The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got a very special episode for you guys. And we’re talking about the work, life, and legacy of a very special person, the late great Barbara Ehrenreich. 25 years ago this year, Barbara published what is still to this day one of the most essential and impactful books about working class life in America ever. And the book is called Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. And if you listen to this show, then chances are you’ve probably heard of it or you may have already read it.

But if you haven’t read it yet, and if you haven’t dug into Barbara’s incredible body of work, then frankly, I kind of envy you because you have a feast before you, a feast for your mind, your heart, and for your soul. And to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed, the Nation Magazine just published a really beautiful and vital forum with folks from around the worlds of labor and journalism testifying to the enduring power and relevance of Barbara Aaron Reich’s work today. As author and friend of the show, Alyssa Cort writes in that forum, “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled.” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork, Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague as we created a media organization, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

To recap, for that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside Restaurants, and a Walmart worker all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul. It’s hard to underestimate the effect nickel and dimes vacuum cleaner’s eye view of what it means to work a minimum wage job in this country had on so many of us. For those blinded by America’s late 20th century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop unseen low wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taking care of a child already knew, but had perhaps not articulated that there is no such thing as “unskilled work.” As Barbara wrote, “The working poor, as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk, freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, all paid hourly and shabbily, see themselves more clearly as being on a continuum with other working people.

Now, we’ve linked to the Nation Forum commemorating Barbara Ehrenreich and the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed in the show notes for this episode. And you should definitely go read it when you have some time. And it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that you should really, really go read Nickel and Dimed. And hopefully by the end of today’s episode, you’ll see why. There’s really so much that I want to say and could say here about Barbara Ahrenreich, but to keep it short and sweet, I’m just going to say this. I never had the honor of meeting or knowing Barbara personally, but I know that I would not be here doing the work that I do on this podcast, on the Real News Network and beyond without her. Her work has inspired generations of working class journalists and non-traditional storytellers just like me.

Her advocacy and institution building has made it more possible for people like us to have places to publish our work and for working class stories and voices to be heard. And I am so grateful to Barbara for that and to all who carry on her beautiful vital legacy today. And I am so grateful to all of our amazing guests on the show today who are doing just that. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Deirdre English:

I’m Deirdre English. I’ve written three feminist and class-conscious books with Barbara Ehrenreich, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley.

Alissa Quart:

I’m Alissa Quart. I created the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara. I’m a journalist and a poet. I’ve written seven books and edited one anthology. My last book was called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. And the one before that was Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.

Ann Larson:

Hi, my name is Anne Larson. I’m the author of Cleanup on Aisle five: Essential Work: Poverty Wages and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. I’m a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my intellectual and journalistic heroes and mentors.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is an honor to be chatting with all three of you, and all three of you are my journalistic heroes, and I think you are all living testaments of the incredible legacy of the incredible Barbara Erin Reich. And I wanted to start by asking more about that. Whether you got to know her in person or through your work, tell us and our listeners more about Barbara and what she and her work have meant to you.

Deirdre English:

I got to know Barbara because we were both on the faculty of an experimental radical college called the College at Old Westbury with a mission of social justice and a very multiracial student body and teaching staff. And we taught women’s studies courses together, some of the first back in the ’70s, and then we spent seven years writing three different books together. Perhaps the one I’ll mention is called For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expert’s Advice to Women, which is about the impact of health and mental health professionals on creating stereotypes about women based on gender, class, and race, and helping to authorize those stereotypes to make them seem as though they were scientifically based and authoritative. So Barbara and I were really more than friends and coworkers. We were really sisters. I lived in the same house with her for periods of time.

I’m the godmother, or as she called me, the goddess mother of her two children who I am still very close to and who are remarkable testaments to Barbara’s influence too. Her kids are both extraordinary writers and activists. I’ve had a lifelong relationship with Barbara and profoundly influenced by her. She influenced. And then when I was at Mother Jones, I became her editor and she had a column. She did a cover story on one of her books, and she was a frequent advisor. And then finally with the founding, we’ll be talking about Nickel and Dimed and that whole period. But then with the founding of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I certainly consulted with her then, and now I continue that role with Alyssa by being on the board. And so Barbara’s just had a profound lifelong impact on my thinking and my commitments. So

Maximillian Alvarez:

Deirdre, I got to ask from one editor to another, going from friend to editor is not an easy transition to make, especially when you’re editing Barbara Ehrenreich. How was that transition for you guys?

Deirdre English:

Pretty smooth because Barbara was such a great writer. It’s actually the best writers who are the easiest to edit. They get the big picture and they get back in the day when we had a paper publication before it was digital, sometimes you just have to cut for space and the professionals know how to do that. So no, no, no, we never had any arguments. But I’ll just say one more thing though. An editor should always remember that the piece belongs to the writer. So your role is to help the writer, not to impose yourself on the writer. So throw that in too.

Ann Larson:

I never met Barbara Ehrenreich, but I read Nickel and Dimed pretty soon after it came out. And I think I was the graduate student at that time, maybe my first year in graduate school. And this was 25 years ago, this was still sort of end of history type era. We just had Bill Clinton for eight years, and there was this sense that everything had worked out how it was supposed to work out. Capitalism was great. It had defeated all the other alternatives, and everybody got what they deserved in life. If you worked hard, you could succeed. And meritocracy was the name of the game. And so Nickel and Dimed just sort of punctured that myth so profoundly and so completely that it was so necessary at that time. I taught the book or portions of the book in a class I was teaching at the time as a graduate student.

And I remember being struck by how funny it was that students that I taught, we were reading these about poverty and low wages and living in motel rooms and cleaning shit out of toilets, and yet we’re all just laughing and hooting and hollering through the whole thing. And I just remember thinking, “What an amazing writer that you could write about these topics that are so dark, and yet we’re all laughing the whole way through.” I just think that’s a very rare talent that she had. And then we can talk about this a little bit more, but at that time I was a graduate student. I was planning on a career in academia. The idea of service work was not something that I worried about for myself, though I had come from a working class background. But a few years later, I found myself working in a supermarket.

And I remember thinking about nickel and dimed and seeing it differently once I’m doing the service work and a line from the book, I hadn’t read it in several years at that point, but I remembered a line from the book. I’m working behind the cash register and I’m tired and it’s weeks and weeks and I’m struggling to learn the job. And Barbara Arenak’s voice popped into my head and it said, “What you don’t necessarily realize when you’re selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” And I just thought how apt that was and how accurate it was that she’d really captured that I was now living, I was now experiencing. And so that influenced me and made me think I should write about this job because Barbara did it. She sort of forged a path for me.

Alissa Quart:

I read it when it came out in 2001, but my favorite book by far was Fear Falling. So I had been introduced to her earlier than that. I had been, like Ann, at CUNY Grad Center in English and Sociology and had been adjuncting. It was the introduction for me to what I would later call the middle precarious, this kind of precarious middle class where we were making, I don’t remember what it was, Anne, it was 2,000, $3,000 a class, and we were somehow supposed to also go to graduate school. So I started to see after I read Nickel and Dime, a continuum for the first time between my own experience as a kind of unstably middle-class person and the people around me who were serving food and taking out the garbage and making people’s beds in hotels. And I saw the connection, which I think had been purposely obfuscated by third wave Democrats, which is part of what Anne was saying also.

