I could once boast that the road that wrapped around my home on Cornell’s Ithaca campus provided everything I needed to keep my mind, soul, and body intact. On the road sat a health center, gym, cinema, grocery, a place for prayer and reflection, and a winding path up the sloping lawn that led to my department. 

Then one October morning I noticed through my bedroom window that the road had hardened into a wall. I had been banned from campus and could no longer cross it. Despite being served a “non-academic suspension,” I was prohibited from working in the library or visiting my academic department. I could not attend academic events or visit my PhD supervisors. I was effectively placed under house confinement for a month and I was one of the luckier ones. My crime: protesting a career fair that featured arms companies that supply Israel with the jets and bombs it uses to carry out its genocide in Gaza. 

I and fifteen other students were suspended for opposing the wanton annihilation of a people. We reflect the will of the student body.  In March, a landslide referendum of the undergraduate student body overwhelmingly called for the university to divest from companies supporting Israel’s war, including Boeing and L3Harris, companies that attended the Statler career fair. The university had other ideas. Of the sixteen  students punished for taking part in the Statler Hall protest, three were arrested and charged; at least one was evicted from campus accommodation and another was forced to leave the university altogether. And in a high-profile case, one African-born student was threatened with effective deportation. In this last case, the university relented after a brave fight by the community and the student body. The suspensions are unprecedented and moreover embarrassing for an institution that prides itself on freedom of expression and a legacy of student protest. Indeed, freedom of expression was the 2023-2024 University Theme. The university dedicates a section of its website to the Willard-Straight takeover, the 1969 Black student campus occupation that led to the founding of the first department of Africana Studies in the U.S. 

Growing up in London, the original capital of global racial empire, under the shadow of the so-called “war on terror” helped me understand Cornell’s approach. An abiding policy of Western counter-terror policy in the post-9/11 era has been to reduce the conceptual gap between non-violent and violent forms of political expression. Think tanks, government hawks, and the mainstream media meticulously attached “extremism” and “radicalization” to the signifier of “terrorism.” (The same logic governs Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people, as it claims to go after Hamas.) According to the British government’s guidelines, “criticizing government policies,” “showing a new interest in political ideology or religion” or “expressing concerns about being victimized” are all potential waymarkers on the pathway to violent terror. All public sector workers, including midwives, teachers, social workers, psychotherapists, doctors, and train drivers were trained to spot these signs, effectively becoming the frontline of the deep state. Cage, an independent advocacy organization focused on social justice, has said that Muslims in Britain live under a “cradle-to-grave police state.” According to Ilyas Nagdee, the director of racial justice at Amnesty International UK, Britain’s counter-terror policy had a “chilling effect” on people, causing them to modify their behavior, refrain from joining campaign groups, and attend protests. 

Cornell’s surveillance eye made a similar conceptual leap linking peaceful activism to violence. Within hours of the Statler takeover, the university sent the first of a string of statements to the student body that appeared to recast an overwhelmingly peaceful protest as a near-riot, describing it as “illegal.” The following weeks saw more statements laden with violent innuendo as demonstrators were described as “menacing” and “frightening,” and were said to have “alarmed” students. “Demonstrators screamed into bullhorns and banged cymbals, pots and pans, resulting in medical complaints of potential hearing loss,” read one statement, as sound appeared to take on a physical punch.  Five of the twelve university statements sent to the student body during the fall semester dealt with the Statler takeover; a semester that also saw striking staffers bring the campus to a standstill, a student die in a gorge, and a fraternity suspended following a brutal mass sexual assault of a student. 

Cornell’s surveillance eye depended on CCTV and police bodycam footage, smartphone footage filmed by hotel staff and eyewitness accounts. The university used a Wifi geolocation system to identify us. While stopping short of accusing us of actual violence, the university nonetheless insisted that our  behavior amounted to “violent or threatening behavior” and that we were  somehow involved in “collusion or complicity.” They provided no evidence to justify these claims but only dropped the charges after lifting my suspension.  Sure, the demands of capital and the pressure from donors meant the university had to take action to crush pro-Palestine activism. They wanted to make an example out of a few visible student protestors to send a message to the student body. But in a year that saw sustained and powerful pro-Palestine protests on campus, including an encampment on the Arts Quad that lasted over two weeks, many die-ins and sit-ins in major academic buildings, vigils and lecture series, why did the university reserve its harshest punishment for the Statler takeover?

In 1992, Sylvia Wynter penned a groundbreaking essay, entitled “No Humans Involved,” following the acquittal of three Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers involved in the savage beating of Rodney King in 1991. In it, she explains the concept of the “inner eyes” and the way its biases and filters govern how we categorize our social world and determine who is worthy and unworthy of rights, privileges, and life itself. Wynter had discovered that the LAPD had marked instances of police violence against young, unemployed Black men using the acronym N.H.I.— No Humans Involved. The designation, she writes, “would have given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its members in any way they pleased.” She reported that after a spate of Black deaths at the hands of the police using a specific chokehold, an official explained away the deaths by arguing that the victims had something abnormal about their windpipes. Black males, she writes, “had to be classified and thereby treated differently from all other North Americans.” Wynter wrote “No Humans Involved” as an open letter to her colleagues at Stanford University where she was a professor. She asks, ”Why should the classifying acronym N.H.I., with its reflex anti-Black male behaviour-prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed by the judicial officers of Los Angeles, and therefore by ‘the brightest and the best’ graduates of both the professional and non-professional schools of the university system of the United States?” Addressing her Stanford colleagues, Wynter argues that academics are responsible for transferring “inner eyes” to students who will then regard “the jobless and usually school drop-out/push-out category of young Black males” as non-human. The university plays a key role in the social outcomes of N.H.I., which Wynter says are “having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means.”

