Abstract

This essay begins with the argument that the settler university is a colony. It draws on Cornell University's origin, history, and current repression of student protests in solidarity with Gaza as microcosmic settler coloniality. This unraveling moves through three episodes: the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 that enabled the founding of Cornell, the story of Emeritus Professor Benzion Netanyahu, father of current Israeli leader and war criminal, and the Gaza Solidarity encampments and protests that took place on Cornell's campus. Our intention in telling these stories is to exemplify and explain academic institutions as an extension of settler-colonial ideology and process. We center displacement in our analysis of this process, and define it as essential to the interconnected settler colonialism that persists across place and time. The ongoing genocide in Gaza guides this reflection, revealing to us the necessity of liberatory education and communalism as solutions to the rupturing crisis of the settler colony.