And I too had gotten lost in the aestheticism of the ’90s in its attitudes, in its stances. It was a very alluring decade for Generation X people who were into alternative culture. You could just lose yourself in Sleeter Kinney or something and in poetics and theory and get disconnected from the experience of class even when you yourself were living it. So what it was, it was both a reminder and a form of self-knowledge reading it because I suddenly was like, “Wow, my time here adjuncting at Kingsborough Community College where people are screaming at me and I can’t afford my rent even in the East Village is being stolen in a way.” And so I actually wound up dropping out of graduate school for better or worse as a result. And then years later, obviously I met her. I was working on a film called The Last Clinic, which is about the clinic at the Center of the Dobbs case in Mississippi, women’s health.

And I was the producer and the writer with the great director, Macy Crow, and I was raising money from Barbara. And I called her and it was unbelievable. I was sitting in the middle of a magazine office. She said, “Hi, Alyssa.” And she starts talking about Jane, which I believe she had firsthand experience with. And I just was like, “My God.” I mean, I fell in love, I think. I felt like I had finally found not just a mentor, but family, a mother of sorts, a spouse of sorts, a place where I belonged as a person, but also as a mind and a kind of politics, which in journalism is hard to find, let’s be frank. This is not a field filled with activists or unusual poetic people or people who are incredibly moral. And she was all those things. And also as a woman, she was incredibly generous to other women, and we can talk more about that.

I feel like she didn’t have some of the conventional gender identifications of a lot of boomer women who might see themselves as internalized masculinity and all this kind of stuff. She really was about women and about encouraging women. I mean, she had a lot of male friends and male colleagues and men in her life. But I think she wasn’t competitive and defensive in a gendered way, which really set her apart, honestly. So after this love match, I started working for her at the Economic Hardship Reporting, and she insisted we call each other co-editors, which of course was a marketing person’s nightmare. She’s like, “We have an anarchist socialist nonprofit.” I was like, “Okay, but I better not share this with our funders. Flat hierarchies.” I was like, “Okay.” But I knew also that this was the only way I could actually do this was with somebody like this.

And the idea of our organization was to fund people who were truly working class and fund people like she and I who were journalists who wanted to write entirely about income inequality and no longer had the resources. So actually, yeah, Max, you were one of the people I encountered early on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, baby. I mean, like I said, we are all in some way or fashion living proof of Barbara’s incredible legacy, and that includes me and this show. I mean, not only would I not be doing this work, there wouldn’t be a market for this work without someone like Barbara. And on top of that, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has sponsored episodes of the show. They’ve connected us to folks that we’ve interviewed on this show. It’s an incredible, incredible organization and legacy that you and Barbara built from the ground up. And it’s touched so many of us and helped tell so many of our stories. And I think I’m honored to be in the struggle with all of you to carry that legacy forward however we can. But I want to go backward again because I think you guys have really touched on something that is super important for folks to understand about Nickel and Dimed itself and everything in it because you can’t understand it just by reading it today.

You have to understand who we were and where we were at the time that it was published. And it was published in 2001 and written in a turn of the millennium America that feels so incredibly far away today in many respects. I mean, I was still a teenager then. I was a conservative, middle-class, dipshit, mixed race kid in Orange County in Southern California who still didn’t really know a whole lot about life and who had no idea how bad things were going to get over the next 25 years. I identify with the stories that y’all were telling because when this book came out, my family was part of the middle class in that post-Cold War boom. And then we lost our middle-class status in the post – 2008 crash Great Recession, including the house that I was raised in. And so I read the book very differently later on in life than I would have had I picked it up in 2001.

So I want to really take listeners back to that time. And I wanted to ask if you could say more about who you were then, what the country was like then, and what working in America was like then.

Deirdre English:

Barbara never bought into the boom myth. I think that certainly throughout the Reagan years, which were the 1980s, Barbara was continuously aware that wages were still stagnant for the working class. The postwar boom really ended by the ’80s, and the boom was for the business elite and corporations, and it was Reagan deregulation. And then moving forward a little bit in time, Barbara never fell in with the Clintons. And in fact, a lot of her concern with poverty came about because during Clinton’s regime, the push to eliminate welfare, welfare as we know it, and to force women mothers into jobs to justify their welfare payments, that was actually the impetus of writing nickeled and dimed. I was actually part of a group with Barbara that I think was called the Committee of 100. It was 100 feminists who were protesting Clinton-esque welfare reform, and we failed to stop it.

And then Barbara was left with the question, well, what is actually going to happen to these working women who are being pushed off welfare and into the workforce? And so if that’s supposed to be the answer, get a job. Let me go out and look and see whether you can support yourself on a low wage job. And that was the genesis of nickel and dimed. So that would be some part of my answer to your question.

Ann Larson:

I mentioned earlier this idea of the end of history and the meritocracy had went out and everything was as. We were in the best of all possible worlds and how nickel and dime sort of punctured that myth. I do think also one of the things that I remember from that period is this kind of looking back, it seems like we were all living in this myth, in this kind of dream world, and our feet weren’t really on the ground in a way. I really thought I was going to get a job in academia and be a professor. I mean, I think about that now, given my background and the fact that I went to CUNY and I studied English, and that was never going to happen. That was always a failed venture. But I believed it. I got on that path and people told me it was going to work out.

If you work hard, it’s all going to work out. And so one of the things that I think nickel and dimed does is it not only punctures the myth, and I’m talking more about Barbara’s work in general, books like Fear of Falling and Natural Causes. She wanted to see the world as it really is, not how we wish it would be. She was really a critic of delusion in all its forms. And this goes from in Bait and Switch, she talks about the myth that just by updating your personality or getting a new wardrobe is going to be the key to a new job. Or in another book that she wrote, kind of busting the myth that positive thinking can cure breast cancer. She sort of refused to succumb to that kind of thinking. She was really insistent on science, on evidence, on rational thinking.

And even in one of the last books she wrote, if not the last, she wrote about these mystical experiences that she had as a young person that sort of hinted at something supernatural beyond the realm that we live in every day. But even that didn’t change her mind about the fundamental class divide in the world and the fundamental reality that we live in. And I just find this very inspiring. To me, it’s a very kind of socialist way of thinking without. Barbara didn’t wear her socialism on her sleeve. She wasn’t out there pounding the gavel. What she showed is a way of looking at the world in a concrete and material way and an insistence that we not be diluted about how things really are. And that way of thinking, that really grounded concrete way of thinking is the foundation for political change.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah, I love that, Ann. When I think about what was going on in 2001, I mean there’d be a terrorist attack six months after Nickel and Dime came out, World Trade Center buildings falling, killing over 3,000 people. There’s the Enron scandal. There’s all those accounting crises. And Wikipedia launched that year and kind of a notion of unskilled expertise, which I think is important too, because she was really pushing in nickel and dime for rethinking what unskilled labor was. And I think the knots had a complex relationship with what skilled and unskilled labor was, especially thinking work, what had to be done by amateurs and what could be done by professionals. And I also think one of the things that was interesting about that time, not just this forcing us to see what the Democrats, the centrist Democrats were masking with the end of AFPC and so forth.

It was also a moment when people could publish these kind of books. Which is less and less common. I mean, Anne, who’s on this panel, just did. I do. A few other people do, you do Max. But I think there was a time when No Logo was a bestseller, Fast Food Nation, Michael Paulin’s early books. And these were mega sellers, as was Nickel and Dimed. There was an audience for them. And there was also a real hot critique of commercialism and a lot of these factors. I mean, my first book branded The Buying and Selling of Teenagers was in this vein. And I do see Nickel and Dimed as part of that as a kind of materialist account. The years that transpired after the Forever War would say, oh, do we have the energy to worry about the consumer economy and labor? Shouldn’t we be worried about the threat against our nation?

