In April 2024, Columbia’s administration brought in the New York Police Department to dismantle the tents that had been set up by pro-Palestinian protesters occupying the university’s South Lawn. Undeterred, students at over one hundred other campuses across the United States emulated the Columbia activists’ example in the following weeks. Over a year later, colleges are facing retaliation from Trump and his cronies, who relish the opportunity to turn skirmishes in higher education into political theater. Amid all of this turmoil, Eman Abdelhadi, a Palestinian social science professor at the University of Chicago, was disinvited from giving a keynote address at a student conference at Notre Dame due to what a dean called “security and planning” issues. This excuse, as Abdelhadi pointed out in a response letter, was “flimsy” and an “insult,” especially because she had been a 2023-2024 visiting fellow at Notre Dame. No overture was made to reschedule her address for a later date. 

Alongside her scholarship on identity and attachment in Muslim American communities, Abdelhadi has played a key role in organizing faculty members to support the Palestinian solidarity movement at UChicago and extensively covered the Uncommitted Movement for In These Times. She has also coauthored, along with M. E. O’Brien, a work of speculative fiction titled Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022), reflecting her capacious intellectual and political vision. Abdelhadi spoke to us over Zoom about the fallacy of the ivory tower, the relationship between religious and political conservatism, and what it was like getting literally canceled. 

It’s been a little over a year since the university encampments emerged last spring. You were involved in supporting the students who protested at UChicago. How do you assess that movement from this vantage point? What has been its lasting impact, and where do we go from here?

The movement exposed the intense hypocrisy of universities and their role as repressive institutions in a broadly repressive system. It exposed how intertwined they are with ruling class interests, how beholden they are to donors and parents, and how unwilling they are to serve as spaces of dissent and debate. This has reminded us of the extent to which the good things that happen at universities happen in spite of them. So much of what we value about higher education comes as a result of political struggle within the university. The movement was very effective at revealing all of that and, in doing so, pushing our conversation about Palestine and about the left forward.

It also exposed the Democratic Party. In the first wave of encampments, the Democrats really committed to the idea that pro-Palestine solidarity was anti-Semitic, that it was inappropriate, and that the correct response was to shut it down. We might be tempted to think that the repression of this current moment is a result of the far right’s ascendance, unique to Trump. But the continuity between then and now shows the ways that the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment, and liberal elites across the country absolutely committed to the same logics as the far right. Then Trump took it to the next level.

The movement was really important, and the students’ radicalism helped shift our political frameworks. But it’s always hard to come to terms with people rising up under terrible conditions and doing something extraordinary, and that not having a material effect. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Palestine solidarity movement long had a mandate to change minds. We were supposed to expose the American public to the reality in Palestine. We were supposed to expose the history of the occupation, the apartheid, the genocide — and by doing so, the thinking went, we would destroy the American support for Israel that is so crucial to Israel’s continuing as it is. And we absolutely succeeded in that mission. By spring 2024, the majority of Americans disapproved of Israel’s actions in Gaza, and wanted an arms embargo. And yet I’m not sure that the movement has saved a single life, and that’s extremely sobering. It speaks to the fact that we don’t live in a democracy; the majority of the American public can think something and only a tiny sliver of politicians end up supporting it. We’ve reached the limits of what moral outrage can do without material political power backing it up.

What’s your sense of the opportunities and the challenges confronting activists in college today? Where do faculty fit in?

Students should be the radical flank of the movement; they should always set our furthest horizons. They are particularly well-suited to imposing costs through direct action, and effectively amplifying the urgency of this topic. But they’re not well-suited to long-term campus power building because they’re only on campus for a short period, and they don’t have access to the institution’s levers of power. Ideally, we would have an active student movement that sets the agenda, and faculty and staff who think about how the institution functions and how we can leverage our labor, our knowledge, and our relationships. Faculty have an enormous role to play, and I think they are largely late to the game. Many of us have built organizations basically from scratch over the last year and a half, and it’s been really impressive, but there’s a lot of work to be done. The reality is that even those who are radical and who think and write about politics for a living are surprisingly bad at actualizing political potential or building organizations. One of the difficulties of this moment broadly is that the intense urgency of the genocide can make long-term projects and goal-setting feel frivolous or distracting. But the reality is, we’ve done the urgent, big actions for a year and a half now, and we haven’t accomplished our goals. So we can’t keep thinking that the long-term work can be put off. Our movement has grown such that we can do both, if we are organized enough.

In early April, Notre Dame asked you not to give a planned speech at a student-organized conference. Lecture cancellations used to be the ultimate bête noire for critics of political correctness. Does a situation like this allow us to appeal to principles of free speech and academic freedom, and thereby recruit new allies?

I think it does have some promise. The cancellation of my speech did more for the movement than my speech would have done. It was going to be on a Saturday morning at a student conference; I’m not sure how many faculty would have attended. I would have loved to do it, and it’s a terrible thing that happened primarily to the students, as the ones who had organized the event. But everything went into an uproar. People organized around this cancellation who otherwise had not been involved. It became a rallying point.

Sometimes we on the left get in our own way by demanding ideological purity from everyone who’s organizing with us. We effectively do not have a strategy around centrists, liberals, and people who perhaps don’t yet fully see the contradictions of the systems that we operate in, but are movable. Things like this can help radicalize them, shift their perspective, and mobilize them, even if that mobilization has its limits. We will not win on our own. We will only win by creating alliances with people to the right of us. That’s true in the smaller context of the university, and in the broader context of American society. 

What’s your diagnosis of the situation in higher education across the board? What role should universities play in public life?

