【by Hitomi Koyama and Anonymous Interviewee, Dec. 2025】
[This interview was conducted online on October 30, 2025. The interviewee is currently working in one of the universities on the East Coast. All names have been anonymized, and specific state names, program names, or locations have been changed.]
Hitomi Koyama (hence HK): Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for this special topic. The reason why I wanted to speak to you is because you are currently working in US higher education that is facing the impact the current administration has on campus life where protests are part of the campus culture.
Anonymous interviewee (hence AN): Yeah, so we have quite an active campus. I guess like everything is relative in a way, but having spent most of my time in the United States, I think we can say pretty decisively that after October 7th, 2023, there was a dramatic shift that happened on a lot of university campuses, and we teach at a large university. We now have a Republican governor but a democratic state legislature.
There are pockets of liberalism in America, in the American sense of it, surrounded by some pretty conservative areas. What happened because of that arrangement is that when you have a Republican governor and you work at a public university, there is a system that is equivalent to governing board of the university that determines everything from tuition to budgeting, whether the university is going to expand or shrink, decide on all matters related to promotion and tenure, so they have enormous authority and the members get appointed by the governor.
You can imagine if you know anything about the Republican Party in America, they are very pro-business entrepreneurship. So those are the kinds of people that get appointed into these seats. So that has a kind of trickle-down effect, in the sense that they are going to try to shift away from the humanities and social sciences and try to shift funding to biomedical science, research, business, and engineering.
So it is in addition to the shift away from the humanities and social science, October 7th has an effect of politicization of campuses over Palestinian activism. And those were really cracked down upon—I wouldn’t want to say this is because of the Republican governor, because I can name several states in which there are Democratic governors.
There were crackdowns on public campuses and non-public campuses. For instance, in Pennsylvania, you have a Democratic governor, and at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a private college, he basically urged the president to essentially crack down on the encampments, even though they were just sort of like, you know, very peaceful encampments. So the same thing essentially happened at my university in 2024.
There were probably around 100, 200 students in tents, signs, singing songs. It’s like, you know, very peaceful. But they were clearly in a place where they were not “authorized” to be—although when it comes down to the exact rules where one can have demonstrations and where one cannot is very vague and it has actually been created post hoc, that is, after the fact. So at the time of the crackdown, there really were no regulations, and this is a relatively politically active campus, this is a place where one is used to seeing demonstrations and protests, you have people with megaphones talking about end of days kind of stuff. It is a very vibrant and boisterous campus.
So here are these Palestinian students all wearing, you know, kufiyahs and you know, flags and but you know, being very non-violent and just basically doing their thing there in front of the library. And they were told to leave, and they refused to leave. And then three different police forces—the campus police, the city police, and also the state police all came in. And it was mayhem, absolute mayhem. Tear gas, brutality, much of it captured on camera, and several arrests. I think close to a dozen students and non-students were arrested because there are also a lot of local activists there. I was there for part of it.
We had faculty groups that were sort of monitoring the situation and trying to make sure that the students weren’t being harassed. But eventually it just became absolute mayhem, and the encampment was broken apart, and there was a really long fallout. But that wasn’t the end of organizing. If anything, it got in some way stronger.
Many of the Palestinian and Muslim students are in the social sciences and humanities program. So we wanted this to be a safe place for students that are minority, but also politically thinking. This one student group have been storing their supplies in our faculty building. We are used to seeing them almost every day and some of us are advisors to these students. So there are close ties between us teachers and students.
But one morning, there is a call from the Dean of our college, saying that these students are having a meeting about divestment, and how this meeting is held in our building. This meeting was going to be informal, only for members, in the after hours. Because this was planned after the building was closed, there was a vague rule that any student remaining in the building had to have permission from the faculty. This was a rule that has never been enforced. Because many of us know these students and know that they are responsible, there has never been any reason not to let them use this space.
So the administrator, her first reaction is what are these students up to? As if they are planning some kind of subversive attack. She asked, why are they talking about divestment? What are they planning? Who is going to be there? What are the guidelines? And you know, basically just going through this whole thing.
This was triggered because the student group wrote the program name on the flyer—and that made it appear as if the program was sponsoring it. However, what they really meant was that that is the location of the meeting. So we made that very clear. We asked the students to change the flyer to make it clear that this was just the location.
But the other thing is, you know, why can’t we sponsor an event on divestment? You know, divestment is a very established concept and something you should talk about in the social sciences and humanities program. It is definitely topical.
But the administrators did not want to look as if they were cracking down on free speech. So what they did instead was say oh, it is not about free speech, it is about the building regulation. So they found all these other reasons to justify, you know, basically putting an end.
I later found out that this whole thing happened because there is a Zionist faculty member that spends time monitoring and searching on campus events and label this as anti-Semitic. This faculty found the event and reported to the Dean, the Provost, people at the top. This also alerted local groups in the community, and they were calling and questioning the university to ask if they are hospitable to pro-Hamas movements or if this is an anti-Semitic campus.
So this is a case in point of what kind of environment we are dealing with here. The people on top are making the deep six figures, and their job is to basically toe the line and to really crack down on anything that can be seen as somewhat problematic. So it’s a very authoritarian environment. And you would hear essentially the criminalization of these students. These students did not break the law.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, on the flyer it said masks required. That is a typical thing with students on our campus. These students are very conscious. They came of age through the pandemic, and they are also smart about surveillance, you know, so they were like, wear a mask for public health and public safety reasons.