There was all these different enemies that have been constructed since then. But it was pretty clear in that ’90s knots period, even though it was being masked, that those were the polls. It was like this flushed consumer economy that rested on the backs of workers, that rested on the brainwashing of teenagers to buy shit, that rested on people being fed terrible meals, supersize me, and Michael Moore’s films were about that. So I think that’s part of the scene that I think of. And I also think of just the level of consumerism in that time. You can’t even imagine. It was very go-go before there was a crash.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s what I remember. I mean now it’s like I tell my daughter, it’s like, yeah, that was the era of what I would call free range capitalism, where we were allowed to run around as consumers and stretch our legs a little more. We had a little more buying power. And the consumer felt like an important thing in the economy, whether you were going to a restaurant or staying at a hotel. It felt like you could still vote with your wallet as the proverb goes. That we still had some power to determine what the economy looked like and get what we could from it. We could still make enough to earn a good living. Like Ann was saying, our feet weren’t even really touching the ground. But that bubble burst for me at least after 2008. And in the years that have followed, I feel like I’ve only come to see more and more what Barbara saw back then that me and my family couldn’t.

Because when we heard about worker issues like that, we saw them as consumers. And we saw them as, well, I’m the fast food consumer going in paying for my meal, or I’m the student going to get an education. Why is it my job to care about the employee on the other side? They should be doing their job kind of thing.That was such a prevalent way of thinking in America and sure as hell in conservative, middle-class, Orange County, California. But again, that really came crashing down for me and for so many of us over the next 25 years. And frankly, reading Nickel and Dimed in the America, in the world that we’ve got here and now in 2026 is quite a trip. And I wanted to ask y’all, why do you think it is still important for folks to read Nickel and Dimed and Barbara’s work in general today?

What can her work still teach us now? Or what has it been trying to teach us for years that we still haven’t learned but really need to?

Deirdre English:

Well, the economic pain has spread. And I think that Alissa really was speaking directly to that when talking about the middle-class precariot and the fact that a middle-class way of life has become increasingly unaffordable to the working class and to large parts of the middle class. I mean, of course in America, everybody thinks they’re middle-class, so it becomes very hard to talk about class for that reason. But basically the great increase in unaffordability since first the enormous crash of 2008 that wiped out so much value and showed that all that home ownership was based on a bubble economics, and then the rise of the forever war, so absorbing so much of our economy in military spending. So we’ve just seen so many social failures during this period of time. And I just want to also mention that the rise of what you were talking about, the consumer economy is also the rise of the service economy from the worker point of view.

And that was a big shift in the working class because it was largely women who got those service jobs, as Anne has written about so brilliantly in her book about grocery store work. I mean, obviously there are men working in grocery stores too, but the “opportunities for women that are often blamed on feminism,” like that feminists encourage women to go into the workforce. Well, no, economics forced women into the workforce. Feminism tried to make circumstances better for them. I don’t think we’ve succeeded. But Barbara was just very aware in nickel and dime, those are all jobs of women workers in the service economy. And so that was really burgeoning while the kind of extractive industries were all being outsourced and technology was coming in and absorbing a lot of those kinds of jobs. So Barbara was just so aware of the shifts in demographics and economic policy and economic reality so that she always saw under the surface of what people thought was going on to what was really going on.

Alissa Quart:

I sometimes see her as sort of like an ultra violet light, like forensic dusting where we can see things that we wouldn’t otherwise see. I love what you just said. That was so smart, Deirdre, and about the consumer economy being a service economy being female. And when we’ve been assigning Looking at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the pieces we assigned were people who have taken low wage work writing about what it’s like inside of that, including Anne, but also Joseph Williams, Danelle Alexander, Daryl Wellington, a bunch of other people. And that to me was part of what Barbara also wanted to do towards the end of her life was she didn’t want to just be the sort of co-pastoral woman underground, my man Godfrey, I’m going to go into the supermarket in a mask and become the worker. It was like she wanted to hire the person who had actually been that, who was a writer and a reporter and an active mind who could name and wasn’t doing it as a stunt.

And I think that to me, that was part of the understanding of the line between journalist and practitioner that started to expand in the knots when experts in amateur started to blend a little more. Publications like The Global Post started assigned to local reporters rather than to have white dudes fly in to cover shit. And I think she was doing the domestic version of that. Let’s not have people parachute in. Let’s have people write from their own place. And I followed that to the letter. I mean, I just thought it was really important. And also having people who could think critically. Anne here is such a great mind and you really are. And she can interpret a lot of the things that she was experiencing structurally. And that’s another thing that Barbara was really interested in.

Ann Larson:

Just wanted to note that one of the things I’m thinking about hearing this conversation is that Barbara was a baby boomer. And I don’t know, that seems important. Somehow we have this whole, hey boomer where we make fun of the boomers, God love them.

Deirdre English:

Okay, boomer.

Ann Larson:

Right, that they’re just like these clueless. And there’s some truth to it. They grew up in this time where there was more opportunity and you get education and it’s going to work out for you. And there was room for upward mobility in a lot of cases thanks to government investment and public goods. And we all know what the French call the tant glory is, these 30 years after World War II when working class was making gains. And so for Barbara to be in that generation and yet recognize all the things that people on this panel are talking about and just see through that mythology and to see, as Deirdre put it, what was under the surface, I think we should pause on how extraordinary that is. I mean, I think one of the reasons that was the case is because she had working class roots herself.

I grew up in Montana and I believe her dad was a minor. But then her dad, if I’m remembering correctly, ended up becoming an executive. He advanced in his career and ended up leaving the mines and became something of a professional. And so she got to see this upper mobility, this transformation. But it wasn’t just that she had a really good memory for that period of her life when she’d been working class, but she really just, she saw welfare being cut. As Alyssa mentioned, she saw what was happening to aid to families with dependent children. She saw free trade agreements sending jobs overseas and that expanding the service economy that she wrote about. And so it wasn’t just a good memory, although that was part of it. She just never lost her talent for recognizing the way the material world was the foundation for what was happening in people’s lives.

And in terms of what’s changed, I mean, I think there’s no better example of what stayed the same than the minimum wage has been stuck at 725 since 2009 or something like this. I mean, this is something out of just the dystopian universe that we have not raised the minimum wage since 2009. And I just think Barbara saw that this was the way things were going. And she was able to see not only through this and of the mythology that we’ve described, but even in her own generation, in which so many people had a different experience, and even in her own experience, her own family kind of crawled out of the working class. She still stayed true to her vision and to herself. And I think that’s very rare.

Deirdre English:

We baby boomers, we came of age in the ’60s and there was a vast movement to be a part of. And Barbara and I were both very much a part of it. The anti-war movement where I really came of age in my college days doing that and worked on two documentaries about the anti-war movement, about anti-war Vietnam, and working with Vietnam vets. And then the women’s movement that Barbara and I both really kind of shared our journey into that world and into what was missing in the women’s movement and what was missing in the labor movement, which was a lack of feminist consciousness and on the left. So all of those, there was this big thing, the movement, and we felt very much a part of it, supported by it, buoyed by it, but also the productive arguments that happened within it. And so Barbara wasn’t a lone figure, she was a standout figure, but I think she always felt part of a much larger community and with multifaceted elements in it from the labor movement, from the women’s movement, and many others.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important to note, like you just said, she didn’t see a different distinction between advocacy and journalism, like that thick line that we’ve been taught in J schools for decades, the voice of God and NPR and neutrality and all the major newspapers. She thought it was really important to bring the movements into writing. And that I hope is also another part of her legacy. And honestly, I mean, look at the DSA. I mean, she was the first co-chair with Michael Harrington. So it’s not just what she’s done as a writer or what she’s done institutionally, it’s politically. And I think that is also a legacy within journalism to not forget politics on that level.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully and powerfully put. And it really reminds me of Barbara and the rare writers and people who see and fight and write the way that she did, have taught me ever since. Like y’all said, you don’t necessarily need to see the world through socialist goggles, but once you stop seeing them through the kind of capitalist goggles that are welded to our eyes from birth, then you start seeing things how they really are and you become a socialist real quick. So that’s what it was for me is I was so conditioned for so long to see the country I lived in a certain way. And it was a massive financial crash that taught me otherwise. It was our government bailing out the banks and big corporations while families like mine fell through the drain that taught me that. It was working on a warehouse and factory floors with people I had been taught to say were dumb and deserved to be in those jobs because they couldn’t do anything else.

