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student organizing
Knowledge Is Power. Gaza War Supporters Don’t Want Students to Have Either
Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it.
Sep 05, 2024
With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.
In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.
The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnachtper day—for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC Newsreported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”
Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.
The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?
What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what—while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.
But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option—or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities.
Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweissarticle by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.
“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power—and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”
The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.
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I Learned More By Leading a Student Debt Strike Than I Did At College
After graduating from Everest College with a bad education and no job prospects in sight, I refused to pay my student loans. Now I’m helping lead the first student debt strike in America.
Aug 21, 2015
Five years ago, I was lying around the house watching Maury when a commercial for Everest College came on. I can still see the woman on my TV screen telling me how I could get a degree and go to work simultaneously.
I was lying around the house watching Maury when a commercial for Everest College came on.
I was already thinking about applying to college. It had been two years since my family and I left my Missouri hometown and moved to Los Angeles. I had dreams of becoming a successful musician, and after watching a reality show about Cheyenne Kimball, a 16-year-old girl who moved to Hollywood and released a successful album, I became obsessed. I'd been singing and writing music for a long time. I figured if she could do it, so could I.
My mom saw my determination and wanted to help me live out my dream. So, a week before I turned 18, just shy of a high school diploma, she sold our house, uprooted our family, and moved us to California. Although she was incredibly supportive, she made one thing very clear: I had two years to make something major happen before I had to go back to school.
Two years passed. I had garnered some attention from successful people in the entertainment industry, but I wasn't an overnight success. I didn't have a hit reality TV show or an album deal. I knew I wanted more, and my mom's time limit was up.
Also, music wasn't making me much money. I had to work at fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Carl's Jr. to pay my bills. I was sick of it. I wanted a career. I dreamed of starting my own business helping kids connect with music. So when the woman on the Everest commercial said enrolling would help me live up to my potential, I picked up the phone and gave them a call.
What began as a daytime TV impulse became serious really quickly. When I called I was transferred to an admission representative in my area and we spoke for more than 45 minutes. She told me all about the classes Everest offered, the network of employers the school would introduce me to, and their successful job placement program. After hearing all she had to say about Everest I told her I needed time to think and talk it over with my family and that I would call her back when I decided.
For the next two weeks the recruiter called and emailed me every day.
For the next two weeks, the recruiter called and emailed me every day. She kept saying I should come in to get a tour of the campus. Still unsure, I agreed to check it out, and enlisted my older sister for moral support. Neither of us had a car so we got on a city bus and headed for the Everest campus.
Unfortunately, we got lost and ended up the wrong school campus. Looking back on it I guess I should have seen this as a sign for more bad things to come. I called the recruiter and she picked us up and drove us to the right campus. Once we got there she said she was technically off the clock so she couldn't give us a tour. Instead we sat in her office for an hour and a half while she told us about the application process and how their financial aid system worked. She said Everest only enrolls new students twice a year, and that if I was interested I had to enroll that day to make the cutoff. Later, I learned this wasn't true.
Even though it felt a little rushed, she made the application process seem easy and was so persuasive that even my sister was convinced to register for classes. My sister and I wanted to start a business together—a record label and music camp for kids. I figured if I got a good job, I could pay off my loans in a few years and then save money to start our business.
Before we signed anything, we called our mom for advice about the financial aid forms. She was concerned, as a single mom, who knew she couldn't afford to put two kids through college. The admissions rep told her not to worry. She explained to my mom that we were getting grants and that we'd only need to take out small student loans if our grants didn't cover the full tuition.
I was 24 years old and had to pay $647.91 a month for my student loans.
In the end I never signed the financial aid documents showed to me that day. But when I saw the paperwork later there was a funny looking version of my signature on the dotted line. I wasn't sure exactly how much I was paying out of pocket until I graduated and my payment plan started. I owed $68,0000 plus interest! When I left Everest, I was 24 years old and had to pay $647.91 a month for my student loans.
"Eventually I took my degree off my resume..."
Once I had my degree--a Bachelors of Science in Business Applied Management--I began my job search. I wanted to get out of food service. I applied to places like The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, a local bank, even a position at Everest College. Most places I applied to never called to schedule an interview. Other places all but laughed in my face when they discovered what school I went to--they told me they didn't think my degree was legitimate.
And maybe it wasn't. During my time at Everest I often wondered if I was really getting the education I was promised. Once we took a "field trip" to the mall food court where my professor played video games and drank beer with us. Playing games inside the classroom was common too. One day a teacher seemed to forget their lesson plan and had us play tic-tac-toe for hours; another time a four-hour "final test" turned into a classwide Monopoly game. And my many trips to the career services office resulted in the office workers emailing me job ads from websites like Craigslist, Monster Jobs, and Career Builder.
