and control over the camp before the agreement was even signed—from imposing a set of rules (including “quiet hours” during the daytime) and significantly reducing its perimeter on the second day, or dismantling half of the tents and telling non-Northwestern protestors to leave on the third? What could we have done to mitigate the fearmongering that started long before the encampment even began, the paranoia manifest in the profiling, doxxing, and frisking of “suspicious-looking individuals” who were our fellow students and comrades? How could we have stopped the professors (whose real expertise was in playing carrot-and-stick) from persuading students that their only two options were to “take the deal”—celebrated as “unprecedented” and “a historic win”—or “get arrested”? Among these discrete points of failure, was there ever an opportunity to pull the emergency brake on the drive toward selling out?

We stayed till the very end, despite clear writing on the wall. We held out hope that growing discontent with the lack of transparency and authoritarian decision-making, the racist weaponization of identity to shut down dissent, and the leadership’s blatant disrespect of non-student protestors were sowing seeds of rebellion. The specter of the outside agitator, the infiltrator, the anarchist, the opportunist, the adventurist, the rumor spreader—the potentially autonomous actor that doesn’t consent to being governed but won’t go away – was continuously weaponized toward those who simply questioned the lack of democratic procedure and the strategic value of the agreement. We lost to the power the university and its junior partners wielded over the encampment as the sole guarantor of safety: safety but for Northwestern students only.

However, the rest of the world is still exposed to the ever-intensification of necropolitics. The zionist entity’s “full-fledged messianic genocide” in Gaza, intensified with the recent catastrophic invasion in the overcrowded Rafah, is being live-streamed as we write. Direct exchanges between America’s militarized police and “Israel’s finest” occupation forces, responsible for a slower “incremental genocide,” have long been kept out of the public eye by programs like Georgia State University’s GILEE. While paid cops train to repress the violent fallouts of settler colonial apartheids in Palestine and Atlanta, self-deputized student organizers and marshals in yellow vests have turned campus “liberation zones” into hyper-surveilled and micro-managed experiments in containment.

This is what the catchphrase “we keep us safe” means in today’s elite, private university, where the COVID-19 generation is conditioned by the post-George Floyd Rebellion expansion of the DEI industrial complex of a recuperative progressive identity politics—one of the most effective counterinsurgency tactics ever invented—and a demobilizing anti-sociality coded in the language of community, unity, protection, and self-care. At Northwestern—located in the suburb of Evanston, protected from the social antagonisms and police brutality that racialized working-class communities experience on the daily— one of the results is that ​​​​​​rather than shape creative, new strategies of action and organization, terms like risk and escalation have become vacuously omnipotent, as if their mere utterance automatically would summon an onslaught of violence against the most vulnerable members of a fictive collective. Rather than develop collective intelligence and confidence in response to real violence, the fantasy of threat by an omnipotent, abstract other to an intersectionally endangered self—be it by the state or the “autonomous actor”—manufactured automatic consent to de-escalation.

The Northwestern administration saw no reason to use police repression because low-level psychological warfare was enough to stamp out resistance. To be sure, the same cannot be said about the battles fought at many other encampments, but similar tendencies and techniques of control, obstruction, and collaboration have been observed nationally. If the dream of reason produces monsters, the shame that comes with the – conscious or unconscious—betrayal of the Palestinian Resistance generalizes the desire for masters—or for any that will declare the master’s victory as one’s own.

The Future of the Campus Rebellion

We write this message of warning, heartened by the rapid globalization of the Student Intifada, by the encampments, occupations, and blockades that have taken campuses and streets worldwide. We also recognize that calls for autonomous action and escalation alone cannot accomplish the work of counter-counterinsurgency. Insofar as the police retain the power to escalate, the truth that a student movement can tell—with its presumed moral innocence and deservingness of protection unafforded to other struggles—might still be limited to the spectacular images of disproportionate state and vigilante violence it provokes.

Most beleaguered sectors of society hardly need reminders of this violence that constitutes American life. Many in the global south remain ambivalent about the first-world student as a political subject, for whom police violence against their peers in sacrosanct spaces of class reproduction is far more tangible than a broadcast genocide (to say nothing of the many more years of occupation and bloodshed that precede October 7). As the student movement pushes beyond territorial models of encampment defense to accommodate more agile, more mobile forms of disruption in many locales, what will remain of the “student activist” figure in the summer, the fall, and the years to come?

While the “liberal counterinsurgency” model pioneered by Northwestern has successfully captured multiple encampments and channeled student resistance into existing institutional structures, it also appears to be a losing strategy on the national stage. Bipartisan congressional assaults on Schill and other university presidents for not cracking down hard enough on student protestors make it clear that politicians are only too eager to trump up the political cost of “nonviolence” to make it an even less popular method of campus repression. It makes for good hate-watching, but we find ourselves unwilling to derive too much enjoyment from mocking Schill’s F-rating from the ADL and Republican congresswoman Stefanik.

Without a doubt, the fallout from today’s campus battlegrounds will prove disastrous for Democrats in November, who have called for police violence against a key part of their voting base already alienated by the party’s brazen support for the genocide in Gaza. As Chicago braces for national party conventions in the coming months, we note that it is precisely through their ceaseless capitulation to an unmeetable goalpost in the hands of supposed adversaries that liberals perform some of the most essential and shoddy work of empire: the neutralization of resistance by proxy.

Divestment already sounds the limits of our existing conditions and the limits of the student movement, if we are willing to hear it. What would it take to bring about real divestment from death, to abolish necropolitical apartheid regimes anywhere and everywhere, to practice a life worth living for the liberation of Palestine? The student that surrenders prematurely has given up on work that is not yet recognized, not yet avowed—the work of becoming Palestinian, as defined by the revolutionary martyr Basil Al-Araj in his writing on the rules of war:

“Finally, every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty.”