Sep 29, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min · 11 segments
Writer and professor Abdaljawad Omar joins the podcast to discuss the history, hollowing out, and lingering possibility of Birzeit University in Palestine.
As we start coming to the end of our interview here, I'm wondering the, therefore, so what? And Eli's part of a tradition that is called abolitionist university studies.
And I feel like here in the US, the answer is, therefore, we should just burn it to the ground and build something in its ashes, as the saying goes.
But part of that is founded on the assumption that Universities here in the heart of empire, their foundations are settler colonialism.
And I think there's something fundamentally different, or perhaps there's something fundamentally different about a university like Brzee.
But Eli, can you maybe set it up a little bit before? What is this strain of thought?
Yeah, thinking of universities in the United States from a kind of abolitionist perspective, we've written about how we can look at the foundations of U.S. universities in settler colonial dispossession of Native American peoples from their land and the enslavement of Native peoples and also the enslavement of African-American people using their labor for the universities themselves and using profits extracted from their stolen labor to fund the early universities.
But then also with this abolitionist perspective, we look at how those racial capitalists and settler colonial features of universities have continued beyond formal emancipation of enslaved people.
So looking at how after the Civil War, after formal emancipation, capitalism or Racial capitalist mode of production lost the kind of massive profits that it had extracted from enslaved people's labor, and so it entered a kind of crisis of accumulation needed.
Capitalism needed more new sources.
And so in thinking about universities from this kind of abolitionist perspective, we can think about how new universities after the Civil War took on new features that could help enhance capital accumulation processes.
So there's something called the Moral Land Grant Act that was a way to take resources Native American lands and use profits from the sale of those lands to fund universities and also the creation of new kinds of sciences like eugenics and racial sciences and mining and agricultural sciences through universities that are used to enhance capital accumulation within the education system itself.
New practices of differentiating the value of people's labor power, like increased uses of grading and ways of segregating people across and within labor.
Education institutions were implemented in the sorts of ways of hierarchically separating people within institutions, like tracking within schools, ways of valuing people's labor and conversely treating other people as kind of disposable, like by labeling them as dropouts and
criminalizing them.
Yeah, so that's kind of how we're thinking about the
history and present of universities in the
U.S. I'm sure there are parallels, but also crucial differences with universities in Palestine.
I
We should remember that the political and economic classes that created universities here were ones who... also were very much imaged in European and American institutions before they returned and thought about also the creation of, again, a very similar grammar.
But I would say three things about the Palestinian experience that are a bit different.
The first is that education was from the outset of this kind of idea of this historic trauma that we call that continues to this day.
This act of mass ethnic cleansing, this position, the idea that another society was capable of robbing us from our land.
And the reason for it is that the only way we can confront this challenge, this challenge of our land being taken, is that we should have a new generation of Palestinians that are also educated, that are capable of responding to the lies, to the effacements of Palestinian history, to the dominant frames to which the world is looking at us through history.
As we start coming to the end of our interview here, I'm wondering the, therefore, so what? And Eli's part of a tradition that is called abolitionist university studies.
And I feel like here in the US, the answer is, therefore, we should just burn it to the ground and build something in its ashes, as the saying goes.
But part of that is founded on the assumption that Universities here in the heart of empire, their foundations are settler colonialism.
And I think there's something fundamentally different, or perhaps there's something fundamentally different about a university like Brzee.
But Eli, can you maybe set it up a little bit before? What is this strain of thought?
Yeah, thinking of universities in the United States from a kind of abolitionist perspective, we've written about how we can look at the foundations of U.S. universities in settler colonial dispossession of Native American peoples from their land and the enslavement of Native peoples and also the enslavement of African-American people using their labor for the universities themselves and using profits extracted from their stolen labor to fund the early universities.
But then also with this abolitionist perspective, we look at how those racial capitalists and settler colonial features of universities have continued beyond formal emancipation of enslaved people.
So looking at how after the Civil War, after formal emancipation, capitalism or Racial capitalist mode of production lost the kind of massive profits that it had extracted from enslaved people's labor, and so it entered a kind of crisis of accumulation needed.
Capitalism needed more new sources.
And so in thinking about universities from this kind of abolitionist perspective, we can think about how new universities after the Civil War took on new features that could help enhance capital accumulation processes.
So there's something called the Moral Land Grant Act that was a way to take resources Native American lands and use profits from the sale of those lands to fund universities and also the creation of new kinds of sciences like eugenics and racial sciences and mining and agricultural sciences through universities that are used to enhance capital accumulation within the education system itself.
New practices of differentiating the value of people's labor power, like increased uses of grading and ways of segregating people across and within labor.
Education institutions were implemented in the sorts of ways of hierarchically separating people within institutions, like tracking within schools, ways of valuing people's labor and conversely treating other people as kind of disposable, like by labeling them as dropouts and
criminalizing them.
Yeah, so that's kind of how we're thinking about the
history and present of universities in the
U.S. I'm sure there are parallels, but also crucial differences with universities in Palestine.
I
We should remember that the political and economic classes that created universities here were ones who... also were very much imaged in European and American institutions before they returned and thought about also the creation of, again, a very similar grammar.
But I would say three things about the Palestinian experience that are a bit different.
The first is that education was from the outset of this kind of idea of this historic trauma that we call that continues to this day.
This act of mass ethnic cleansing, this position, the idea that another society was capable of robbing us from our land.
And the reason for it is that the only way we can confront this challenge, this challenge of our land being taken, is that we should have a new generation of Palestinians that are also educated, that are capable of responding to the lies, to the effacements of Palestinian history, to the dominant frames to which the world is looking at us through history.
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