Displacement
Some thoughts on materiality and land (on campuses and in Palestine), and how economic incentives can induce dire circumstances
The incentives that induce the displacement of groups and cultures remain top of mind recently; a series of violent land use enclosures and processes first developed by settler-colonists the world over (including the United States’ iterative displacements and genocides across the Americas of Indigenous and Black communities, alongside Western Europe’s devastation of the global East and South) have allowed imperial imps to profit from pilfering and policing space while simultaneously safeguarding their accrued wealth via counter-popular technologies and repression. The convenience and capital regeneration inherent to these strategies are key to understanding how economies predicated on land and space have the potential to motivate politically oppressive action. Israel’s heightened genocidal action towards forcible removal of Palestinians from Palestine over the past week has recently been contextualized as partially related to the discovery of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil reserves just off the coast of Gaza, which Israel has just weeks ago promised to corporate bidders; these reserves would be difficult to explore/access…unless Israel planned on genocidally acting against the millions of Gazans who live on and abide the land surrounding the oil. Money makes monsters out of governing bodies, in many contexts—moving the marginalized to make more of it is par for the course.
The institutions entangled in such efforts chase the money just the same, and approach management of space in similar regards; chief among them is Massachusetts’s very own MIT (world-renowned technical institution, locally-renowned gentrifier of Kendall Square, Cambridgeport, and East Cambridge). MIT is deeply implicated in the Zionist project, holding study-abroad programs and various other legitimizing partnerships, alongside co-created financial infrastructure (like the MIT-Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund, the MIT-Israel Broshy Medical and Healthcare Fund, and the MIT-Israel Lockheed Martin Seed Fund), and various imperial tech development apertures (like MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, co-run with the United States Air Force to develop ‘national security’ technologies, and MITRE, a spin-off not-for-profit organization which maintains ties and partnerships to MIT and which runs federally funded R&D centers that focus on defense, aerospace, and telecom interests). These connections help explain MIT’s heightened opposition against pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist organizing on campus, a stance made extremely clear over the past five days.
And the last five days have been a-fucking-lot to process. Campus organizers have had to reckon with MIT’s administrational intimidations and its campus cops who seek to unfairly enforce rules and regulations upon their fiefdoms. A recent sit-in/shutdown action held on Thursday, November 9th, fell into disarray when peaceful protestors organized by MIT’s Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) were continuously harassed and violated by counterprotestors (who were unafraid to enlist MIT PD as their own personal security, shoving folks and yelling obscenities in faces before quickly calling for police to protect them). CAA-organized protestors, in exchange for their entirely peaceful responses to these aggressions, were then threatened with academic and financial retribution from MIT’s highest administrators if the original protest continued indoors. Nevertheless, folks persevered; the shutdown lasted a full 12 hours, and CAA’s shrewd operations and strategic communications brought media and legal attention which forced MIT’s administrators to walk back their threats. Many of us attended this action in on-and-off shifts; MIT PD eventually locked off the first floor of the main protest area, known as Lobby 7, to prevent personnel and remunerative relief, but this didn’t stop us from continuing to congregate and finding clever ways to offer food and water to protestors on the floor.
