DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA — APRIL 30, 2025
University and college administrations, in collaboration with municipalities, police departments, and influential and wealthy alumni and donors, increasingly draw on a similar playbook as they address rising independent political analysis, organizing, and action among students and workers across the country as we connect the dots in organizing on and off campus. These points include indebtedness; privatized and expensive housing, healthcare, and education; overpolicing that especially targets Black, Brown, and poor people; a eugenicist approach in policies affecting the poor, working people, the elderly and disabled; genocidal wars that serve US imperialism and the military industrial complex; racist, xenophobic campaigns that target documented and undocumented immigrants, students, scholars, and laborers; and attacks on everyone’s ability to think and express themselves freely and to dissent and organize independently.
On Wednesday, April 16, 2025, the North Carolina Central University Student Panthers planned a “speakout rally” to demand housing on the Durham, North Carolina, public campus and to protest “deplorable conditions in dorm rooms with mold, frequent flooding, cockroaches, broken appliances, overflowing garbage, and countless other issues… while paying an ever-increasing amount for this housing.” A multi-agency operation involving campus police, UNC Chapel Hill police, and Durham police encircled the location to which students had moved the rally in response to administration pressure. In an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the action, university officials had stamped the independent NCCU student group as “unauthorized” and orchestrated a competing “discussion” at which the first 100 attendees would receive “a Chick-Fil-A sandwich,” according to an Instagram post. Hundreds of students congregated at the protest nevertheless and police violently tackled, restrained, and arrested five people, “The Durham 5,” among them four NCCU students and a faculty member, charging them with misdemeanors and a felony.
Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine is outraged by the repression of students and staff at NCCU. We note that Black Durham residents in the surrounding community similarly struggle with limited, poor, and overpriced housing as they are driven out by developers and gentrification supported by the Durham City Council. We demand that all charges be dropped against The Durham 5 and that NCCU treats its students and workers with dignity and respect! We call on all to support The Durham 5 in a modest fundraiser that will help them live and fight the charges. Duke ASJP connects the disproportionate response to the NCCU protest with a worrying pattern of intensified UNC repression against students, faculty and staff that demands increased surveillance, control, and coordination with police forces ironically relying on the language of “security” after the encampments of Spring 2024. These are sure to fail attempts to quell all kinds of dissenting protest and expression, including against the Palestine liberation anti-genocide movement.
The arrest of The Durham 5 does not exist in isolation from the targeting of “The Duke 7,” a group of Duke faculty and students threatened with terminations and expulsions for a November 19, 2024 protest against the former Israeli attorney general. The Duke administration mobilized a revised “Pickets, Protests, and Demonstrations” (PPD) policy, with unprecedented draconian rules. The policy’s 1968 origins lie in the violent repression of the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, but the autumn 2024 revision goes so far as to ban all protest actions that the administration does not approve well in advance. We connect Duke’s PPD policies to longer histories of class, race, and anti-war struggles highlighted also by the brave protesters at NCCU. The unprecedented Duke 7 case demonstrates “the Palestine Exception,” or the disproportionate targeting of people associated with Palestinian identity and the anti-genocide movement. In the end, the university’s charges were a flop: the University Judicial Board hearing failed to identify specific violated policies and ruled that none of the individuals’ actions warranted punishment. These investigations were arbitrary and performative, demonstrating the extent to which the university attempts to shut down our movements and, indeed, all dissent. Duke ASJP will continue to call out the illegitimacy of such policies for what they are, and will not be deterred.
We reiterate our demand to cancel the revised PPD policies, whose purposefully vague and uneven implementation based on a recently normalized surveillance system has a chilling effect on all campus protest. In our ramped up authoritarian political climate, Duke needs to pick a side: will they cow to the bullying of donors and politicians, or will they stand with integrity against the powers that wish to destroy the fundamental mission of the university?
As part of a local, national, and world community of educators and organizers, we draw attention to demands recently articulated by “The People’s University Encampment,” established at Howard University on April 16, 2025:
● The protection of international students, and their right to be safe and have an education ● The elimination of police officers and ICE agents on campus ● Mutual aid and community care ● Anti capitalism ● Anti colonialism ● Pan Africanism ● Black Queer Feminism ● Anti Ableism ● Abolition ● Anti Imperialism ● Self Determination
Duke ASJP is moved by these demands and we continue to work for a liberated Palestine, which includes institutional forms of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, free and just communities, and universities that educate and work toward inclusion and justice–not fear, surveillance, repression, and genocide.