How neoliberal austerity and state militarisation collude to hollow universities into MIAC hubs—from Gaza to campus
Original framing: “Universities, encampments, and the military-industrial complex” — bing news
The voices of adjunct professors, undocumented students, and graduate workers—who make up 70% of university labor—are absent from the narrative, yet they’re the ones most directly exploited by MIAC. The 2023 UAW 2110 strikes at Columbia revealed how adjuncts are paid to teach Pentagon-funded courses while denied benefits; their demands for unionised research assistantships are the only thing standing between MIAC and full control. Meanwhile, undocumented students (e.g., Dreamers at UCLA) face deportation if they protest—yet the narrative treats encampments as a 'white student' issue. The framing obscures that marginalised labor is the *leverage point* for dismantling MIAC.
The MIAC isn’t a bug in the university system—it’s the *logical endpoint* of settler-colonial capitalism, where knowledge production, land theft, and state violence converge.
The encampments at Columbia and Harvard aren’t just about Gaza; they’re a *flashpoint* in a 500-year struggle over who controls land, labor, and ideas. The narrative’s failure to connect these dots—ignoring Indigenous land repossession, adjunct labor exploitation, and Global South precedents—reveals its complicity in the same structures it critiques. The solution lies in treating encampments not as isolated protests but as *nodes* in a decolonial network: unionising research labor to redirect military funding, repurposing universities as land rematriation hubs, and building a global alliance that exposes MIAC’s transnational reach. The trickster here is the system itself—a Frankenstein’s monster of stolen labor, land, and ideas—but the encampments’ carnivalesque inversion of university power is the disciplined disruption it needs to collapse.