A question from a friend towards the end of the shutdown, as several of us gathered above the protest space to be present in solidarity (and to keep a watchful eye over the policed, enclosed lobby), became a helpful searchlight toward understanding MIT’s responses. Paraphrasing from memory, the question: “MIT is known as a space for countercultural student initiatives! People put on pranks (called hacks here) where cows and police cars end up on the dome of our main campus buildings; why aren’t these sort of actions still happening?” The answer is complicated, but familiar: MIT (as an institution) has embarked upon a campaign over the past decade to renovate, remove and/or quite literally gentrify the spaces and housing residences that fostered the counterculture MIT is known for (and markets itself upon!). Starting with Bexley Hall in 2013, then Senior House in 2017, and potentially continuing with East Campus (undergoing renovations starting this year), MIT has made a conscious and sustained effort to displace students from ‘disruptive’ housing arrangements, dorms which prided themselves on their openness to fluidity in gender presentation and sexual expression, their proclivities for stunts and hacks, their statuses as loci for leisure, and their oppositional relations to administration. MIT’s actions were a result of pressure from donors; these alternative spaces were a safe space for vulnerable populations who could coalesce and find community amidst a difficult and heavy academic experience, but these spaces also presented an uncomfortable image to conservative alumni + outside funders and they confounded expectations with lower comparative graduation rates relative to other housing arrangements. This discomfort pressed MIT admin to use the excuse of graduation rates to disband Senior House; Bexley Hall was allowed to fall into disrepair by the administration for decades (as a sort of benign neglect in practice), allowing MIT to then claim that the building was structurally unsound and needed to be demolished. No replacement housing was built to hold the campus communities which had organized themselves in Bexley or in Senior House; students and culture were displaced to appease monetary interests and protect funding, and new dorm developments arising five years later became sterilized opportunities for integration. Moreover: prior to MIT’s interventions, these buildings were all low-rent; coming renovations to East Campus will mean rising rents, and Senior House’s rebranding as a culture-less graduate dorm has also allowed MIT to exact higher dollar amounts from its students as a landlord. All of this means that we no longer have true, established homes for subversive action on campus, and this is the direct result of MIT’s intentional efforts to protect its cashflows.
These pressures from donors and funders, and the attendant image-conscious reactivity, provide context for MIT’s actions in the present: rumors spread on the day of the shutdown that Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT (and president of the MIT Corporation, which governs MIT’s endowment and land holdings), was directly pressed by donors to act hastily in threatening suspensions on protestors. I overheard concerned Zionist counter-protestors on the phone to others outside of Lobby 7, disappointed that communications to Kornbluth, to donors, and to MIT PD had not resulted in the clearing of protestors from the lobby—and yet, while they were unsuccessful in forcing students to leave that day, a teach-in which was scheduled to take place the following morning and afternoon had to be canceled as MIT locked off classrooms and placed police in front of doorways to prevent CAA from congregating on campus. This is not the first time that MIT has used aggressive policing tactics to remove people from space; the original Coalition Against Apartheid (first organized to campaign against South Africa’s hypersegregated state) erected a replica of a colonial shantytown edifice on the lawn in front of our student center in 1987, taking up space to demonstrate the need for divestment from a nation where such sights were commonplace—and MIT responded by tearing it down, calling the police, and arresting CAA members.
All of this leaves us with many questions to answer for ourselves: how do we approach movement-building, given that institutions are letting us know exactly how they plan to interact with us in physical space? What is ‘safety’ when universities threaten protestors peacefully organizing in common spaces with suspensions, when administrators make mention of campus police enforcing space restrictions with arrests? When police get in ears and faces and tell marshalls that they can’t protect protestors from being filmed for doxxing purposes by self-deputized Zionists? When MIT Admin attempts to order CAA to take its shut-down outdoors, in the midst of near-freezing rain and 40-degree temperatures, restricting speech, space, and access in one fell swoop?
Speaking on these enclosures of space is important at this stage; we as students should not at all be the center of conversations, but it’s important for us to recognize the extent of the institutional threat we face. MIT is historically well-versed and well-practiced in its methods for disrupting productive political and social use of its properties, and MIT acts in this way to protect its money, as do many other institutions that find themselves governing land. So we must be careful: Columbia University has threatened student protestors congregating in open spaces with suspensions just as MIT has. Harvard just evicted an anti-Zionist graduate student protestor from their on-campus housing days ago, and Brown University had 20 protestors arrested by police for ‘trespassing’ on its campus; Brandeis University enlisted the City of Waltham’s police department to arrest protestors after dechartering their campus’ chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
None of this is to say that we should stop; we must keep going, especially in light of these tactics (and if anything, these tactics should make clear to us that what we’re doing has the potential to be genuinely impactful).
All of this is to say: stay safe.
All power to the people; and free, free Palestine. Free the Democratic Republic of the Congo; free Sudan.
p.s. Necessary disclaimer: my views do not reflect the views of any of my employers, of any student groups/organizations, or of any of my comrades or affiliates.
p.p.s. Links:
Democracy Now Coverage of Campus Protests
Timeline of Protests at MIT on November 9th
More Reporting, from Senior House Folks