By DYLAN EDWARD and GUS DAVIS

On April 16, two student activists were arrested in Athens, Ohio, during a protest outside the Ohio University (OU) Board of Trustees’ April meeting. These arrests came at the culmination of a year of sustained organizing by a broad coalition of student, labor, and community organizations. They also raise urgent strategic questions about how to build and sustain the movement as the campus heads into summer break.

Four fronts of resistance at Ohio University

The April 16 protest was driven by multiple, converging demands and brought together a wide array of labor, left-wing, and progressive forces, including the United Academics of Ohio University, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Ohio Student Association, Black Panther Legacy, Amnesty International, Young Democratic Socialists of America, Publius, and others.

The protest centered on four primary demands:

• Calling for disclosure of and divestment from Israel bonds

• Amplifying the student-led “ICE Off Campus” campaign

• Defending the attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, departments, and spaces in the shadow of the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act” (SB1)

•Resisting efforts to union-bust the faculty union, the United Academics of Ohio University (UAOU)

After Ohio Senate Bill 1 went into effect in June 2025—a state law aimed at undermining higher education workers and DEI initiatives—the university administration moved quickly to over-comply. In the past year alone, the administration under President Lori Stewart Gonzalez has taken sweeping action to shutter multiple centers and academic programs including the Pride Center, the Multicultural Center, Black Alumni Weekend, African American Studies, the Music Therapy program, among 32 other academic programs.

During this same time, after an overwhelming majority of nearly 800 full-time faculty voted to unionize with the AFT-AAUP, the administration initiated an aggressive union-busting campaign, including legal efforts aimed at undermining and potentially dissolving the union. These legal efforts are still ongoing, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees while the president and her senior leadership team award themselves disproportionate bonuses and faculty continue to go without raises.

While drastic measures have been taken to squash campus movements from below by Ohio’s ruling class, working-class and oppressed people in Southeast Ohio are not rolling over. There have been active steps to counteract and organize against these reactionary policies and university administration.

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions in Southeast Ohio

Earlier in the spring, Ohio University’s undergraduate student body overwhelmingly passed a referendum calling on the university to publicly disclose its financial holdings and divest from Israeli bonds. The measure emphasized transparency and accountability in the university’s investment practices. Its language was deliberately crafted to navigate Ohio Revised Code § 9.76, which prohibits public institutions from boycotting or divesting from Israel on political or moral grounds. Drawing on a prior effort that successfully pushed the Athens County Treasurer’s office to divest from Israel bonds, the referendum framed its case on economic grounds, arguing that such bonds are neither profitable nor financially sound investments.

In response to the student referendum, the university administration quickly issued a statement declaring it would “neither consider nor act upon any resolution or referendum that proposed illegal actions or exposed the university to civil liability.” Organizers rightly noted that the administration gave no indication it had even read the referendum, choosing instead to hide behind Ohio Revised Code § 9.76 as a convenient shield for its spineless inaction, rather than extending even a basic measure of respect to the student body.

Organizing against ICE in Southeast Ohio 

Over the fall and winter, as ICE carried out “Operation Buckeye” and other violent raids across the country, a network of campus-based and community organizations began strategizing how to respond to the possibility of similar operations in Southeast Ohio. This effort culminated in the formation of the Athens Safety Network, a rapid-response formation of community organizers tasked with monitoring activity and mobilizing residents in the event of an ICE presence.

Shortly thereafter, the Ohio University chapter of the Ohio Student Association (OSA) launched its “ICE Off Campus” campaign in the spring, building on strategies that had seen modest success on neighboring campuses. OSA’s campaign was premised on six key demands:

• Inform the public of the policy of Ohio University towards ICE either through email or a website page.

• Publicly state ICE is not welcome on campus.

• Refuse all data sharing with ICE that is not legally mandated; protect private information of students and staff to the fullest extent of the law.

• Treat the presence of ICE on campus as a critical emergency, in which all students will receive an “OHIO Alert” emergency alert through the established system.

• Deny ICE entry to campus buildings.

• Refuse to sign the 287(g) agreement.

