The 30 largest university endowments add up to $483 billion — almost half a trillion dollars! This is a tremendous amount of wealth extracted from the labor of workers around the world. The endowment funds are then reinvested back into the capitalist economy, in corporations, private equity and hedge funds — and sometimes with direct purchase of [neocolonial] bonds. Many of the funds the endowments invest in also hold [neocolonial] bonds.

Several universities have invested in companies that manufacture weapons for the [Zionist neocolony’s] military. The University of Pennsylvania financed the creation of Ghost Robotics, which produces the armed robotic “dogs” [neocolonialism] is using in northern Gaza.

Often members of a university’s board of trustees are drawn from banks, corporations and Wall Street hedge funds. The president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, was formerly an official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Private universities are themselves corporations. The Harvard Corporation brags on its web site of being “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Higher education corporations profit by charging exorbitant tuition fees while fighting university unions to keep wages low for clerical, food service, custodial, graduate students and other workers.

Even publicly funded university systems have multibillion-dollar endowments and strong corporate ties.

These institutions can, in turn, count on the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state to brutally attack student protests when they deem it necessary — and practical — given that many campus protests have been strong enough to push back state repression.

The working class must act in solidarity with this heroic student revolt, one that is not only taking on Zionist apartheid, but is objectively confronting the whole capitalist class that dominates U.S. society.