While the university’s surveillance eye serves to discipline students through carceral measures applied externally, its capacity to manufacture “inner eyes” is more pernicious, operating at the depths of human consciousness. Causing students to become alive to profit and indifferent to suffering, the initiated will police their own minds to stay within predetermined political and social boundaries. Whether they go trade on Wall Street, run for electoral office, work for advertising agencies, publish books, edit newspapers, direct Hollywood films, manage budgets at the Treasury, develop AI in Silicon Valley, oversee military action at the Pentagon, work for a defense contractor, or, in the case of Rodney King, enter the police force, students will regard the world with “inner eyes” forged by their education. Ultimately, they will choose their profession based on these “inner eyes,” overlooking the implications on minoritized and racialized populations. 

But the eurocentric order of knowledge that grants “inner eyes” their form and shape has been challenged in recent years. Cornell has been at the center of that struggle. In 2020, Cornell’s Department of English was transformed into the Department of Literatures in English — one of the first universities to do so in the US. The decision, taken in the wake of the slaying of George Floyd at the hands of police , was designed to decenter England and reflect the diversity of those writing in the English language. Cornell built on efforts by Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his colleagues to “abolish the English department” at the University of Nairobi in the late 1960s, so that students were taught literature that reflected an emerging postcolonial Africa. 

As a discipline, English literature has its roots in colonial India. Colonialists introduced Chaucer and Shakespeare to fashion the “inner eyes” of Indians holding fast to their Hindu and Muslim traditions. Britain’s intentions were crudely summed up in 1835 by Thomas Babington Macaulay, a British politician serving in colonial India. The British wanted to produce “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” Macaulay wrote.

Wynter reminds us that the movements that sought to alter the order of knowledge emerged at times of political upheaval, coupling theory and praxis. Again, Cornell’s switch to a Department of Literatures in English emerged as protests swept the United States and globally following the killing of George Floyd. Wynter’s letter, penned in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the acquittals, also makes a call for  “a new intellectual order of knowledge.” Similarly, the founding of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell in 1969 emerged at the height of the Black Power Movement in the US and the anticolonial movement abroad. While the Black freedom struggle contested colonial and institutional structures across Africa and the diaspora, Africana set out to challenge the systems of knowledge that continued to further Western interests at the expense of the colonized billions  — the “wretched of the earth,” to use Frantz Fanon’s term.  For Wynter, Africana, also known as Black Studies, was eventually co-opted into the “mainstream of the very order of knowledge whose ‘truth’… it had arisen to contest.” However, from Africana flowed other fields questioning systems of power, inequality and oppression, including gender studies, Chicano/a Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Queer Studies. This era also saw the growth of postcolonial studies and other critical approaches to the humanities and social sciences. Could the wave of pro-Palestine protests also bring about a challenge to the order of knowledge?

One morning, as I struggled up a hill on Cornell’s campus, I struck up a conversation with an undergraduate student studying computer science. When I told him that I was a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English, he scoffed. “What you gonna do with that?” I smiled without letting on that the same thought was running through my head about him. He could not see how I could make money; I could not see how he could make a difference.  

The encounter was a stark reminder that the Western university has moved from a knowledge-centric to a career-centric education. This has come amid increasing enrollment and higher fees resulting from the marketization of higher education. Today, integrated internships, cooperative education programs, and “career readiness” have become all the craze while corporations now help design curricula. Where once upon a time the question of what you will do with your degree was to learn it is now to get a job. The university has gone from a marketplace of ideas to a marketplace. It has become a career fair. 

The Statler takeover intervened at the moment a student shook the hand of a potential employer and dared to dream of a handsome salary and a life of relative comfort in the richest country on earth, with little regard for the consequences on the most downtrodden. It occurred at the transactional moment, the split-second when the career fair university consummates its promise to its student customers. 

The clamor of anti-genocide slogans, of blaring bullhorns and of clanging pots and pans, may have caused a very different kind of violence from what Cornell led us to believe. It set out to maim the “inner eyes” fashioned by the university and nurture new ones.  “Inner eyes” through which students can cast a scrutinizing gaze back at their university and understand their advantageous positionality in the world. Ones used to regard the “the wretched of the earth” as deserving of equal rights and dignity. “Inner eyes” that may impel them to action.  

The historic protests that have engulfed US campuses since Israel amped up its long onslaught of the Palestinian people following October 7th have called into question the very purpose of the Western university and the moral foundations of the Western world order itself. Systems of knowledge have been called into question as “people’s universities” sprung up on quads all over the country with demands for critical university courses and reading groups on imperialism, racial capitalism, and settler-colonialism soar. For the most part universities, including Cornell, have been unswerving in their fidelity to Euro-American supremacy and its concomitant system of knowledge — playing into the hands of a new administration that wants to gut what remains of progressive thought at universities. If the founding of Africana amid the tumult of the 1960s is anything to go by, Cornell has not always made enemies out of student activists. However, Cornell’s draconian response to the Statler takeover offers a portal into its worst fears:

The protestors have unwittingly hit a raw, vital nerve. They dared to challenge the very foundation of the university. They had poked Cornell in the eye.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a PhD candidate at Cornell and writes about Global Blackness. Previously, he worked as a reporter based in Dakar. He supports Tottenham Hotspur and dreams of drinking mint tea in Palestine.

Thumbnail photo by Edwin Adrade via Unsplash.

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