 OSA’s campaign culminated in a March 31 public town hall featuring key administrators, including OU Police Chief Andrew Powers. Nearly 60 students, faculty, and community members turned out, only to watch university leadership once again throw up their hands, hide behind state laws they claimed had tied them in knots, and refuse to commit to a single student demand. At that point, the message was unmistakable: the administration would rather see international students, faculty, and immigrant workers across Southeast Ohio live under a cloud of fear than mount even the slightest resistance to the terror imposed on our communities by ICE.

Defending and expanding Black Power and other oppressed voices on campus

Parallel to the BDS and ICE-Off-Campus organizing that was underway, key organizations—including Black Panther Legacy, the Black Student Union, and others—continued resisting the rollbacks being implemented in the shadow of SB1. Arguably, this current wave of campus organizing began with a February 2025 demonstration against OU’s preemptive over-compliance with SB1, led by the Black Student Union alongside other campus organizations.

On Jan. 2, the Black Student Union released a letter calling out the administration’s inaction and over-compliance with the reactionary political program of Ohio’s state government. Then, on April 16, Black Panther Legacy, alongside several other progressive organizations, hosted an all-day sit-in and community-building event at the former Multicultural Center on campus. Much like the March 31 town hall with anti-ICE student activists, university officials responded by hosting a series of “listening sessions” with Black student organizations regarding their grievances. Ultimately, these sessions functioned as little more than superficial exercises meant to project accountability to the broader campus community while the administration continued to avoid acknowledging their own role in these attacks.

Sustaining the movement of organized labor on campus 

Bookending all of these struggles has been a multi-year organizing drive by full-time faculty at OU. Following the pandemic-era mass layoff of nearly 280 faculty, administrators, and unionized staff in 2020, faculty sought to build collective power to protect the most vulnerable among their ranks and to fight for better learning conditions in programs that have endured decades of austerity under a revolving door of executive administrators.

After nearly four years of deep, sustained faculty-to-faculty organizing, the United Academics of Ohio University (UAOU-AAUP/AFT) went public with a supermajority of union authorization cards and demanded voluntary recognition from Gonzalez’s administration. The administration summarily rejected neutrality and launched a multi-month effort that successfully excluded more than 200 faculty from the proposed bargaining unit. Nevertheless, UAOU went on to win a landslide victory in its union election with more than 80% turnout. Despite this decisive mandate, the administration has continued attempting to overturn the election through a series of lawsuits while delaying and obstructing contract negotiations for nearly a year.

By the spring of 2026, it had become increasingly clear that these were not separate fights unfolding in parallel, but interconnected fronts within a broader struggle over the future of public higher education and democratic life itself. The same administration that was arresting students, attacking DEI programs, refusing demands around ICE, repressing Palestine solidarity, and union-busting faculty was responding to a deeper political crisis far beyond Southeast Ohio. What has unfolded at Ohio University over the past year is therefore both intensely local and unmistakably global.

Repression on campus in an age of imperial decline

What is unfolding at Ohio University in Southeast Ohio cannot be understood in isolation from a broader political context. It would be an error to understand the failures of Gonzalez’s administration solely as the result of a handful of reactionary university officials. Although one may certainly argue that this is part of the problem, it would be a disservice to our movement if our power analysis began and ended there.

The political developments that have taken place at OU over the past year reflect broader transformations underway within the U.S. neoliberal order as it continues through an increasingly crisis-ridden and decadent historical phase. As global economic crises deepen, U.S. hegemony and legitimacy weakens, requiring more severe interventions abroad while simultaneously tightening their grip on popular dissent at home. Within this broader political landscape, governing institutions are increasingly being repurposed into mechanisms of control, surveillance, and repression.

To put it another way, the process of U.S. imperial decadence has both international and domestic dimensions. Internationally, this has meant escalating imperial intervention and unconditional support for genocidal wars like the one in Gaza. Domestically, this has looked like an expansion of policing powers and other repressive arms of the state through anti-immigrant terror, the criminalization of dissent, and attacks on labor, reproductive, and LGBTQIA+ rights. Public institutions that are ostensibly meant to serve the general public have been systematically repurposed into instruments of repression, control, and the management of social instability on behalf of ruling elites.

