Protest and the Public University

Members of an encampment at a public university in New York City are on trial for felony charges. In 2024, students across the world launched encampments to challenge university financial ties to Israel in response to the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban public university system in the United States, celebrates and valorizes its long and storied history of activism. However, the administration reacted differently during the 2024 police raid on the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at its flagship campus in Harlem. Comparing the CUNY student movements of the mid-1990s and 2024, this episode asks: What are the conditions in which institutions like the university choose to repress struggles for social justice? At what point do stories of struggle become institutionally palatable? Thayer Hastings is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. He is a scholar of political anthropology, the anthropology of colonialism, and Middle East and Palestinian studies. His dissertation focuses on how everyday modes of documentation in contemporary Jerusalem, where Palestinians have to prove their presence to the Israeli state in order to maintain access to their homeland, change the way political belonging is understood. Our thanks go to Prison Radio, which published the speech Mumia Abu-Jamal gave to the CUNY encampment in April 2024. All audio samples used in this episode are from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of April 2024. These artifacts were collected and preserved by the CUNY Encampment Archive. The CUNY Digital History Archive is a rich resource that provided much crucial background information for the social movement history of CUNY activism.  * SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor.  SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library.  This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.