Student Resistance and University Repression

The Struggle for Decolonial Pedagogy and a Free Palestine

Abstract

In 1976, June Jordan penned I must become a menace to my enemies, an earth-shattering poetic letter to Agostinho Neto, president of the People’s Republic of Angola, and a still-relevant liberatory message occasioned by the violent forces of hegemony. She asks, “How many of my brothers and my sisters will they kill before I teach myself retaliation?”, issuing a clarion call for oppressed people to wake up and act amid nation-state violence. The genocidal campaign in Gaza has exposed the political theater and hypocrisy of universities whose commitments to diversity, equity, decolonization, and justice are contradicted by their silence. In this manuscript, we narrativize our experiences as students at a large public urban university who organized insurgent decolonial educational interventions within a school of education. Amid the intensifying murder of Palestinians, we demanded curricular interventions that prepare future educators to understand the long struggle for Palestinian liberation and to practice educational solidarity. Drawing on Black and Indigenous knowledge traditions, we examine how university leadership neutralized genocide as “violence in the Middle East,” criminalized student organizing, and revealed its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. We conclude by envisioning insurgent educational praxis grounded in self-determination, courageous will-building, and anti-indoctrination pedagogy across K–20 education.