BY RACHEL IDA BUFF

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I had a rough day at work on Friday for the usual reasons: administrative overreach, lack of support for the actual education work of the university. As on countless previous occasions, I left my office discouraged.

But this day was different from a thousand other Fridays on campus. On my way home, I stopped in at the UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition encampment, where there was a teach-in on “Reproductive Justice and Palestinian Mothers” and an evening Shabbat service scheduled for later in the day.

Nothing was happening yet, so I sat in a camp chair and talked to some of the people I had gotten to know over the course of the past two weeks. There was a current undergraduate student, a recent alumna and former student government leader, and an organizer with a local activist group: one of the dread “outside agitators” who, the media warns, are the true motivators of the encampment movement.

We chatted about our days and about the encampment. I complained to them about working in a university whose administration seems mostly interested in reducing costs. We discussed the destruction of universities in Gaza and how US funding of the Israeli occupation of Palestine drains monies that might otherwise be spent on education, health care, and social services.

The student pointed to the food tent, where bright blue tarps draped containers bulging with donated supplies. See, she said. this means that no one has to be hungry! We can provision unhoused people the same way the community is feeding us.

This was a conversation I would want to have in a seminar that I have yet to teach. It made it so clear that what is happening at student Gaza solidarity encampments, at UWM and around the country, is far from an invasion of outside agitators bent on manipulating students and destroying the university as we know it.

No, the encampments represent the true and best hope for the university. They are purposeful spaces of collective effort and inquiry, something that current administrative regimes at universities have at best lost track of and at worst are bent on undermining and destroying.

The encampments are zones of collaboration, invention, and spontaneous performance. They are multiracial, interfaith, queer and trans-positive. New forms of knowledge emerge from them on the daily. They are the true universities.

Unlike on campuses around the country, including UW Madison, the UWM administration exercised forbearance in deploying police against encamped students. But after the encampment at UW Madison came down late last week, the UWM administration, perhaps responsive to pressure from the UW system, began insisting on ending the encampment. After three negotiation meetings with administration over the course of a week, student leaders received an email at 8 p.m. Saturday with a final offer and a midnight deadline.

At a hastily arranged meeting Saturday night to discuss a response, I wondered: why the hurry? Pressure from system, administrative exigency, ideas about “safety,” blah blah blah. The real explanation, the source of the violence against encamped protesters around the country is that the presence of a democratic, educational space in encampments around the country reveals their typical, grievous absence on campus.

The students negotiated as best they could, winning concessions that were impossible before the encampment movement commenced in April. The resulting agreement contains administrative affirmation of support for a ceasefire in the Israeli genocide against Gaza, acknowledgement of the scholasticide, the destruction of schools, universities, and libraries taking place there, as well as important local concessions towards university divestment from support of Israel and weapons manufacture. Students took down the encampment in time for the campus to be swept clean for graduation next weekend.  It was a big win.

At this writing, I am on my last early morning security shift at the now short-lived UWM encampment, listening to local television journalists try to wrap the story. The two weeks of encampment seem both way too short, with so much more learning and teaching and organizing to do, and quite long. I find myself assuming that the encampment has been here for a long time.

Under the sidewalks, the beach!

This refrain was common to the popular uprisings of 1968 Paris, which included many students. It epitomized the revolutionary aspirations of that time and place, the sense that another world waits beneath the surface of the one that we inhabit.

In spirit, the collective adventure of a transformative, accessible university inhabited by students unburdened by debt, remains present. The encampments assert how close such a university could be.

Guest blogger Rachel Ida Buff teaches history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.