And here I was with a degree from the University of Chicago doing the exact same job in 2010. I mean, life taught me a lot of what capitalism and America tried to keep from me for many years. And Barbara taught me a lot more about that. And I was so grateful when I kind of lost that innocence, that American innocence of realizing the world and the country that I actually did live in, instead of believing I lived in the fiction that had been presented to me. I was so grateful to have a book like Nickel and Dimed to help guide me from that point to a greater consciousness and to more answers and to more hope about what can be done about this for families like mine, for people like me, for the hundreds of people and workers that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years, their families.

I’m so, so grateful to Barbara, to Nickel and Dimed for all that they have helped provide me in my long sort of recovery from the hangover of the capitalist fiction that I and my family had lived under for the first half of my life. And I wanted to sort of turn that into our final question here because I could talk to y’all for hours, but I know I have to let you go soon. And I wanted us to sort of finish by talking about the legacy of Barbara Ahrenreich herself and of course her work, including Nickel and Dimed, whose 25th anniversary we are celebrating this year. And so I want to frame the question this way. We now have the benefit of hindsight to see in our past what we frankly could not see coming in the future that lay before us 25 years ago.

With our life experience and with all the lessons that Barbara Ehrenreich has taught us, what wisdom can we offer through the gift of foresight to ourselves today with everything that we’re facing and to our descendants 25 years from now?

Deirdre English:

Well, I mean, I would say Barbara actually foresaw herself the advent of AI on middle-class jobs. And she actually very presciently wrote in an essay in Time Magazine that I haven’t read since it came out, but it struck me so much at the time that maybe the middle class was soon going to be facing the downward mobility that the working class was experiencing. And that when the robots came, when technology came for writing jobs, journalism jobs, teaching jobs, white collar jobs, the way it was already coming for so many working class jobs, definitely factory jobs, that maybe the middle class would wake up and understand their commonality, which Alyssa has been speaking to and which Alyssa is very alive to talking about the precariot. Maybe they would begin to understand that the bosses were not their friends and that the scraps that they were getting from the owner’s table were getting less and less and that they would begin to experience a sense of unity and class consciousness and fighting spirit.

And so that’s happening. It’s going to accelerate. And one hopes that what will also accelerate is what Barbara called for, which is that unity and oppositional spirit.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah, I’m hoping for this unity. And I’ve been talking to people about how they’re affording America. I wrote a book called Squeeze Why Of Families Can’t Afford America almost 10 years ago now. And I’ve been returning to some of those topics because it seems very of the moment, the middle precarious. And what startles me is people saying things like middle-class people, people who earn six figures saying things like, “I don’t feel like America likes me.” And just that emotionalism of that, I feel like that is where this kind of emotional politics is going to start, where people feel like they’re part of a gradient, a range of class positions that are being kept down by people who are manufacturing insecurity for really the 99%. And that concept is no longer just pablem, but it’s something that people actually live and vote by and connect to each other around.

Ann Larson:

I’ll just end by, I really want to emphasize something Deirdre just said, which strikes me as really important about movements. I think just one generation after Barbara as a Gen Xer, I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement. It was like all individuals who were working hard and trying to make it work in the professional class or whatever. And I think what Barbara would want us to do is rebuild these movements that used to serve as a foundation for social action, for thinking, for camaraderie, for solidarity. I’m also the co-founder of an organization called the Debt Collective that is trying to organize the debtors to bring some sense of community and collective strength to people that are drowning in debt. It’s why I’m so proud to be part of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project where I think the organization publishes people that are writing as part of movements, that they see journalism, like Alyssa just said, is not just something that you should be objective and talk about facts, but as part of a movement building work.

And to me, this is, I think, a real key to. We can’t think of individuals. You can do your best as an individualism, but there’s a limit there unless you have a movement behind you, unless you have a culture that supports the kind of thinking and work that Barbara did and that we should all be trying to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the great Deirdre English, Alissa Quart, and Ann Larson. I also want to thank the Nation Magazine and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for all the vital work that they do and for helping us put this special episode together. Go check them out, subscribe and support them using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and rest in power, Barbara Ehrenreich. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Two years ago at the height of Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, we witnessed one of the most widespread waves of college campus protests in this country since the Vietnam War. Student-led Palestine solidarity encampments exploded from Columbia University in New York to UCLA to right here in Baltimore. And as we’ve been covering continuously here at The Real News, what we’ve seen since then has been a harrowing assault on free speech and the right to protest from the federal government and Zionist organizations. And we’ve also seen universities themselves, private and public, ramp up their own internal surveillance and repression machines and weaponize them against their own students, grad students, and faculty. Life, learning, and activism on America’s college campuses looks very different today. And today we’re talking with a number of student organizers across our home state of Maryland about how they are adapting their tactics today to continue their struggle to end the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and to hold supporters and enablers of the genocide accountable, including their own universities.

And I am really grateful to be joined today by four students from different institutions across the University System of Maryland who are all also organizers with the USM Divestment Coalition. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Khadeeja:

Hi everyone. We’re so excited to be here today and grateful for the opportunity to share a little bit about what the University System of Maryland Divestment Coalition does. My name is Khadeeja. I’m a student within the USM system. I’m also a member of the USM Divestment Coalition and I’m a former member of UMBCSJP. The USM Divestment Coalition is an organizing body of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members of the USM and the broader Maryland community organizing for the end of our university system’s complicity in violating Palestinian human rights and upholding the settler Zionist state. Hey

Zyad:

Everyone. We’re really grateful to be here. My name is Zyad and I’m one of the members of the USM Diveston Coalition and a former member of the UMDSJP. I got involved with the coalition after we at UMD finally had successfully achieved a divestment win via our referendum in the student government elections, which over 3,000 students voted in favor for calling UMD to divest from companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine. The university refused to take action on this. However, we knew that the power of divestment was really at the USM level and recognized this led to where we are today with multiple USM schools part of the coalition.

Mohammad:

Yeah. Hi, my name is Mohammad. I’m also a student at the University of Maryland College Park, involved in the SJP. Don’t want to reiterate what Zyad said too much, but similarly, we saw that there was only so much we could do at the school level. We’ve been meeting with our school administration for years and they would always just point their fingers and say, “Hey, we don’t have power over divesting the USM’s $2 billion endowment from weapons manufacturers and companies enabling the genocide in Palestine.” So yeah, that’s why we got involved just to shift the pressure onto the people who actually have decision-making power and to hopefully shift all of our activism back to gain back the momentum that we had during the encampments and actually start negotiating with the people that have the power to divest rather than just screaming it into a vacuum.

Fi:

My name is Fi. I am Towson YDSA’s incoming co-chair. I’m a Towson University student, and I got involved with the USM Divestment Coalition following a teach-in that they had at our university.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is incredible to have you all here on the same call together. And I wanted to ask if y’all could just explain a little bit more for our listeners what this Divestment Coalition is, how it came to be, and how you personally got involved in it.

