Elite philanthropy, neoliberal universities, and the politics of suppression: The case of the Palestine solidarity encampments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the fall of 2023, a wave of student-led protests against Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza sparked widespread solidarity encampments on North American university campuses, demanding institutional divestment and accountability. These protests were met with severe pushback from university administrations, including increased surveillance, police interventions, and restrictions on protest activities. This essay examines the critical yet understudied role of philanthropic power in shaping university responses to these movements. We argue that the donor reaction to the contemporary Palestine solidarity student movement showcases how philanthropic power is exercised within the neoliberal university to reproduce status quo politics, thus foreclosing the possibility of working toward alternative political-economic structures and institutional arrangements grounded in justice, equity, and dignity for all. By situating these events within broader trends of austerity, corporatization, anti-Palestinian racism, and the erosion of academic freedom, we show how financial precarity in universities amplifies donor influence, often at the expense of the university’s purported mission of free expression, critical thought and accountability to students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".