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UNAM seeks to demobilize students, but protests continue

Originally published on It’s Going Down.

A short text by Camilo Ocampo, published on Pie de Página and translated by Scott Campbell, that looks at recent developments at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Since the publishing of this article, the struggle has spread throughout UNAM, with reports of five departments on “total strike” as of Wednesday, April 9, 2025. Those are Social and Political Sciences, Arts and Design, Engineering, Chemistry, and Architecture; with a partial strike in the Economy Department.

In the midst of a politically tense atmosphere within UNAM, the University Council, the highest governing body, approved a change in Article 15 of the University Tribunal Regulations, which seeks to implement the suspension or expulsion of students and academics who engage in “acts of vandalism” on the institution’s campuses, as well as those who participate in drug dealing.

Students, workers, academics and even part of the University Council warn that this measure violates the freedom to protest, given the lack of clarity distinguishing between what is considered an act of vandalism and the right to protest.

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The Campus Movement and Academic Self-Management

Originally published on It’s Going Down.

As Israel’s brutal genocide against the Palestinian people and Palestine itself continues past the 200-day mark, students around the so-called United States have risen up and are carrying out occupations and erecting encampments on their campuses. These acts are extremely inspiring, militant, and hopeful – calling to mind the campus occupations from the early aughts, the student mobilizing against the war on Vietnam in the 1960s and protests against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. Breathless blather from politicians and the media have turned what are actions against genocide into a “controversy” that deftly manages to ignore the political content of what is currently unfolding across the country. As Samuel P. Catlin notes in his exceptional essay, “The Campus Does Not Exist”:

Campus panic is a sustained note in the American public conversation; from Vietnam to Gaza, it has never let up. Reliably, every few months something happens “on campus” that the media inflates to the status of a national emergency: a speaker is invited, a speaker is disinvited, a speaker is not disinvited, a professor teaches, a student complains, a protest takes place. The media offers these incidents as scandals so fascinating and disturbing that they eclipse even a genocide.

At the front of any conversation regarding what is happening on college campuses must be an acknowledgement of what the action is in response to: an ongoing, U.S.-facilitated genocide. It seems both absurd and necessary to note that what matters above all is the genocide. Students (and some faculty and staff) are taking tangible, direct action to pressure institutions complicit in the genocide into divesting and disassociating from that most atrocious of acts. That opposition to genocide has been successfully constructed as “controversial” in this country merely demonstrates the insipid nature of what passes for public discourse and the paucity of thought contained within it.

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