Since Trump’s inauguration, there has been a significant uptick in political repression in the United States. Columbia University has become the center of this battle between the U.S. regime and one of the most noteworthy movements in recent history, which questioned the genocidal campaign in Palestine. Columbia’s overwhelmingly pro-Palestine student body came into confrontation with the university’s administration, which has deep ties to U.S. imperialism.
As if the administration’s true face weren’t revealed during the repression of the encampments, when former university president Minouche Shafik called the NYPD on students, recent weeks have marked a leap in administrators’ willingness to discipline students, collaborate with the NYPD and ICE, and engage in union busting. Their recent acquiescence to Trump’s demands, in order to prevent $400 million in cuts, is the latest confirmation of their “donors first” attitude.
The most striking confirmation came on March 28, when Columbia president Katrina Armstrong stepped down after less than eight months in office. This sudden resignation is widely understood to be the result of pressure from the university’s donors and the Trump administration, following Armstrong’s comments at a leaked faculty meeting in which she appeared to downplay the university’s detested agreement with the Trump administration. Even though she had publicly reaffirmed her support for Trump’s policies just days earlier, it seems that even the appearance of dissent was too much.
Armstrong’s ouster is a clear sign that the university apparatus is increasingly subordinated to the agenda of the Far Right. Any internal disagreement — even one expressed in private — can result in swift discipline, showing that loyalty to the regime’s political line is now the litmus test for leadership at elite institutions.
Claire Shipman, now the acting president, inherits a campus in crisis and will be tasked with implementing the same Trumpian measures that led to her predecessor’s downfall. Although she is being attacked by the Far Right — especially by figures like Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, who have denounced her appointment because of texts she sent calling the congressional hearings “Capitol Hill nonsense” — there’s no question where Shipman truly stands. Shipman played a leading role in the university’s disciplining of protesters during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024 and played an active role in preparing the pro-Zionist narrative to defend the university before Congress last year. Her rise to the presidency confirms that the real issue isn’t individual presidents but the university’s institutional alignment with the regime — regardless of who is in charge, the Columbia administration serves bipartisan imperialism.
As the Columbia administration has shown, there is no in-between when it comes to the interests of the broader student body and workers at the university and the interests of the regime and the donors who profit from war and repression. These basic realities are animating recent events, like the attempts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student and worker, as well as the expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union president Grant Miner, and even immigrant students like Ranjini Srinivasan and Yunseo Chung, who were targeted for their pro-Palestinian activism. More stories appear every day, and the level of repression seems unlike anything we’ve seen in the recent past — harking back to McCarthyism.
Despite this right-wing offensive, it has attracted national attention and led to a broad outcry. Mahmoud Khalil’s petition, which received millions of signatures calling for his immediate release and for the defense of democratic rights like the right to protest, made waves. This public campaign, uniting sectors of the activist vanguard and everyday defenders of free speech, likely helped thwart Trump’s attempts to deport Khalil without a trial and forced the trial to be held in New Jersey instead of Louisiana, where Khalil is being held.
More sectors are being awakened again by the current situation. As Trump and Netanyahu resume their offensive in Gaza, those who mobilized for Palestine are angered by another wave of violence. Immigrants are kept on edge by constant news stories. The trans community is also being targeted by the Trump administration. Researchers are facing cuts and censorship. And the labor movement — from public sector workers to those in higher education, who had already been rising up against their precarity in recent years — is being galvanized, now that one of the UAW’s own was expelled from Columbia right before a bargaining session for a new contract. The labor movement has been pulled into the fight, even as labor leaders like Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien express enthusiasm for Trump’s tariffs and the possibility of working alongside U.S. imperialism’s top figure.
That’s why this moment is about the students, oppressed communities, and workers who are being hit the hardest. These are not isolated incidents because Trump and his collaborators have a job to do: stoke fear and prevent class struggle. That doesn’t mean the fight is over; in many ways it’s just beginning. But how did we get here in the first place?
From Encampments to Repression
It was barely a year ago that the encampment movement was on the rise, following months of protests on the streets to denounce Palestinian oppression at the hands of Zionism and its imperialist backers. As we explained, even before the encampment movement, the movement’s potential was being curtailed by leaderships that preferred to lobby the Democratic Party rather than organize independently from it.
Rather than a pressure campaign on parties like the Democrats — who were the architects of genocide even if they called for a ceasefire in their rhetoric, the movement could have benefitted instead from the development of mass democratic spaces, such as assemblies in schools, workplaces, and communities, where the millions who took to the streets at the peak of the movement could debate and decide on demands and coordinated actions rather than being told what to do by leaders with illusions in the Democratic Party.
Even groups like the PSL, which led many of these protests, adapted to this approach by avoiding mass democratic spaces that could have fostered the independent organization of students, workers, and oppressed people. As the genocide continued, the protests seemed more symbolic than escalatory. People showed up, listened to speeches, chanted, and went home. But what was the strategy? What were the next steps? Who got to decide them?
Then came the encampment movement, which was born on Columbia’s lawn, spurred by the ongoing horrors of the genocide in Gaza and a deep sense of injustice. In many ways, the encampments were a reaction to the stagnation of the movement on the streets. Students adopted a logic of constant “escalation,” but here too the absence of democratic spaces of decision-making, paved the way for increasingly risky actions without bringing broader layers of students, workers, and community members into active, democratic participation. From our firsthand experience, we saw that while students were brave and determined, they took many actions without consulting or involving the broader student body or campus workers.