Public higher education has become one of the most salient battlegrounds in this broader transformation. Across the country, universities have become some of the primary agents of repressing popular protest, unraveling academic freedom, dismantling DEI programs, and union-busting organized labor on campus. In Ohio, Senate Bill 1 represented one of the sharpest expressions of this overarching authoritarian turn. It advanced the ruling class’s playbook for restructuring public higher education to discipline both students and faculty, further undermining any semblance of shared governance while subordinating education to austerity and corporate interests.

Of course, at Ohio University, these changes did not happen overnight, nor was SB1 the sole originator of them either. At the same time, the past year has demonstrated that resistance to this political moment is possible. Students, workers, and community members across Southeast Ohio have repeatedly refused political demoralization and passivity. The convergence of labor organizing, Palestine solidarity work, anti-ICE organizing, and struggles against racist repression on campus points toward the early formation of something larger than a series of disconnected issue campaigns. The central question now is whether these struggles can develop into a more organized, strategic, and durable movement capable not only of mobilizing resistance, but of building lasting power.

What this moment requires of our movement 

The April 16 arrests of the two campus activists should be understood as a political test for the broader campus and regional movement. Whether OU’s administration, the police, and the state are successful in isolating these activists is dependent largely on whether our movements are capable of transforming moments of repression into opportunities for broader political organization and united-front action.

For these reasons, launching a serious public defense campaign for the two activists must become an immediate priority. Such a campaign can serve not merely as a vehicle for fundraising for their legal fund and political solidarity, but more importantly as an organizing tool capable of unifying student groups, faculty, workers, and broader regional forces around shared democratic demands. Public defense campaigns historically become most effective when they move beyond symbolic outrage and instead function as vehicles for mass participation, political education, coalition-building, and sustained pressure campaigns.

At the same time, the movement must honestly assess its own weaknesses and organizational limitations. Much of the current organizing terrain remains heavily centered on mobilizing without sufficient attention to deep, long-term organizing campaigns. Actions are frequently reactive, disconnected from broader strategic campaigns, and often carried out by relatively small layers of highly committed activists rather than rooted in broad and democratically organized constituencies. While disruptive protest tactics can play an important role under certain conditions, they cannot substitute for the slow and difficult work of developing durable organizations with deep roots among ordinary students and workers.

This weakness is particularly visible in the gap between widespread dissatisfaction on campus and the relatively narrow social composition of many activist spaces. There is deep frustration among students regarding affordability, declining educational quality, political repression, economic insecurity, and the broader direction of society. There has also been a noticeable shift in public opinion around issues such as Israel’s assault on Gaza and the expansion of ICE operations. Yet much of this energy remains untapped and politically unorganized.

Bridging that gap requires prioritizing open and democratic organizing structures capable of bringing new people into struggle rather than concentrating decision-making among a relatively small layer of experienced activists. Too often, organizing infrastructure revolves around informal leadership circles with limited mechanisms for leadership development, political clarity, or mass participation. If movements are to grow beyond episodic mobilizations, they must create structures that systematically develop new organizers, deepen political education, and integrate broader layers of students and workers into active participation.

This also requires a far deeper unification between the student movement and organized labor on campus. The faculty unionization drive demonstrated that large numbers of campus workers are prepared to struggle collectively against austerity and administrative overreach. Students and workers are confronting different expressions of the same political project: the transformation of higher education into a more authoritarian, corporate, and unequal institution. A stronger alignment between labor and student organizing would significantly expand the social power and durability of resistance on campus.

Ultimately, the strategic task ahead is not simply to mobilize against each new outrage as it emerges. It is to develop democratic, militant, and deeply rooted organizations capable of contesting institutional power over the long term. The political conditions that produced the events of the past year are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The question is whether movements on campuses like Ohio University can evolve accordingly.

Photo: “End the Silence” protesters rally against Ohio Senate Bill 1 outside Peden Stadium in Athens, Ohio, Feb. 27, 2025. (Emma Reed / The Post)