NATIONAL DIRECT ACTION FOR LIBERATION

April 17, 2025 | 12pm PST, 1pm MST, 2pm CST, 3pm EST

Call for a synchronized national direct action on April 17, 2025

This April 17, we, a collective of academic workers, students, union members, and activists within multiple higher education associations and unions, trade unions, and other organizing spaces, call for a coordinated national direct action in protest of the ongoing genocide abroad and the escalating repression at home. As academic workers and students united with other labor sectors, we aim to take back public places and uplift the right to dissent and the right to collective organizing for liberation. We stand against the neoliberal and colonial logic of higher ed that represses speech and academic freedom in the US and that enables genocide, carceral tactics, and the long-running destruction of education and historical memory in Gaza and throughout Palestine.

We resist the attacks on gender, women, and sexuality studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and Middle East studies departments and programs across the U.S. While attacks on fields that emerged from social movements are not new, their intensification during the genocide in Palestine highlights the interconnectedness of necropolitical practices of the U.S. empire around the world and at “home.” As those “in the university but not of the university,” we are aware of our complicity. We know that the universities in which we work and study were built on stolen Indigenous land and with capital extracted from slave labor. We are aware that our universities continue to profit from settler colonial violence, incarceration of Black, Indigenous, trans, and immigrant people, investments in weapons manufacturing companies, and investments in companies that enable the genocide in Palestine.

Threats of cuts and attacks on academic fields that have emerged from social movements and continue to insist on the indivisibility of justice are therefore attempts to silence demands for reparation, divestment, and meaningful change. These cuts point to the failure of attempts to fully assimilate and “professionalize” departments and programs through empty gestures of inclusion and diversity as tactics of the neoliberal management of dissent. While our protest is to mourn the death of over 65,000 Palestinians and the death of “academic freedom,” we know that liberal notions of freedom are not enough. Our fight for liberation is for a world that is livable for all of us. Because we love life, we fight for it to death.

For 18+ months, we have watched as encampments across the country were violently dismantled by the police in collaboration with university and college boards and administrators. Thousands of students, academic workers, and supportive community members were beaten and arrested – some still coping with injuries and/or facing felony charges. With Columbia leading the way, higher ed decision-makers in advance of the current US administrative crackdown embraced repressive tactics and militarized their campuses, adopted authoritarian disciplinary measures, weaponized false charges of antisemitism, enacted increasingly restrictive time-place-manner restrictions on acts of dissent and protest, attacked campus unions, threatened entire fields of study, and now openly collude with ICE in the abduction of students. These escalatory restrictions on our extramural speech and academic freedom further undermine our rights to educate, organize, and speak out in solidarity with Palestinian human and political rights and liberation. As the genocide in Gaza and throughout Palestine accelerates and intensifies, the stakes of these abrogations of our rights could not be more dire.

We believe our liberation is mutual and intertwined. There can be no labor for genocide. Our resistance is not symbolic. An injury to one is an injury to all.

We recognize participants in each institution will assess capacity, risk, and precarity to determine their own level of action. We encourage coordination with all academic workers – faculty, staff, and students – and invite you and the groups with which you are affiliated to plan your action in a way that is consistent with your needs for physical safety and security of livelihood. While the actions that we pursue may vary, we affirm the power of a commitment to a timed, nation-wide direct action that unites US higher ed landscapes and builds on and toward cross-sector coalitions. Actions that you might want to consider include: wear black or red, read the manifesto, walk-out, walk-in, banner drop.

In commemoration of the beginning of the Columbia encampment on April 17, 2024 and in honor of Palestinian prisoners day, we envision April 17 as part of an arc of escalating actions for collective liberation in and beyond higher-ed. Our next major national direct action will take place on International Workers’ Day, May 1, followed by Nakba Day, May the 15th.

—National collective of academic workers, students, union members, and activists