There were no mass assemblies where hundreds could debate tactics, escalate together, or organize defense. The encampments became increasingly risky without building the mass participation and legitimacy needed to sustain and expand them. The lesson? Escalation must be paired with self-organization. That’s because real escalation isn’t just about chanting more radical slogans or taking defiant action; it means taking steps that shift the balance of power — by organizing open, democratic assemblies, involving as many people as possible, and forging strategic ties with workers who have the power to shut it all down.
Take the occupation of Hind’s Hall in April 2024. In response to Columbia’s ongoing repression and complicity in genocide, a small group of students occupied the building, renaming it Hind’s Hall after a Palestinian child killed in Gaza, and issued bold demands to sever ties with war profiteers.
But despite its courage, the action was tactically isolated — carried out without mass assemblies, collective planning, or coordination with workers. This wasn’t merely a problem of a few assemblies here and there — it was a problem of not building assemblies as centers of democratic decision-making for the base. We’ve seen these exist elsewhere — from Mexico to the CUNY PSC assembly organized by the rank and file during the CCNY encampment. When built seriously, they aren’t just symbolic spaces but spaces where large sectors of the movement can genuinely take control of their own struggle.
Because Hind’s Hall was not rooted in that kind of mass participation, the administration and the state were able to move in with overwhelming force. The administration called in the NYPD, which stormed the building and arrested dozens of students. The media spectacle allowed figures like Mayor Eric Adams, Columbia’s Board of Trustees, and national Democratic politicians to frame the action as “extremist,” “antisemitic,” and “outside agitator driven.” The Democratic Party establishment seized on the moment to recast the entire movement as dangerous and illegitimate. That narrative opened the floodgates to repression — not just at Columbia but at campuses across the country.
This wave of repression didn’t originate with Trump. It came from the Democratic Party — and that’s the point. Trump is not an aberration. He is continuing what the Democrats have started and what they still support today. But he’s willing to go even further to undermine our ability to organize as workers and students for years to come.
What Is to Be Done?
We are in a very different phase now, but we can still take lessons from our recent experiences. Clearly, the encampments lit the spark at universities across the world — but we need something more sustained, more democratic, and more rooted in the masses.
We need a space where everyone who wants to fight the repression can contribute. A space for people who may not be on the front lines but still want to participate. A space that’s open and that, if built large and democratic enough, can create its own protection through strength in numbers.
Toward that goal, a democratic, open town hall open to all students, faculty, and staff at Columbia could be a first step. Who could come to this space? The overwhelming majority of students who voted yes in the recent referendum on divestment could join those already fighting campus repression, including immigrant and trans students facing attacks, as well as researchers, faculty, adjuncts, and staff who want academic freedom, no cuts, and better union contracts. All groups on campus could unite their struggles in a space like this to build collective strength and decide democratically how and for what we fight together.
A town hall like this should not be symbolic; its participants should vote on next steps, elect spokespeople, and form committees to coordinate actions based on mass agreement: walkouts, teach-ins, joint statements, petitions, mobilizations, and even political strikes.
The labor movement on campus, in particular, needs to use every tool in its arsenal to build such a space that can meaningfully fight back against the attacks. Working groups within the SWC, like the International Students Working Group and Cops Off Campus, have already organized town halls, but we need something even broader and more sustained.
We also need our unions to take seriously the necessity of democratic spaces. We call on union leaders at every level at Columbia and beyond to treat the expulsions and deportations of SWC members as what they are: union-busting attacks, and to use every tool available to mobilize members and take political action democratically. Leaders must stop paying lip service to democracy and actually build it. Otherwise, they’re enabling top-down structures that preserve the status quo.
From Repression to Resistance: Toward a Mass Movement against the Far Right
Any serious resistance on campus must recognize the fight against Columbia’s administration’s attacks as inseparable from the fight against the Far Right regime it collaborates with. In this context, our task is clear: we need to build spaces of resistance that confront both the university and the regime it serves. To combat the university’s repression, we have to fight the regime itself — because the two are working hand in hand.
This means moving beyond reacting to each attack in isolation and instead developing a clear political strategy rooted in the understanding that our struggles on campus are part of a broader fight against a reactionary regime that serves the interests of U.S. imperialism and uses repression to maintain its hegemony. While the repression is escalating and our leaderships often feel slow to channel our rage into action, recent years have shown that students and workers are ready to respond.
From Black Lives Matter to the movement for Palestine, students and workers have had experiences that have shown us how an attack on one is an attack on all. But we need a political strategy for the rank and file to confront the moment, rather than succumbing to the idea that there is nothing we can do; that the best we can do is rely on the Democrats, who paved the way for these attacks, engage in mutual aid and legal support (which are necessary but insufficient), or believe that broader sectors won’t join our fight.
Instead, we have the opportunity to give a voice to those broader sectors and unite all our struggles. This also includes uniting the fight for democratic rights, such as the right to protest and to free speech, with our struggles for divestment, for Palestinian liberation, in defense of trans folks, for immigrant rights, against budget cuts, and for SWC’s contract. Without confronting the repression and connecting it to our larger struggles, we will be condemned to surrendering our ability to mobilize.
If we can overturn Mahmoud Khalil’s conviction or reinstate Grant Miner, we show the world that when we fight, we win. Every defense of our rights — every dropped charge, every rehired worker — builds confidence in the movement.
A democratic town hall can be a first step toward coordinating immediate actions — but it must be more than that. It must help lay the foundation for a mass movement that can fight repression, confront the Far Right, and build lasting power independent of the bipartisan regime and its allies. The way forward isn’t through closed doors or symbolic gestures — it’s through unity built through mass democracy and mass action. An open, democratic town hall can bring us together, give the rank and file a voice, and chart a real strategy to win at Columbia. It can jolt our movement in the right direction and help us build the kind of movement that can not only defend itself but also go on the offensive for what we really want.