The great job placement program they had told me about didn't exist. No one was interested in hiring someone with a degree from Everest. Eventually I took my degree off my resume because I was so embarrassed.
I owed nearly $700 a month for a degree I didn't want anyone to know about.
I began to understand that tons of people were dealing with our same problems.
Around that time, my friend Ben said he was fired from his Everest job right after graduating. This was the last straw. Ben started a campaign to fight Everest College, and began protesting on campus. I was excited to get on board.
I began holding student meetings at a nearby coffee shop. I wanted people who had been students at Everest to share their stories and discuss what we could do to hold the school accountable. We'd been told Everest had a network of employers waiting to hire us after we graduated, but our education was useless.
At first our group was just five students. But as we began to grow we became more determined to help all Everest students. I figured, if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. We called ourselves the Everest Avengers.
"Together we could actually make something happen"
Soon after we started our campaign, Debt Collective, a debt resistance group that grew out of Occupy Wall Street, contacted us. They had heard some of the complaints about Everest and had also heard about our activism. When we met with them they told us how they had recently figured out a way to buy medical debt for pennies on the dollar and abolish it. They wanted to start doing the same for student loan debt.
We were preparing to make history...
The people we met through Debt Collective also told us about how Corinthian Colleges--the group of colleges Everest belongs to--had been screwing over students across the country. Up until then I'd thought it was just my campus, but then I began to understand that tons of people were dealing with our same problems. Debt Collective helped us take our campaign to the next level. We began focusing on all the Corinthian Colleges, including Heald, WyoTech, and other Everest campuses. I was hopeful that together we could actually make something happen.
In February, our group of 15 former students went to San Francisco to meet with a team of lawyers. We were preparing to make history by announcing the first-ever student loan debt strike in the United States. We wanted to understand all the possible risks associated with that choice. The reality of what might face debt strikers—like garnished wages and possible criminal charges—seemed a little overwhelming, but we were determined to make a stand. After leaving San Francisco, we called ourselves the Corinthian 15.
The following month we were invited to speak at the Department of Education. Our group of student debt strikers had grown to become the Corinthian 100, and we were gaining some real attention. About 15 of us went out to Washington, D.C., to share our story and explain to government officials why we feel we shouldn't have to pay any of our student loan debt.
Officials in the Department of Education said they agreed with us, but offered very little direct action in helping us actually get our student loans discharged. With our team of lawyers we submitted a proposed application process for Corinthian College students to apply for their loans to be discharged. And, in the end the Department of Education did start to use a very similar system for their online loan discharge application.
It's an amazing feeling to have people looking up to me and asking me for advice.
Unfortunately, they've also worked in a loophole that prevents most students, including myself, from applying. The Department of Education requires that applicants must have been enrolled within 120 days of their college being closed. So basically they will only discharge loans for students that couldn't finish their degree. If you got a degree--like I did--that's completely useless, you're still out of luck.
So we continue to fight Everest, and anyone that says we have an obligation to pay these loans. Today we're the Corinthian 200 and counting. We're asking for all Corinthian Colleges to be shut down and for all student loans from these schools to be discharged. In my mind, these are fraudulent schools handing out bogus degrees. I don't believe I should have to pay for a useless education.
But even with all the drama this last year has been amazing. I never in a million years thought that I would get attention as a student activist. My goal was to be known as a pop star. Now I'm known as the guy who helped shape the very first student debt strike. Recently a student from another state reached out to me, and I was able to coach her through student organizing in her own area. It's an amazing feeling to have people looking up to me and asking me for advice.
I never expected that the call I made that day from my bedroom during a Maury commercial break would wind up taking me to Washington, D.C. But now that it has I'm determined to turn a bad situation into an important step in the history of student and debtor rights. I want anyone that feels trapped in student debt to know you're not alone. I want anyone who feels like the government isn't willing to help you to know you're not alone. I want anyone who isn't able to afford his or her loan payments to know you're not alone. We are all standing in solidarity.
And as for my music career, all of this media attention has inspired me to get back into the studio and write again. While I was doing press for our D.C. trip someone on the news said the Corinthian strikers should be ashamed of ourselves and called us entitled, spoiled brats. So stay tuned for my debut EP, Confessions of a Spoiled Brat this fall.
For more information, visit DebtCollective.org
You can find the title track of Hornes' EP here.
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