This university has an anti-masking policy that came into effect in 2024, so you can wear masks but you cannot require masks at events. If you do require masks, you must remove them if asked by any university official, including security or campus police, so that the student can be identified.
So the administrators are talking about these students as if they are just like terrorists. They are asking why would they cover their faces? What are they going to do if a security guard comes in and asks them to remove it? Are they going to fight the security guard? Are they going to cause trouble? So we responded that these students are health aware, especially the vulnerable students, they came of age during the pandemic, and that if they were asked to remove the masks they would.
The issue here is that there is an assumption on the side of the administration that the students are up to something. The students are not given a fair hearing. They are already colored in a very particular way. This is not unique to this campus, this is happening everywhere in the United States. And of course this has chilling effects, when they raise such an alarm over an innocuous thing like mask requirements. Are they going to ban all after hours meetings? Almost every campus organization meets in the evening because during the day students have classes.
These are not the only things, there has been so much harassment and disciplining of Palestinian activists here. Our program has been specifically told to not sponsor any pro-Palestine events.
HK: Do you think all of this has an impact on teaching?
AN: No, it definitely did not affect my teaching. If anything, I talked about it more. We also instituted an awareness campaign about, you know, there were rumors of ICE troops like arresting international students or apprehending international students. So we had a whole protocol in place for how we can protect our classrooms if we hear that ICE is on campus. So we were actually trying to be quite proactive about that.
In terms of course content, I haven’t heard from anyone who has changed what they are teaching, and it would obviously be very disappointing if they did, but yeah.
HK: That is encouraging to hear in a bleak time like this.
AN: Well, I mean, we’re not there yet, you know, but I wouldn’t be surprised, if again, like there is a bipartisan sort of support for these kinds of repressive moves. I mean, you saw it in Columbia. Columbia is a very heavily democratic space, and yet it became like, you know, the number one target for this whole thing about campus activism.
So yeah, there are built-in sort of safeguards in the sense of like there is not a lot of oversight in terms of what is it that we put on our syllabi. But you know, I can see the day coming. Unfortunately, I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but I can see the day coming where someone gets a tap on the shoulder and says, hey, what is this person teaching?
What has happened in these past two years has really changed the discourse in the United States, it is very much a different day right now.
HK: Do you think this would have a long term damage? Or do you think this is more of a matter of the next election cycle and you know, things switching back the moment there’s more Democrats in charge?
AN: I hesitate to talk too much about the long term, right. I mean so much has happened in just the immediate short term, everything that has changed has really been for the worse in terms of institutions. Institutions have become less protective of speech, not more. They have become more draconian and sort of paranoid.
But I would like to also think that there is more awareness now. And I think the ability to be critical of the US relationship with Israel and with Israeli policy and war has become more acceptable. It is still being severely policed, right? So we live at this really kind of mixed moment. It is hard to say where things are going to land.
So there is more surveillance, but there is also more public discourse in general. So yeah, you can surveil what faculty or students are saying, but it is not going to stop them from thinking and talking.
HK: Can you say more about this dynamic?
AN: The pressure on the campus is there, but this is also pitted against the image of what a university campus should be, and this is ultimately the one pressure point that we have. There are the powers that are pro-Zionist, militaristic, but the university as an institution cannot trade on their ability to be a university—which means to be at some level a free-thinking space. If they cease to be so, then what exactly are they offering? You know, like what? What is it that are being offered that you can’t get from, you know, just getting a degree on YouTube video?
HK: How is this impacting graduate education, especially students who are international? My sense is that most of the media is reporting about undergraduate students but less so on PhD students.
AN: It is difficult to be an international student. In the summertime these students cannot work off campus because of visa regulations, so these students are reliant on getting a summer class, but these classes do not always fill up. So if that happens, these students have to dip into savings. You could maybe try to find work in a restaurant or something, but these days with the anti-immigration crackdown this is too risky.
HK: Right, and now anything can be a cause of arrest, and even with those with green card, as it happened in Columbia. Do you think what happened in Columbia has impact on other PhD students?
AN: I imagine like if you are a PhD student, an international student, you are going nowhere near these protests, you know, I mean you know Mahmoud Khalil clearly was an exceptional kind of person.
HK: Thanks, this vividly etches out the campus environment in 2025.
AUTHORS
Hitomi Koyama is a university lecturer at the Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Hitomi Koyama is an international relations theorist working at the intersection of comparative political theory, global intellectual history, and discourses Asianism in Japanese international political thought. Her first book, On the Persistence of the Japanese History Problem: Historicism and the International Politics of History (Routledge, 2018) asks why postwar Japanese society remains caught in an impasse over atonement for its imperialist past. Her second book, tentatively titled Pacific Dementia: Japanese International Political Thought Under Pax Americana, investigates the epithet “peace dementia” [heiwa boke]—which suggests the Japanese people have become demented because of peace brought under the aegis of American protection—to what it reveals about the history of realist thought of a semi-sovereign Japan.
Interviewee, anonymous.