Today in Labor History April 23, 1968: Students took over the administration buildings at Columbia University, in New York, and shut down the university. They were protesting the Vietnam war. Today, students have are being arrested and deported for occupying parts of campus, in protest of the Israeli war on Gaza, and in support of a free Palestine. Last year, they suspended the daughter of Congressional representative Ilhan Omar, who became homeless, as a result. At the time, the ADL and rightwing Trump supporters Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton were calling for the National Guard to be deployed to college campuses. And rightwing Zionist union leader, Randi Weingarten (of the American Federation of Teachers), who shook hands with admirers of the Ukrainian fascist and antisemite Stepan Bandera in Ukraine in 2022, denounced the Columbia protesters as “antisemites.” And recently, Columbia capitulated to most of Trump’s fascistic demands, in hopes of winning back billions of dollars in funding he had withheld from the university. But Trump just kept demanding more, sending the clear message to other universities that it didn’t matter how much they bent over backwards for him, he’d still fuck with them. Consequently, Harvard and over 200 other universities have pledged to resist Trump.
https://truthout.org/articles/over-200-higher-education-institutions-pledge-to-resist-trump-attacks/