Khadeeja:

Yeah, so I was actually one of the founding members of this Divestment Coalition around two years ago, post-October 2023. A few of us started attending Board of Regents meetings to clarify how the university system of Maryland structure works. Essentially, there’s 12 Maryland public state universities, and they’re governed by one body, which is called the Board of Regents. And these are 21 governor-appointed individuals. So they’re not elected and they’re not necessarily paid for their positions by the state, although we can kind of elaborate further on how they benefit from the structure later. But essentially, they sit above the president. So most people think that university presidents actually control all university operations, but the presidents merely form one of multiple advisory councils to this Board of Regents that ultimately have final say. And these Board of Regents also govern over a $2 billion pooled endowment that is shared between all the schools.

So essentially in that first year, post-October 2023, a few of us started attending Board of Regents meetings and speaking during the public comment portion. And in the past year, we have done a lot of outreach and organized much more with Towson and UMD students. And we’ve developed a lot more internally and externally with a social media presence, as well as developing internal and external goals, increasing our presence at board meetings, and really built up a dedicated organizing body overall.

Fi:

I do want to say one small thing. Although this coalition has sort of united around the issue of Palestine, and that will always remain the core goal is liberation of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. Divestment from weapons manufacturing is an issue that has much broader implications with other imperialist struggles in the world. In countries such as the Philippines, weaponry manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a corporation that the university does a lot of business with, has sort of been used to target certain student activists that have done work in the Philippines, humanitarian work in the Philippines, which I think we’re going to elaborate on more. But divestment is an issue that has very wide-reaching implications, and we are fighting for freedom for colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk a bit more about that and what the USM Divestment Coalition does and why. From the organizing and advocating that y’all are doing on a week-to-week campus-to-campus basis to these larger actions and campaigns like the People’s Tribunal that y’all held earlier this year. Tell us more about what this coalition does and tell us how your universities have responded to the coalition and your demands.

Mohammad:

So I was talking before about how the divestment movement has been around on USM campuses for over a decade now. There have been huge pushes. I have friends who are around now who used to come to these divestment meetings urging the USM to divest from Israel back when they were in middle school. So it’s been going on for a while, but during the encampments era, it escalated and we got to the point where the university couldn’t ignore, or at least not entirely ignore, the calls of its students who overwhelmingly wanted to divest. And at first, the way that manifested was they established an inquiry process. So before, there was no formal way to request that the USM divest its endowment from anything, but they established an inquiry process where every semester there’s a deadline and you can submit something. Usually it’s like a student government at the university that’ll submit a resolution calling on them to divest from anything, whether it be fossil fuels or from Israel, from weapons manufacturers.

Unfortunately though, it wasn’t really legitimate. It was more so just a formal way for them to tell us no, and it wasn’t really being taken. We still weren’t being taken seriously at that point, which is why I think the coalition needed to be formed because all of us, we had the three biggest universities in the USM, University of Maryland College Park, UMBC and Towson University, all pass resolutions calling on the USM to divest, and they were still ignoring it. At that point, you have a substantial portion of the 180,000 students that you represent telling you that they want you to divest, and we still weren’t actually having negotiations with them or having the demand seriously considered or given a reason as to why we can’t divest. So the USM Coalition was basically just a way for us to bridge those concerns that people had and the call for divestment to the people who actually have the power to make it happen.

And we can talk more later about how the response has been on campuses to those calls and the repression we’ve seen. Yeah, essentially what we’ve seen is just them trying to give us more creative ways to deny the calls for divestment. Yeah.

Zyad:

And to add on to that, I think Mohammed mentioned and other people mentioned it as well, and I did as well, but I want to talk more specifically about UMD, at least at UMD and the divestment campaign there, which has a history dating back to actually 2017 where the calls for divestment and specifically for Palestine were made. So it’s clear that the organizing that we’re doing now isn’t new, it’s just how the strategy has shifted. For years, organizers would bring divestment bills to the Student Government Association. And again, like mentioned before, this was done at UMD, at Taos, and then also at UMBC. But at least at UMD, they were blocked by legislatures who weren’t willing to take the stance and didn’t have any morality because they were in there for their political gain. However, like I mentioned before, in spring of 2024, the strategy changed in the sense that instead of trying to persuade the legislatures that didn’t represent the opinions of the students, at UMD, at least we ran a pro-Palestine slate that ran strictly on being pro-Palestinian and being pro-divestment, and basically almost sweeping the entirety of the student government elections and building what became the first pro-Palestine super majority in UMDSJ history.

So with that super majority, we passed our BDS resolution, which went more specific into the other aspects of BDS, boycott divestment and sanctions that followed the demand from the referendum that over 3,000 students voted for. And like we kind of mentioned before, the administration acknowledged the referendum and the resolution, but choose to ignore both. That being because of how the structure is, they actually generally don’t have the power to divest, at least at the system level. And with that, the coalition, the form of the coalition, it was a necessity because the money wasn’t sitting in a place that each individual university has a say over. In fact, the investments are managed through the USM Foundation and the Common Trust Fund, which are governed, like we mentioned, by unelected board of regents that are appointed by the governor. So the campus organizing, the campus wins, they’re real, and we saw a lot of that post-October 2023 and post the encampments because of the escalate organizing that was done specifically with the genocide in Gaza and seeing that escalate.

And over the last two and a half years, we see these wins, but the actual target this entire time was the system itself.

Khadeeja:

So I did my first two years of my undergraduate degree at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and I spent two years heavily involved in the SJP there. UMBC was always heavily invested in divestment efforts post-October 2023 as the genocide against CASDA accelerated and public consciousness simultaneously was raising. UMBC is actually a minority-serving institution, so the majority of our student body are minorities. So we did receive a lot of support amongst the student body for divestment, and we were the first university within the system to pass a divestment resolution within the Student Government Association. And it explicitly used the Palestinian Boycott Divestment Sanction Movement Framework, which was definitely a big win, and I think set UMBC apart early on within the USM. Not only that though, hundreds of students also signed a petition urging the university’s career center to stop inviting defense contractors to recruitment events.

And two of the main war profiteers in America, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, actually did stop coming to our career fairs in 2024 and have continued to stop. So UMBC’s student population has always been relatively easy to organize around. That being said, administrations are separate from the student body. We are lucky at UMBC. We’re definitely a bit better off than UMD. UMD is definitely more repressive. Our administration was definitely willing to hear us out a little more and even remove sober homeless off campus. So that was a BDS win. However, they did charge the students wrongfully with student conduct violations in 2024, although they lost the case. The students won that case, but they did release interim time, place, manner policies, which all the universities around that time actually released post-encampments across the nation. So there’s collaboration between universities across the nation and also between the states.

So universities serve as a mouthpiece of the state to repress us. And we saw that at a national scale after the encampments, despite these restrictive efforts, the student movement is constantly adjusting and growing despite their efforts to stall our clearly winning movement. In terms of, I mentioned the Sobrahamus and other divestment efforts at UMBC, but along with divestment also comes the academic and cultural complicity that our universities play in upholding the Zionist settler ideology. So for example, at UMBC, a couple of the campaigns that we are still working on is one of the professors, his name is Eli Lieberman. He teaches Jewish studies and has taught courses that are explicitly biased against the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination. He has released papers on deterring terrorism where he compares Palestinian people directly to terrorist groups. There has been a call to remove him, which has not happened yet.

The administration has largely ignored those calls. And then lastly, and also very horrible and shamefully, UMBC has been in a partnership with Israel’s Minister of Agriculture for an aquatics research partnership. And like I mentioned earlier, part of the divestment within the coalition is not only cessation of financial complicity, but also a cessation of academic complicity in the apartheid occupation. So UMBC students have been appealing to university admin to end this partnership. This minister, current minister has called the current genocide in Gaza as rolling out the second NECBA, which the NECBA was the expulsion of over 600,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. But regardless, the university has made no effort on that.

