Cops, Colleges, and Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez ( www.blackagendareport.com )

Many of us observed this firsthand during the two-plus years of organizing and mobilizing the Cops Off Campus movement within the statewide University of California system and across North Amerika. Many of the academics—included those tenured and relatively financially secure—who publish, teach, tweet, post, and eagerly broadcast their critiques of state violence and policing were nowhere to be found when it came to supporting what i considered to be a relatively modest, contained attempt to confront campus police departments and their long histories of repression and profiling. This absence was unsurprising, but no less disappointing and enraging.

Don’t get it twisted: i’m not throwing this criticism out there with some projected threshold of “authentic” participation from these people—i’m saying that the academics i have in mind were wholly absent. Zero. These people know who they are. You know who you are. They ghosted the whole thing and wanted nothing to do with the collective work of confronting police violence on their own campuses. It was their loss, because this period of campus-based organizing and collaboration built and strengthened a continuum of relationships between scholars who were actively exceeding and contributing to the obsolescence of the “academic” position.