Universities need to be seen as public goods, as spaces that serve whole communities. Universities like UChicago are basically governed by pay-to-play boards of trustees. My colleague Gabriel Winant gave a great talk about this at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He pointed out that this place is a landlord for thousands of people. It’s a health care provider for tens of thousands of people, if not more. It’s one of the largest employers in the city of Chicago, and it owns an enormous amount of property. UChicago also has a police force that has jurisdiction over a huge swath of the city. What democratic access do people who are affected by the decisions of this institution have to the institution? None. When we think about why the average American isn’t taking to the streets to protect universities, we have to face the fact that for a lot of people, elite institutions are seen as colonizers in their local neighborhoods. What would it mean to have a university that is seen as a public good the way a public library is, even if you’re not paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to it? 

The encampments showed us a glimmer of what the university could be. Here at the University of Chicago — which is one of the stuffiest places on earth — within a matter of hours, students set up an entire society that the city poured into. Everyone could eat for free, hang out for free, access knowledge for free, pray together, sing together, dance together, do whatever together. It was such a stark contrast to what this place usually is, and an indictment of it. When I talk to working class, black Chicagoans who live in this area, they barely know what this university is called. It’s criminal, given how extractive this university has been to the black South Side.

Tell us about your involvement with the Uncommitted Movement last year. How should we think about the electoral costs of the Democratic Party’s steadfast loyalty to Israel?

Uncommitted was an example of trying to leverage whatever power we thought progressives had within the Democratic Party. It was made up of people who were, in many cases, career Democrats, including city council members. It was, I think, a worthwhile effort. It failed, or rather, it was defeated — there’s a difference. What we’re up against is so much bigger than us. 

I’ve been thinking about how electoral politics is a ladder, and we are often trying to influence the people at the top. But once they’ve gotten to the top, they’re already so enmeshed in the disgusting work that it takes to get up the ladder. We should be trying to influence those people anyway, but I think we’re not doing the work to put our people on the ladder, or to influence the people on the lower rungs. We should be pressuring local candidates, and running ones of our own. I’d like to see the phrase “progressive except for Palestine” live in the dustbin of history, so that every politician who claims a progressive base has to be openly pro-Palestinian, and any single dollar donation from AIPAC is going to lose a candidate all progressive support. We can do that on the local level in ways that we can’t by jumping up to the top of the ladder. It’s the long game. We have to do that and a cultural boycott. We have to do that and an economic boycott. We have to do that and direct action. We need a more ecumenical strategy on the left, and we need to stop pulling the rug out from under each other’s feet.

How do you read Islamophobia in the U.S. today? Is this the post-9/11 era reborn, as some have suggested, or are we seeing something new?

Islamophobia is one of the organizing principles of most Western societies and Christian societies, and is deeply tied to Christian nationalism. The story that’s being sold to people is: your parents and grandparents had better living conditions when our society was more hegemonically white supremacist, more Christian supremacist, more cis and het supremacist. And if we return to that world, then you’re going to be okay again. Muslims fit easily as an “other” in that story — as do immigrants and trans people. We can’t underestimate the degree to which Christian nationalism has, for hundreds of years, been built on Muslim and Jewish others. Jews have been incorporated into the Western civilizational narrative since the Holocaust. Israel takes advantage of that incorporation, claiming to be the outpost of Western civilization in a sea of uncivilized Arab Muslims. That logic only works because Muslims are seen as inherently barbaric. 

So, yes, Islamophobia is very real, and there are echoes of the September 11 period. But we are a very different community than we were then. A lot of Muslim organizing happened in the interim, and our institutions are much stronger. I don’t think the Democrats understood that last fall. The Democrats thought that Muslim voters would just come along because we were too scared of Trump not to. That’s not just conjecture — that’s what Biden staffers were saying. We don’t have to worry about this segment of people, because they’re not going to go to Trump, right? Democrats underestimated the degree of anger over Gaza.

There’s a lot of talk about a turn to religious conservatism in the U.S. today. The focus is usually on white Christianity and the cultural values associated with it, but your scholarship has pointed to the need to pluralize our understanding of religious conservatism. What are we missing in these conversations, and how should we understand the role of religion in this political moment?

Many people assume that religious conservatism means political conservatism, which means Republican Party loyalty. But that assumption is based on patterns among white Christians. My colleague and I published a paper in which we found that if you’re not white and Christian, your religious conservatism isn’t necessarily going to lead you to the Republican Party. For years, Muslims were allied behind the Democratic Party, and often its progressive wing. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have run as progressives, and Muslims largely supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries. Now, though, with the Democratic Party failing working class people, failing minorities, and failing religious communities, it’s not actually clear where things are going to land. It’s important for us not to assume we know what people’s leanings are, and not to effectively generalize a white Christian impulse. When we do that, we don’t do the organizing work that we can and should do to mobilize some of these more religiously conservative minority communities. 

Why do you think there has been less widespread resistance this year than during Trump’s first term? Many of the people who would seem on paper to be well positioned to oppose him — Democratic elected officials, university leaders — have instead been somewhere between ineffective and outright cooperative. 

I’ve been astounded by how deeply authoritarian our society is. For a country that defines itself on freedom, we actually have such an authoritarian set of structures. Almost every institution is governed by a small, unelected body; those people get to decide what happens, and everybody else is fucked. 

I do think there has been a lot of resistance to Trump, but it hasn’t taken the same form as it did before. A lot of the resistance that’s happening right now is based on people’s sectors. There are these smaller efforts that are still really important. But elites are not resistance actors. They go with the flow and try to minimize risk and survive. We have to wrest power back within all of these institutions so that the capitulative impulses of leadership do not determine where we go next. We need to be asking ourselves: what does winning look like? What would it look like if we won next week, next year, in five years, in ten years? And then we can work backwards from that.