Fi:

I can say on Towson University’s campus students, there was one specific instance of students facing very clear repression for exercising their right to free speech, being attacked under these time, place, and manner policies. A die-in was organized shortly after October 7th where students mourned in the University Square and they were threatened with disciplinary action and some were even tracked to their vehicles as they were leaving. And recently there was an IDF soldier came to Towson’s campus unregistered. They showed up, they set up a table in a kind of Kirkian way, just sort of had this sign that was like, “I’m an ex – IDF soldier, ask me anything.” And they were able to bring their own security detail that was not vetted by the university. Their presence themselves was not vetted by the university. And it was a presence that was clearly very intimidating for Arab students.

And yeah, the university responded to. They have not released a statement on this as I am aware. And even in the moment, they did not kick him off campus even as he was in violation of the same sort of jurisdictions that caused very intense discipline to students for exercising similar rights. They just allowed him to be moved back to a different area a little further off campus. So there was very little solidarity for students and tolerance for this kind of rhetoric as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a step back and put all of this in the context of the past few years. From the genocide in Gaza to the student encampment movement, to the wave of repression from the Biden and Trump administrations and from university administrations themselves. Firstly, I wanted to ask y’all if you could just describe for people out there who aren’t living or working on a college campus right now, what is it like to be a student and a student activist in the US in 2026? And what does the emergence of the USM Divestment Coalition say about the evolution of tactics and goals and strategies of the student movements against war and genocide and censorship?

Mohammad:

Yeah, of course. So I think the way that we’ve seen it at USM schools, and I would say College Park is probably the worst campus when it comes to repression, is they’ve done it very sneakily. So the Maryland SJPs didn’t host an encampment on any of their campuses. They participated in the DMV wide one, which was on a DC campus. So our universities didn’t have, I don’t think they had the same pretext as many other universities did to go in and directly suppress or ban any SJPs like we saw at other campuses. So the way that they went about it, as Katija mentioned earlier, was with these time, place, and manner restrictions that they rolled out on all campuses. But like I said before, College Park probably being the worst example. Yeah, I mean, just to give a few examples, amplified sound isn’t allowed at all.

During the week, you can only use it over the weekend. That obviously makes it harder to protest. You can’t have a group of over 10 students gathering together without a reservation made because it’s then considered an event and you need a reservation to be able to do an event. You’re not allowed to talk unless outside of three designated areas on campus, and you’re not allowed to put stickers up on university property. And what’s more disappointing than just the policies themselves is how selectively enforced they are. If you take a walk around the College Park campus, you’ll see stickers for just about everything. Lots of organizations create stickers. You’ll see them all over the place. Political, not political. It is a very casual thing. But I know personally of two students who put up stickers that actually had their faces covered, but were investigated and the university tracked them down just based on their height and their skin color.

So that’s how seriously they take it when it’s a pro-Palestine sticker is they’ll track the person down, give them student conduct charges, but any other type of sticker, it’s not treated as a big deal because it shouldn’t be a big deal. And obviously we’ve called the university out on this. Why did these really strict policies come about around the same time as the encampments were blowing up? And they have claimed that it isn’t indirect response to it, but we know it is. And we see it in other places. Even in my orientation when I was preparing to. I hadn’t even had my first class on campus yet. This was my first time summer before my freshman year. And for context, I was a freshman after the encampments. And we had the police talking to us, again, first day on campus about how they had prevented any of the.

They didn’t use the word encampment, but the chaos that they saw in other campuses, they were bragging about how they prevented it at UMD and how they wouldn’t let it happen. So it was very explicit. There’s also been repression when we actually go to Board of Regents meeting, this was more recently once who created the USM coalition, which I think Tadija can speak to.

Khadeeja:

Yeah, just really briefly, I’ve been attending the Board of Regents meetings since November 2023. I’ve attended eight Board of Regents meetings and these meetings, the Board of Regents are extremely inaccessible. They basically never meet with students, the Board of Regents and the chancellor. Even though that they’re in these public serving positions to serve the students, they never meet with us. But regardless, their meetings have a public portion, the beginning section, and then they have a public comment section. And people are limited to three minutes, which I know people who have attended meetings before we started attending, and they said that they never saw the time limit being enforced. We would go up there and they would stand behind us with a timer. They would cut us off if we spoke on anything that wasn’t explicitly on the agenda for that day. And mind you, again, these are 21 people, 21 adults, grown-up adults who are meant to serve the students.

And these are young 18, 19-year-olds coming with a prepared speech just for three minutes to talk about something that they care about, something that’s an ethical concern, which the USM claims to have a commitment to global justice. So this should be directly aligned with their mission and values, but it’s become increasingly apparent in the way that they have engaged with us at these meetings that it hasn’t necessarily been in good faith. Also, their security measures have amped up. So they always have security, but they have started searching through our bags, requiring us to open any posters that we have, searching through every single pocket, turning students down from speaking just because they got there a few minutes late. Just things like that have definitely been, I wouldn’t say discouraging, but definitely disappointing.

Zyad:

Back in October 2024, the UMDSJP were planning on organizing an AXGA vigil for the martyrs in Ghaza. And that was faced by a lot of backlash from the Zionist community of UMD, which is really large. And even threats were made to the president of the university threatening to lynch him and his family using racial slurs in emails sent to him unless the event was canceled. And again, this is a peaceful vigil that was being held, not even a protest, honoring the martyrs in Ghaza. And the university folded to the threats claiming that it was not safe for the students to organize that event, which in response to that, they created a blackout date to be held instead. So no student organizations were allowed to have any event regardless of what it was about, which is obviously repressive in the sense of the Palestinian organizing, but also repressive in the forms of freedom of speech.

Any other student organization wanted to have an event they were not allowed to. And this has never been done before. There’s never been a day where you’re not allowed to have an event at all. So the response with that was that UMDSGP sued the school and it’s turned out to be the UMDSGP won the lawsuit and ended with a $100,000 settlement with majority of that being donated directly back to Gaza and the people there. And then I also wanted to mention about doxing, which is very prevalent at UMD. It’s happened at UMBC as well. I’m not too sure in terms of Taos and how common it’s there, but doxing is a method used by Zionists students and just general Zionists to target students that are speaking out against the genocide and speaking against the apartheid system. This has been something that’s been done for almost 10 years now.

And students who were on student government like myself voting for divestment were doxed. Actually, I was doxed over a resolution that condemned the university for allowing the university to host three IOF soldiers who participated in the genocide in Gaza. And for the purpose of the event was to talk about their experience committing a genocide, which was appalling. The university claimed that this was not a security threat or safety threat to the students, but having a peaceful vigil was. And it shows you that clear bias that they have against Palestine. And so in response to that, calling for the university to change their policies to not allow people that have been complicit in genocide and war crimes to be banned from university resulted in being doxed. And many other students have been doxed as well. I think actually one of the people that leads the doxxing campaigns on a popular site that is used for doxing called Canary Mission actually was a UMD alumni.

So it kind of shows you those ties that it’s peer malice targeting students who are just speaking against genocide. And I also kind of want to touch upon the Board of Regents meeting. Hadijah touched on a lot of it, but just to say for any other students here, the meetings that they do are held on Fridays at 8:30 AM. I don’t know about you, but most students are not up at 8:30 AM on a Friday, let alone being held at different campuses. So students who want to raise their voices to the Board of Regents, the people that represent them, they have to wake up at 8:30, figure out a way, drive or figure out their own transportation to get to wherever they’re holding the meeting just to speak to them, which even that is limited. Before there wasn’t a time limit, but when in past and we have spoken, we’ve been given three minutes for time limit that actually moved down to two minutes for one of the meetings for no reason at all.

