When Israel finally accepted a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025, I thought the river of blood and loss had finally stopped, and that I would no longer have to live through the same feelings of grief again. But that hope did not last long. Since the so-called ceasefire came into effect, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has recorded the killings of more than 1,100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip…
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If education is indeed the great vehicle of social and economic mobility, then higher education is no longer delivering the promise of the “American dream.” In fact, this “dream” has become a fiscal nightmare. Colleges and universities saw 9,000 job cuts and buyouts in 2025, and several college closures, mergers, and looming budget crises have already been announced in 2026.
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In 2024, at the height of Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, one of the most widespread waves of college campus protests since the Vietnam War exploded across the United States. Then came the repressive backlash. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a harrowing assault on free speech and the right to protest from the federal government and Zionist organizations, and universities themselves have ramped up their own internal surveillance and repression machines, weaponizing them against their own students, grad students, and faculty.
Life, learning, and activism on American college campuses looks very different today than it did in 2024, but the student-led Palestine solidarity movement is not going away. As a new school year begins, we speak with four students at different college campuses across the University System of Maryland (USM), who are all organizers and members of the USM Divestment Coalition for Palestine, about how the movement is maintaining its demands and adapting its tactics in 2026.
Additional links/info:
USM DIvestment Coalition for Palestine website, Instagram, and Linktree
Diamondback Staff, The Diamondback, “USM students call for divestment from defense companies at Board of Regents meeting”
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
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
Teachers in the second-largest school district in the nation have had to remove Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and Palestinian flags from their classrooms as part of so-called corrective actions taken following a complaint alleging discrimination. The changes occurred at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district has over half a million students and 1…
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We speak to Dave Zirin, author and sports editor at The Nation, about his new book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, chronicling the life and activism of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. For Zinn, says Zirin, “being an academic was always secondary to being in the streets and making history, not just studying history.”…
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated our workplaces, where many employers have sought to boost productivity, cut labor costs, and eliminate jobs via the technology. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that 1 in 5 workers now use AI in their jobs. Organized labor’s response to the AI has been fraught. Where some see an inevitable shift that simply needs to be regulated and could…
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