Within a few days of assuming office in January 2025, Trump began a relentless assault on free speech, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and pro-Palestine activism on US campuses. Among the flurry of executive orders (EOs) issued in his first 100 days of office were those targeting “non-merit-based opportunity,” which effectively ended Civil Rights-era affirmative action policies in higher education, and those revoking visas for foreign students found to be engaging in “anti-Semitic” activities. On the latter, a fact sheet published by the White House on January 30, 2025 following Trump’s EO on anti-Semitism threatens to “deport Hamas sympathizers and revoke student visas." It warns ominously: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”
The latest detention of Columbia University alumnus Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents suggests that Trump is willing to go to extreme, unlawful, and unconstitutional measures—including forced disappearances—to silence critics of Israel. The goal is to instill fear, confusion, and panic on university campuses. On the evening of March 8, Khalil, a former graduate student of Columbia and leader in the Gaza encampment and campaign for Palestinian rights on campus, was returning to his apartment in New York City with his 8-month pregnant wife. ICE agents dressed in plain clothes cornered him and demanded his surrender. He is now being held in an ICE detention center in Louisiana as lawyers battle out this illegal arrest.
What is remarkable about this incident is that ICE agents first told Khalil that his student visa was being revoked and he was facing deportation. When Khalil told them that he is a green card holder (and his wife a US citizen), they appeared confused, shifting quickly to threatening to revoke his green card, a status that bestows US permanent residency privileges, and is not so easily revoked. The apparent ineptness of the ICE agents suggests that they were not only misinformed, but they were likely operating on the basis of misinformed, rumor-mongering rants from Trump and his MAGA-aligned social media trolls. A few days prior to his detention, Khalil reached out to his university administration, pleading that he had become fearful for his safety because of doxing and surveillance by rightwing and Zionist sympathizers on the platform X. Columbia professor, Israeli-origin Shai Davidai, previously banned on campus for harassing pro-Palestinian students, had reposted a photograph of Khalil on X on March 6 tagging Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging the Secretary to deport Khalil for his “terrorist propaganda.” It is no surprise that ICE agents showed up at Khalil’s door 48 hours later. It has to be assumed that Zionist and rightwing faculty on campus seem to have a direct line to the federal government, and are more than willing to hand their students on a platter to agents of state terror.
Liberals Paved the Way via the “Palestine Exception”
Universities tend to be thought of as bastions of free speech and critical thinking. They are often understood to be “liberal” in the sense that many departments in the humanities and social sciences embrace a progressive, inclusive, and democratic politics and ethics in their pedagogy and research. At the same time, Palestine has always served as the litmus test for western academic liberalism. “The Palestine Exception” refers to free speech, social justice, and human rights concerns extended to all areas of academic inquiry except Palestine—to all subjects except the history of the Nakba and US-backed Israeli aggression, illegal occupation, and apartheid. While Trump and Musk have certainly escalated this authoritarian repression on university campuses, the Biden administration is guilty of setting the process in motion. It was under Biden, after all, that the disingenuous equating of criticism of Israel—a rogue, genocidal state with zero accountability in international law—with anti-Semitism became formalized in institutional policies. The Biden Administration fell in line with a long history of American liberals who have punished anyone who is willing to stand up to the Palestine Exception.
Liberal academics are also notoriously conservative when it comes to critiques of capitalism, racism, and empire, choosing in many departments a reformist curriculum that tinkers at the edges: sprinkle a Black faculty here, launch a DEI committee there, and hopefully all the boxes will be checked. Sadly, this reformism is easily cooptable. DEI has now been weaponized against the very Black, Brown, Native American (barely present in universities in the first place), and queer faculty and students who were once celebrated on university campuses. It is the faculty, staff, and students of color and those who are working class, Muslim, non-binary, and queer who have most been at the frontlines of pro-Palestine protests and boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns over the past 18 months. They understand how state violence works. They know their liberation is entangled with that of others. It is these students who have therefore most been under assault. In short, in the guise of policing anti-Semitism, DEI has been repurposed by liberals under the Biden Administration to dehumanize and police the very people for which DEI was ostensibly created. This has successfully paved the way for Trump’s more naked fascism.
