Our Campus Encampment

Dear Friends:

The semester is over. Saturday I have to get to sit for Commencement and then I’m done for real. Back in December, did I mention this?, I was asked to read the names of the graduate students graduating, which I dreaded for months and then enjoyed immensely for the 20 minutes I did it.

How it goes is I got a spreadsheet of names to practice with, most of which had phonetic spellings. At the ceremony, each student stepped on the stage and handed me a little form with their name on it, and again the phonetic spelling. (One kid handed me a torn piece of paper where he’d written ‘Justin I’d A Lot’.) I read into the mic the name I was handed, handed the paper to a student standing behind me with a large wicker basket, and reached for the next one.

It remains the best service I’ve ever done for this university in the 11 years I’ve been here. If you’ve never emceed anything, let me tell you there’s something extremely pleasurable about being the center of attention, with a microphone, and saying the name of a person who suddenly takes all the room’s attention from you.

It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being Oprah throwing new cars at her audience.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: ‘New’ Music Edition

1. Q Lazzarus, ‘Goodbye Horses’ (1988)
You know this as the song playing in that famous scene from The Silence of the Lambs:

Hard to pay attention to just how good the song is while the supposed great big fat person is luring Precious to the pit with a chickenbone, but luckily Spotify recently offered up the track in my Discover Weekly, and I heard the song itself for the first time, and doing so has made my whole month (and I’ve even got a birthday coming up). Its beauty lies in its laidback danceability and its message:

He said,
'All things pass into the night.'
And I said,
'Oh no, sir, I must say you're wrong.
I must disagree.'

It’s a song about being handed another lie that the pendulum will swing back, the tide will turn, and calling out that lie. Sometimes you can’t wait for others to turn the tide. Sometimes you need to get the fuck out. All this in 3:07, and I haven’t even gotten to the great story of how Jonathan Demme discovered Q Lazzarus. Put it on repeat:

2. Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee (2024)
If you’ve ever listened to the Better Caul Saul theme and wondered, If only this could be more shoegazer-y! and gayer!, have I got an album for you. Actually: two albums. Diamond Jubilee is the new double album from Cindy Lee, a drag rock act Wikipedia tells me isn’t shoegazer but rather hypnogogic pop? Regardless of what you call it, listening to the album feels very much like stepping into a bar/lounge in some dusty town, the kind of place David Lynch characters would stumble across but without, like, the threat of a wild-eyed man showing up any minute now. At other times, it’s the sound of driving off into any cinematic sunset. The double album is doubly great because Patrick Flegel, the guy behind Cindy Lee, has refused to put the record on streaming services; if you want it, you can download it, hypnogogically, on their Geocities site.¹ (It’s also officially on YouTube.) I’m currently in love with track 12 on album 2, ‘What’s It Going To Take’:

Our Campus Encampment

Like a lot of universities around the country, students at USF recently built an encampment at the center of campus, on what the admin calls Welch Field but I just call the Quad. Here’s how it looked last week:

As the handpainted signs hung around the encampment made clear, the students’ purpose was twofold: to get USF to stand in vocal solidarity with Palestine and call for an end to the genocide in Gaza that as of this writing has killed more than 34,000 people, the majority of them women and children; and more pointedly, to get our school to divest from companies supporting and/or directly arming Israel.

The day after the encampment was established, a couple of my colleagues messaged me asking about the climate on campus. They had seen, as likely you have seen, the images online that resemble battlegrounds, cops in full riot gear at UCLA or Columbia, buildings shut down, classes canceled. ‘It’s been very chill,’ I told them, because that’s what I’ve seen, day after day on campus.

We’re not a high-profile university. Berkeley gets all the attention for collegiate political activism in the Bay Area. But all the same, I was happy to see the encampment go up, proud of our students for taking this very visible stand against a genocide the U.S. continues to support.

I’ve written recently about how it feels to live in a void of leadership, and I’ve seen the last seven months as a failure of U.S. leadership—political and otherwise—to take seriously the interests of what’s now a majority of us. My congressperson, Nancy Pelosi, believes pro-Palestine protestors are Russian plants and called in January for the FBI to investigate. Four weeks later, a member of the U.S. armed forces set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy.

Still: no change in the top brass. In such a void of deadbeats, coming together with your peers in solidarity—taking care of each other—can do so much to heal a person. It’s like queers finding chosen families in the absence or abandonment by their birth families. The students in our encampment are finding it in, and providing it to, each other. Again, I’ve been happy to see it right outside my office window.

And I should say getting support from outside the encampment. One Sunday, on campus to grab some library books, I walked over to the encampment’s library / check-in table to identify myself as USF faculty and ask how I could best support them. Was there a way to donate funds? goods? They asked if I wanted to make art, but I said I was time and energy poor these days, but I had money to spend. So I was directed to the supply tent, where a student and faculty member were sitting on a tarp and sorting what looked like 2 dozen boxes of Tampax in a large plastic tub. ‘We’re good on supplies right now,’ one student in a keffiyeh told me. What they needed most was ice. I had a car, the nearest bodega was 2 blocks down the hill, so in 5 minutes I returned with 4 bags of ice they poured into coolers full of food folks had donated.

As I said, the main issue here is divestment, and again there’s been a dearth of good leadership. In recent months, the NY Times has given a platform to the head of a private equity firm that invests in fossil fuels to weigh on in the divestment issue (which is like asking a pharma CEO to weigh in on universal health care) and filed news reports about how millionaires will throw money tantrums if their universities divest.