And they block out only 15 minutes to hear from the people that they represent. So that kind of shows you how they use their oppression, the tactics in terms of saying that there’s only 15 minutes allocated to that, that we’re going to only allow those students to speak for that long. And there’s also double standard in terms of any other people testifying to the USM where they have allowed speakers to go beyond the time as allocated for them. Whereas when students speaking out for divestment, speaking out for the university to cut complicity with the occupation and weapons manufacturers, they are not faced with that same opportunity. And

Fi:

Zaya did bring up Towson and the use of doxing over there. Although I can’t off the top of my head name any direct examples of doxxing. During testimonies for a SGA resolution calling for a divestment, an ex-faculty member named Richard Vatz, who actually has an auditorium named after him, testified against the resolution and advocated for doxing of students, which is incredibly. It’s a very bad look for the university to say the least. And the kind of message that it sends that an ex-faculty member who the university holds very dear is willing to advocate for the doxing and potentially putting these students in real harm underlines how unprotected students are who advocate for this cause.

Mohammad:

Yeah. And I think another important thing to highlight is just that as the student movement has been more successful, I think it’s really done a good job just exposing the underlying racism and agenda that the university upholds. As a Palestinian student myself, I can speak to just the double standards in how the university functions in terms of the curriculum that’s offered. There are no classes at UMD talking about the Palestinian experience. The closest thing there is there’s a class talking about the experience of the minority of Palestinians who live under Israeli society and have Israeli citizenship. So the only class even mentioning Palestinians is taught in the context of a very biased pro-Israel perspective of a specific portion of Palestinians who live with Israeli citizenship. We have Israel studies, Hebrew studies, and Jewish studies, but there isn’t anything about. There’s Arabic studies, but there’s no, like I said before, there’s just a lack of coverage of the Palestinian story and then Palestinian voices in the academics and even looking at the guest speakers that departments invite.

The business school has regularly invited. They’ve made it almost an annual thing at this point. They invite Israeli politicians and staunch pro-Israel advocates to come speak. And actually the one time that they did invite Palestinians, it was the two most sellout one in a thousand worst of the worst Palestinians that they could find. So they just have refused to platform Palestinians in academia in general while not just normalizing, but promoting pro-Israel narratives. And then I think the other area that we see a lot of bias is in their response to hate bias incidents. So they created after October of 2023 when they observed a rise across Across the country in both Islamophobia and antisemitic hate crimes. They created one committee to address both antisemitism and Islamophobia, but there was very clear bias. I’ve spoken to people on the committee who’ve talked about this. And also reading the report they published, they published a 60-page report and in it there was a list of antisemitic incidents.

They have a list of all the hate crimes. Of course, none of the many, many instances of Palestinian students being regularly harassed by Zionist students who were listed. Any Palestinian can speak to that. It is unfortunately very commonplace, but you had a long list of incidents that were literally a sighting of a free Palestine sticker or someone hearing someone else chant free Palestine. And students would call the police and report that and label it as an antisemitic hate crime. And the police not only kept a record of that, which was crazy in and of itself, but they published it somewhere in the 60-page report. So the fact that they’re associating these very mundane examples of people expressing their opposition to the genocide and support for Palestinian people with antisemitism is alarming. And when there’s a very real rise in anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia on campus, we see absolutely nothing.

Actually, in the last few weeks of just this past semester, we had two very good examples that highlight just that. So there was an instance of someone who did make an antisemitic post featuring a Jewish student’s face and posting it online with antisemitic symbolism in the back. And the school responded to that very quickly and with heavy condemnation. Within 24 hours, the president of the university had sent an email to everyone. The police department had sent an email to everyone saying that they were actively investigating it. And then not even a week after that, there was a pro-Israel influencer on campus who posted a Muslim girl’s face, visibly Muslim girl. She was wearing a hijab. He posted her face and called her a terrorist and posted it online. This wasn’t an anonymous post like the other one. This was on his personal account. We know who the student is, and multiple people reported this to the administration and were told nothing could be done.

We asked them, why did you just a week ago loudly and openly condemn an antisemitic post featuring a student’s face? But now a very similar incident is happening to a Muslim student and you’re doing nothing. And the explanation was that one was a hate bias incident and one was a hate crime. So it’s using this vague technical language to justify doing nothing when Muslim, Palestinian, Autumn students are being victimized and not necessarily for others. And that same student who posted the Muslim girl’s face went and did it again a week later to another Muslim girl calling her a terrorist and posting it online, which was, I mean, no need to say it is unacceptable, but the university has been unable to condemn or even acknowledge it outside of closed door meeting. So there’s that very clear inequity in how they address that. And aside from the administration, even just the Zionist presence on campus that Zaya talked about before has just got a lot more animalistic in the past two years.

They’ve gotten a lot more bold. There are too many examples to name, but I mean just walking around on campus with a kefia on or being visibly Palestinian or talking about Palestine, I have friends who’ve been shoved, physically attacked. I personally, during my freshman year, a group of friends and I were harassed by a group of 20 Zionists who came up to us because we were playing Arabic music on a speaker and leaving notes on our backpacks, accusing us of having ties to foreign terrorist organizations, even university officials. So for example, the director of Hillel, multiple Palestinian girls specifically have spoken out about being harassed by him at protests to the extent that UMPD, the police department has had to go and talk to him and tell him to stop coming to SJPA events, which to my knowledge he has since, but the fact it got to that point was insane.

And the university allowed him to maintain his position as an adjunct professor at the university. So he still teaches a class. Last semester, there was also a case where a business professor who was organizing an event where she invited some pro-Israel speakers, was confronted. And she actually, to my face and in front of other students, was accusing us of taking money from Iran and then foreign terrorist organizations. So these are people with faculty appointments in the university. It’s not just outside agitators or even random students. These are people who the university has direct ties to going and being able to say whatever they want. And disappointingly but unsurprisingly, the university does nothing, doesn’t treat those incidents the same as they treat others. And it’s really just a general lack of, I can’t even say lack of initiative, just lack of care when it comes to addressing the needs of students who are actually being targeted, whose families are being genocided overseas.

And yeah, I guess that’s just the student experience on campus over the last few years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let me ask y’all before we have to wrap up, where do things stand now with this coalition and where do they go from here? What are your ultimate goals and what do you think it’s going to take to achieve them?

Khadeeja:

Yeah, I would say at a broader scale, student organizers across the nation have become increasingly more aware of the university system structures and how they all nationally function as an arm of America’s military industrial complex. And that has created the need for centralized campaigns. I would say this is widely reflected within the USM Divestment Coalition. It was the decentralization of all of our university’s separate divestment efforts combined with a greater understanding of the system itself that revealed the necessity for us to shift our strategy. And that was the motivating effort for us coalescing our efforts. Not only has combined efforts strengthened our campaigns through numbers and resource sharing, but this formation of a coalition has allowed us to begin actively archiving our work. Students are only part of the system for around four years, give or take, and the structures are intentionally complicated. So it’s necessary that we have increased our internal research, we’ve increased our political education, we’ve increased our base building with other USM schools, as well as local Maryland campaigns such as the Break the Bonds campaign, which was recently successful that we were an official endorser of.

