There are some things that we, as professors, must refuse.

There really is no choice here.

Our students are living in fear of suspension, deportation, jail, or having to find underground spaces. Our students are told the hours they can be on campus and denied access to a gym and libraries.

For all practical purposes, we are exiling them from our community. Momodou Taal, Amandla Thomas-Johnson, Bianca Wake, and many other students have, for all practical purposes, been banished from Cornell and sent off to the wilderness. And for what? Because they stood up and protested a genocide?

I have to take a moment and say that writing this, with Trump breathing down our necks, feels surreal. I have taught at Cornell for 13 years; I can categorically say this is not the university I thought I was joining.

We are turning our students into fugitives when we should be their first line of defense.

As a teacher, I do not see how we can call ourselves professors and allow our students to be arrested in our classrooms, or while driving, shopping, or walking down the street—arrested, in short, for being human.

There can be no negotiating this.

Call it our academic Hippocratic oath. Do no harm. That is a minimum of our duty as teachers. We are actively harming our students.

I mean, do we really want to be in this destructive political space? One of Trump’s executive orders reads, in part, “Immediate action will be taken by the Department of Justice to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities. The Order demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.”

It also says: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Language is everything, and we need to pay attention. Law and order, aliens, criminals, pro-Hamas aliens, and left-wing radicals, infestation. Trump is declaring an open hunting season on our students and broadly on anyone who has a political conscience.

The Cornell administration, to their credit, has said our campus police force cannot be used by ICE to detain our students. But what is needed is a hard and categorical No—a No that says we stand with our students.

I was in Kenya this January, where young people, much like our students, are being abducted or killed for speaking out. And I am old enough to remember how the government would send police to the University of Nairobi in the 1980s and 1990s. Vocal students like Karimi Nduthu were simply assassinated.

Sure, you can say that it is Kenya. But silencing political dissent does not require the crude brutality of a physically dead body to take effect. By asking our students to be quiet or else, by banning them from campus with bureaucratic efficiency, by mapping their time and geographic space, by asking them to live in fear and uncertainty, these methods are just as effective as assassination, because in all these cases, silence is the objective.

In a 1996 report, Amnesty International said it remained “concerned about these 21 human rights activists and believes that the Kenyan authorities are using the laws on sedition to restrict freedom of expression and association. The organization considers them to be prisoners of conscience.” This is exactly where we are in the US and with complicity from our universities. Our students will become prisoners of conscience if Trump has his way.

Donald Trump as a president is dangerous for everyone—even his supporters. There is no sugarcoating this by saying he was democratically elected or that the US system is stronger than Trump and will survive him. He controls the executive, legislature, and judiciary—the three branches that are supposed to provide checks and balances.

Even Adam Smith of the free market and invisible hand theories—the ideological underpinning of capitalism—would be the first to say Trump is not a nationalist capitalist. He would not even make a good fascist leader, because that requires caring about nation-building.

He is like his Kenyan counterpart William Ruto—a termite that will eat the very foundation of the country just so it is belly full—and then, it will keep eating until there is nothing left. And in Trump’s termite eyes, universities are part of his problem, our students are part of the problem. Why would we, as a university, be party to our very foundation being eaten by a glutton?

The facts are as they are. Gaza is rubble, with 45,000 dead. Most of the world agrees that it is a genocide. You could say, if you have a sense of humor or irony, that the tragic myopia in the US when it comes to Israel proves American exceptionalism.

Academia is a funny workplace. We talk about freedom and, if you are in my field, postcolonial interstices. I might as well throw in intersectional this and that. But are we doing enough to practice what we preach?

The irony. We have turned the one space where we should live what we teach into a place where silence is welcome.

We cannot use anti-Semitism as a cover for genocide. Angela Davis, in her 2025 talk at Cornell for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, titled “The Struggle for Liberation Today,” called this out—the facade of hiding oppression under the banner of anti-Semitism.

She also said, “Freedom is not a destination. It is a process.” Why would we deny our students Mandela’s long walk to freedom?

And even worse, why should we actively stand in their way?