Corporate and Zionist Donors Drive the New McCarthyism
In the last few days, Trump announced that he is cutting $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University because of the university’s failure to clamp down on the Gaza protests. Almost immediately, the university’s rich donors and alumni celebrated the government’s decision. This seems a strange response coming from those who are supposed to have the university’s financial interests in mind. But it is not strange if you consider the enormous political power that donors, endowments, and boards of trustees wield on campuses like Columbia. Like all corporate entities, private universities are beholden to their shareholders. In Bankers in the Ivory Tower, sociologist Charlie Eaton traces the rise of elite personal interconnections between Ivy League institutions and Wall Street in the 1980s that fed the growth of new private equity and hedge funds on which university endowments increasingly depend. Over the last four decades, endowments have ballooned into the billions and become core to university governance decisions. Even public universities have turned increasingly to private philanthropy and endowments.
Wealthy trustees and donors with ties to Israel have put pressure on university presidents to discipline and suspend student activists—or risk losing donor money. Gifts to Harvard University saw a 15% drop in in the fiscal year 2024, the largest drop in donations in a decade, due to pro-Palestinian protests. At Columbia, a wealthy donor, Avi Kaner, owner of the American food retail chain, Morton Williams, redirected his donations from the university at large to its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Another anonymous pro-Israeli donor and Columbia alumnus went further, donating $260 million to Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv in 2024 as a snub to his alma mater. Bar-Ilhan University announced that it will use the generous donation for research on artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptography, among other “deep tech” research agendas, fueling the very technology that is used to police and surveil students and faculty in America. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced that the government is launching an AI-fueled "Catch and Revoke" effort to cancel the visas of foreign students who appear to support Hamas or other purportedly “terror” groups. When we follow the financial flows, when we connect the dots between wealth and universities, we can understand the disproportionate influence of corporate and Zionist donors in driving the new McCarthyism on campuses.
Students, Unions, and the AAUP Fight Back
All signs point to a bleak situation: universities are ground-zero for the Trump-Musk fascist take-over. In red states, especially the southern part of the country, entire departments and programs, such as sociology, African American studies, and critical race theory, have been dismantled by state governments. Red states have created a bogeyman out of critical race theory and its traveling companions—gender and queer theory and “radical Marxism”—blaming these theories for indoctrinating students. This is ironic, since, as mentioned, most universities are really not radical at all, and increasingly pliant to politically blunt and financially opportunistic frameworks, if not downright authoritarian diktats. There is legitimate cause for concern. Even faculty and students who are citizens are not safe from forced disappearances when they are pegged as “anti-national” or “enemies of the state”, as the stories of 20th century European and 21st century Indian fascism warn us.
But universities are also spaces of vibrant organizing and activism. Students have long been the vanguard of anti-Nazi, anti-apartheid, and anti-colonial movements. Divestment from South African apartheid offers a useful historical example. The University of California rejected calls for divestment through the 1970s. But, in 1985, responding to police crackdowns in South Africa, UC Berkeley students staged a weeklong sit-in that ended with police arresting 158 students. The police crack-down helped to propel further student action, and a year later—with political momentum finally building against apartheid across the world—the university pulled $3.1 billion from companies doing business with South Africa. Years later, when he visited the US, Nelson Mandela told students how pivotal their activism had been in bringing down the apartheid regime. It is a source of retroactive pride for universities today, of course, though many of them were against divestment at the time.
Though some Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters have been suspended or banned throughout the country, these and other student organizations and coalitions forge valiantly on. Students have also begun to recognize how important it is to fight for fair labor practices on their campuses and are supporting local unions representing dining, janitorial, administrative, and other workers. Many of these unions are also standing against ICE sweeps and deportations, the slashing of federal government jobs and welfare, and state repression. Finally, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a non-profit dedicated to the protection of academic freedom with chapters across university campuses, has also decided to stand on the right side of history. In February 2025, the AAUP successfully filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s EOs ending DEI programs. The US District Court for Maryland granted a preliminary nationwide injunction on key parts of the EOs, arguing that Trump’s orders violate constitutional provisions on free speech. The lawsuit opens with: “In the United States, there is no king.” Trump, Musk, and their cabal of oligarchs may not understand this basic principle, but universities must continue to defend it.