The Times’s argument is that the millionaire donors who’ve long held power and sway over university operations (insisting presidents get fired, e.g.) should continue to enjoy that power, that this is some greater good that divestment threatens. And a corollary argument here is that any university—a place of faculty and students learning together—that heeds the interests of its students and faculty will fail, at least compared to those smartly run by hedge fund managers.

Amid all this comes NPR, with a piece on how divestment doesn’t really achieve its aims. Companies ‘have to’ respond to their investors, goes the reasoning, so by divesting, a university no longer has any influence, and who knows who’ll swoop in to take the sold-off investments?

The piece does say, in passing, that divestment can be a moral victory, and that’s a lot, actually. This has always been about moral victories, because the experience here in the very safe U.S. since October has been so morally degrading. The majority of the U.N. supports granting membership and rights to Palestine, but we—just by dint of living in America—have to watch our country veto vote after vote, and remain partially responsible for the deaths of journalists and aid workers, the utter destruction of universities, libraries, and hospitals.

This is powerlessness, and the most infuriating thing about these last 8 months has been watching the powerful—our president, the NY Times, millionaire donors, police in riot gear, the IDF—villainize the powerless, and direct our fears and anxieties to what they might do to our safety.

It’s Q Lazzarus all over again: sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is get the fuck out. Our students just want to wake up in the morning knowing their tuition money isn’t connected to what might be the largest injustice of their lives so far. How are they the ones we need to worry about?

Last week, developments:

An email came in from Father Fitzgerald, USF’s President, called ‘Fitz’ by many in the campus community, and not always affectionately. Fitz has blood on his hands! read one sign around our encampment. The President’s email clarified that USF was not invested in the companies students were demanding divestment from, and furthermore that we’ve long had ethical investment commitments in place (USF doesn’t invest in fossil fuels either).

The students put out a statement clarifying that with 2/3 of USF divestments protected by nondisclosure agreements, the disclose part of ‘disclose and divest’ has not yet been met. Furthermore, when students from Fossil Free USF requested a statement of USF’s financial holdings back in 2013, they found that, despite our socially responsible investment policy, USF was, indeed, invested in fossil fuels. They want the chance to give similar scrutiny to our investments.

Another email from the president came in, saying that anyone who left the encampment by 3pm Tuesday would not be receive a code of conduct violation. That was Monday of this week. Tuesday at 3pm the encampment held probably the largest rally since it went up. Nobody left. Nobody was dragged away by the cops, which many assumed would happen after Fitz’s email, after the images we’ve seen on other campuses.

At the rally, students were shouting so loudly into the mic they passed it was hard to make out their words, but the passion and anger were palpable. And, of course, the excitement. Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves, and everyone wants to end up on the ‘right side of history’. This country, our America, isn’t there. Amid that crushing feeling, our students have made a better one, together.

How will it end? Students have been invited to join a committee to assess USF’s investments starting this fall, and they seem willing to accept this, provided they have some say over its membership. So we’ll see. When it comes to getting USF to stand in solidarity with Palestine, I think there’s a long and rocky road ahead.

‘Our University stands proudly in solidarity with the Ukrainian people here and abroad,’ USF said at commencement last year.² USF stands proudly in solidarity with the Palestinian people here and abroad? This, for unclear reasons, can’t be said. Is it out of fear such would imply that USF doesn’t support Israel’s right to exist? I was cheered in this sense to read the new statement by USF’s Jewish Voices for Palestine, decrying ‘the weaponization of our Jewish identities to protect a racist, colonialist state aiming to ethnically cleanse an indigenous population in the name of Jewish nationalism.’

These last weeks, I’ve wondered what it is about this issue that has captured students’ minds so much.³ Where were USF students during Azerbaijan's ethnic cleansing of Armenians last year? Where are they now with the surge of anti-trans legislation around the U.S.? How is USF invested in the people and corporations that fund these human rights violations?

Whatever it is, this is where some of our students have been led. I stand in solidarity with Palestine because I want to, because my moral compass directs me to do so. But my standing in solidarity with Palestine is owed to the work activists and journalists have done to direct me to the immorality at hand. I’ll say unequivocally that I’ve hated my job this year, the job of being an administrator, that is. Hate—that wish for ruin and obliteration—is the thing I’ve felt most of my days. Lying dormant in me somewhere is the love for universities, what they are and what they can do, and when I look out the window at our campus encampment, I’m reminded of that love.

Dear God, let it bring me back to myself.

This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this Alf doll in ‘The Boss’ drag:

1. Scroll down past the Geocities-ness and you’ll read, ‘*THE CEO OF SPOTIFY IS A THIEF AND A WAR PIG. HE STOLE 100 MILLION EUROS FROM ROCK AND ROLLERS AND USED THE MONEY TO INVEST IN 'HELSING'. 'HELSING' IS A MILITARY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INNOVATOR.’ Hence their chosen distro mechanism.

2. Just a quick footnote to point out what expert journalistic work USF students have done to paint a much fuller picture of USF’s history of solidarity and investment than our leadership has been able (or willing) to do. All my links are just their links they’ve found.

3. Well, the U.S. is so directly involved in the genocide of Palestinians. Settler colonialism has a very long history and this is not a new issue. The displacement of of 100,000 people from their home is not as heartbreaking as the complete evisceration we’ve seen these last few months. Gazans were moved, they were targeted and killed. Their universities and libraries were blown up. Any number of reasons are available.