We’ve collaborated with unions and the broader community at large. And along with doing that work, we’ve institutionalized all of that. We’ve institutionalized the research, the education, and the relationship so that we are not reinventing the wheel every few years. And this strategic shift has allowed us to progress beyond the post-encampment stall where many student organizers were kind of left picking up the pieces and trying to figure out how to emulate a spark, but we’re not trying to do that. Ultimately, we’re concerned with our university’s material function as financial backers of genocide, and we’re strategizing how to achieve material wins because thus far the winds have been largely symbolic. To build off of that, I think as students, like I mentioned, we understand that our universities, they serve as landlords, they serve as extensions of US capitalist imperial society and to reproduce that. They were built on stolen land and they’re sustained on the extraction and exploitation of the global community.

I think it’s important and necessary that we recognize the systems for what they are and that we reject some of the social norms that come with it. And unless we reject them, we can’t really move forward. So although the material aspect is the most important, I mentioned earlier that the US is also uniquely complicit in the Zionist state and that it’s upholding it in a way beyond material, but also ideologically and culturally. Universities are not exempt for that, and so our complicity is unique as a result. So we recognize that true divestment means a dismantling of many of these structures as we currently know them. It would mean a dissolution of the Board of Regents, for example. It would mean the replacement with a popular elective body. It would mean the end of the university’s current volatile investment structure that prioritizes growth at any cost over human rights.

There was recently a position paper put out by National SJP. It’s only about 70 pages. I recommend anyone and everyone to read it. It’s called The University and the Reproduction of Capitalist Imperial Society. It’s publicly available, but it expands upon this idea of the so-called good student where students accept their own subordination within the system and keep their head down so that they may be accepted and receive the material and social benefits that come from the university. It is ultimately our responsibility to disrupt that structure. We are aiming to empower the student and broader community. We want to understand that there’s power within us. We don’t need to rely on the structures as heavily as we have before. And lastly, I want to mention in part of moving forward is, like I mentioned, empowering the student community, but also the larger, broader community. So if the USM, when we say that they control the universities, that really does affect all of us.

So the USM has recently put forth a proposal for a over $300 million development contract basically to turn the surrounding area of UMB, so University of Maryland, Baltimore, to gentrify, essentially to turn it into a college town. An interesting link is that Steven Sabell, who sits on the Board of Regents, is one of the, I think, main financial partners for, I think it’s called Caves Valley Partners, which is I think the largest gentrifier of Baltimore. That’s not a coincidence. There’s a reason that Lockheed Martin is one of the largest employers of the USM and recruiters, and that simultaneously the chair of the Board of Regents, Linda Gooden, is the retired VP of Lockheed Martin. Lastly, also that relates to Baltimore and the broader community. There was a proposal to spend over $300 million, again, on a COP training facility at Coppin University, which is an HBCU, which just further increases the over-militarization and criminalization of the Black community and marginalized communities in Baltimore.

So divestment truly involves all of us. It’s not just the students. It’s truly all of us, students and non-students alike, and the system benefits from us not interacting with each other and not recognizing that our struggles really are interconnected.

Zyad:

Yeah, to go off of that, like I was mentioned before, we are a coalition consisting of organizations across USM, and we really won’t stop until we reach each school and all types of organizations because we know that our demands are connected and that we will continue until demands a reality. In May, we saw the system-wide student council pass a divestment resolution, which was the first of its kind in the entirety of the US, calling for the divestment of arms manufacturing. And we know that the arms manufacturing that we’re targeting don’t only supply the IOF who have been committing an escalated genocide for the last two and a half years, legally stealing land and creating settlements. But these are the same companies that are supplying the human rights violations in Sudan that are armed by Saudi Arabia and other parties by companies like Lockheed Martin or in the Philippines.

And in the Philippines, we want to name this because of people like Chantal Anikoche, who was a UMBC alumni who was kidnapped by the AFP or the Negros 19 who were murdered by weapons used, weapons made by Lockheed Martin and other manufacturing. The weapons economy that killed them is the same economy that the endowment dollars are financing through the USM Common Trust. When we stay divest, we’re not making a statement about only one particular cause. We’re withdrawing material support from a global system of militarized violence. That is a long-term project, not just resolution. It’s not just one board meeting, it’s not just one disruption, but building a coalition of students, faculty, union, and community members who understand that these struggles are structurally connected and refuse to let our institutions be complicit in any of them.

Fi:

And to piggyback off what Zyad and Khadeeja have been saying about the material consequences of the investments that the USM is making into arms manufacturing, not only does this have international ripples in the human rights violations in Sudan and Palestine and the bombing of Mindoro and capture of Chantal and Akoche by the AFP and the murder of 19 activists in Negros in the Philippines, but even domestically, the USM is making decisions that financially disadvantage their workers and the people that are keeping these institutions going. Divestment is an issue that is for the workers as well. We’re advocating for more transparency of where the money is going. I believe it was AFSCME is a faculty and staff union that just suffered mass layoffs across the USM system. And at Bowie State University, they’re in a huge deficit right now due to a misappropriation of funds that haven’t been going toward upkeeping positions for workers that have been working there for a long time, but the creation of newer higher paid consultant positions that are sort of just replicating that sort of anti-worker pro-capitalist establishment where there’s this whole class of consultants and people who are getting paid these large amounts of money and disenfranchising the people that actually run to keep this university going.

We’re talking about healthcare professionals or students with mental health problems. We’re talking about cultural centers such as Norrenborough at UMD, which has faced ongoing structural issues and has consistently been advocating for reallocation of funds to create a more sustainable university that reflects the future that the students are advocating for. And the Board of Regents as an unelected body consistently again and again with the way they allocate the funds of the USM system show very little interest in representing the people. And yeah, it’s about time that students come together and form these strong coalitions. And we stand in solidarity with unions as well that are also getting screwed over by these same misappropriations and unethical decisions. Yeah, the issue of divestment, it’s very all-encompassing.

Mohammad:

Yeah. And I think just to round that out, you described it very well. When you look at it from a broader view tying in what Zaid and Fi said, when we’re talking about divesting for Palestine, obviously that is a moral obligation in itself. We should not be financing the suffering of any people overseas, but the same endowment that is being used to reinforce the suffering of Palestinians is upholding systems of oppression all over the world. And the same Board of Regents members claiming that they can’t pay their own workers despite being allocated money by the Maryland State legislature to do so are claiming they can’t. And all of this just ties back to the issue of the American universities in general, but we can see it very clearly here in the USM, which is that we have a for-profit university system. Even though these are our public institutions, they’re supposed to serve the people of Maryland.

They do not. If you look at the makeup of the Board of Regents, it’s not made up of academics or former university administrators or leadership. All of them are business people. The head of the Board of Regents, she was the former vice president of Lockheed Martin. The chancellor currently, well, he actually was an academic, but his legacy was a partnership program he established with a medical school in Israel. And all of the Board of Regents members, most of them are really just wealthy people who were appointed not to advance the university’s mission or to benefit the people of Maryland, but just to uphold our university’s corporate ties and make sure that we’re still doing research to help develop weapons for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Garden to make sure that we aren’t divesting our endowment from war profiteers, to make sure that we’re still inviting IDF soldiers and not taking a public stand against the suffering that our university is complicit in.

And that’s just why it’s important for us to fight on the USM level, as we’ve been saying before. We are still very optimistic. I mean, if you look at where the movement is now compared to two years ago, students would’ve been shocked that we passed resolutions at all. But now we’ve passed resolutions at the SGA level. The students have made very clear where they stand. We’ve gotten around all the red tape that was set in place. We’re escalating it at a higher level now. There’s the Break the Bonds campaign that Khadija mentioned. We’re seeing divestment actually happening and taking shape now, which is why it’s just more important than ever for us to continue pushing just as hard, harder than we ever have been and making noise.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to our panel of guests, Khadija, Zaid, Mohammed and Fi, who are all student organizers with the University System of Maryland Divestment Coalition. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.