In May of 2024, while facilitating an educational session for a lifelong learning group, I was asked to explain why so many young people were participating in pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses. My interlocutors thought that student organizers were misguided in their objectives, doomed to fail, and unrooted in historical understanding. I disagreed with all three of these characterizations.

I argued that despite being suspended and banned from campus or even denied their degrees in some cases, the students in those encampments got a better education than many of their classmates, in the ways that matter. They thought critically about competing truth claims and conflicting evidence. They used their knowledge and their media literacy skills to develop powerful arguments, in conversation with others. They thought beyond a false binary of “good guys” and “bad guys” and considered complex historical causes. They questioned where money, support, and legitimacy at their institutions came from and, in recognition of their power as tuition-paying constituents of their universities, formulated specific, moral demands that their institutions cease providing funding and legitimacy to companies profiting from the war. They followed and expanded upon historical precedents set by students protesting against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In other words, pro-Palestine protestors across university campuses demonstrated more intellectual ingenuity and skills, and better embodied the ideals of a liberal arts education, than most.

These students did not learn how to organize an encampment, draw up a list of demands, or write effective chants for mass actions in a classroom. That this form of education occurred outside the confines of the lecture hall, however, does not mean that these students are not living up to the values typically celebrated by institutions of higher learning—values such as critical thinking, civic engagement, cross-cultural dialogue, and leadership. How could I be anything but proud of these students when I saw them curating “liberation libraries” (at CUNY, Swarthmore, Michigan, Princeton, IUPUI, Cornell, Columbia, UW Seattle, Northeastern, Oberlin, Oregon, Purdue, UW, UCLA, Rutgers–Newark) and reading beyond the curriculum assigned to them?

In fact, the encampments could be understood as masterful examples of project-based learning in civic engagement, a “high-impact practice” proven to result in deep learning and growth that sticks with students long after they graduate. At UT Dallas, professor Ben Wright wrote about the educational experience he and his students had after getting arrested and taken to jail following a campus protest. “The purpose of a university is to foster students’ free inquiry as they think and care deeply about the world they’ve inherited. A jail is not the type of classroom that is typically featured in publicity materials for donors, but our students learned a great deal behind bars that day. I did, too.”

The student encampments and other student pressure tactics for Palestine should be understood not as antithetical to education, but rather as significant and generative sites for students’ growth and learning. These students have lived up to rather than betrayed the stated promises of liberal higher education in showing empathy for and solidarity with Palestinians.

A common refrain from those who oppose the pro-Palestinian encampments is that these students were poor students of history. Yet, rather than showing a lack of historical understanding, student protestors were deeply engaged with historical analysis that challenged mainstream or majoritarian narratives about who has a “right” to Palestine. Why should well-documented histories of Arab settlement and others in the region be less determinative than the Old Testament, in debates over who “owns” the land in Israel? Through their resistance libraries, teach-ins, and speeches, students learned and shared what are known as counterstories, led by what education scholar Tara Yosso termed “resistance capital.”

Building on Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital,” Tara Yosso theorized that there are six types of “cultural wealth” that students may bring to the table, even—or especially—if they have less access to cultural capital. Cultural capital is not literal money in the bank, but rather a useful set of resources: in higher education, it can include a familiarity with college and what it entails, especially based on the experience of parents who graduated from college themselves; ease with libraries and computers and bibliographies and thesis statements and salad forks; a network of professional family friends who can offer a leg up on the job market; or an accent and skin color that will get a person through most doors. But cultural capital is not the only kind of resource that can help you get through school successfully.

In the encampments for Palestinian liberation, the students were naming unjust systems, the root causes of the situation in Gaza, in order to break away from them.

Yosso argues that educators should value cultural wealth and support students in bringing it to bear to succeed, rather than framing their lack of cultural capital as a deficit that will inhibit their success. Cultural wealth empowers students to speak up with their own authentic voice and to express their own perspective with confidence. Students may have aspirational capital for their personal and professional lives that motivate them to succeed. They may have linguistic capital in the form of literacy or fluency in other languages, or in the jargon of particular fields or activities. They may have familial capital in the form of support from family, biological or chosen, and social capital through connections to other people who can provide them with support or opportunities. They may also have navigational capital, a knack for getting what they need out of certain institutional or bureaucratic systems. Other scholars have added spiritual capital to this list, which can provide a grounding sense of connectedness to a higher power or providential force, and/or a supportive faith community.

Most useful for thinking through the educational importance of the encampments, however, is “resistance capital,” which Yosso defines as “knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality.” One avenue available to students who lack cultural capital is to conform, to work twice as hard to get half as far, to be so excellent that they meet their institution’s criteria for success. By contrast, resistant capital empowers students to take a different path by defiantly claiming and celebrating their culture, and by calling out unjust systems and working to transform them.

Not all oppositional behavior challenges deep social injustice, as any teacher can tell you. But when a student’s oppositional behavior takes the form of calling out and even proposing a solution to a systemic problem or an unjust practice, their resistance can transform the school for the better, as well as increase the individual student’s access to opportunities and success on their own terms. Students tap into resistant capital when they reject and reframe messages they’re hearing that they’re not good enough, not smart enough, not excelling, not “made for college,” or that they don’t belong. Instead, students can interpret those messages as wrong and unfair, as manifestations of an unjust system of glass ceilings that should be challenged and changed. In the encampments for Palestinian liberation, the students were naming unjust systems, the root causes of the situation in Gaza, in order to break away from them: the American military industrial complex, the long history of Euro-American colonialism, and white supremacy.

In school, students of color, women, and queer students often encounter one course after another that does not include a single text authored by a person who shares their life experience. Instead of internalizing the message that their experience isn’t worth serious engagement, resistant capital empowers students to turn it around and ask the question, Why is the curriculum so limited? This inquiry leads them to see a bigger picture and ask connected questions about, say, why there aren’t more faculty of color, queer faculty, and/or Muslim faculty, especially in prestigious tenured positions and leadership. Why, they might ask, are most of these scholars teaching in interdisciplinary programs for “ethnic studies,” “women’s studies,” or “gender studies,” a dynamic that Dolores Delgado Bernal and Octavio Villalpondo call “apartheid of knowledge.” At UC Irvine, Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard offered this kind of reframing as she was led away from a protest in handcuffs. She pointed out the contradiction between “democracy” and genocidal policy, and asked how many students could have gone to college with books and housing for the money that was being spent to pay the police officers who were arresting her.

Palestinian voices and historical perspectives, too, are underrepresented (or silenced) in academia. When chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine had their charters revoked and were banned from campus,  student protestors drew on resistant capital in calling out that inequity and lifting up a different standpoint on the war in Gaza. While administrators charged them with interrupting the learning that ought to have been happening on campus, in fact, these students were enacting a democratic culture of free and pluralistic thought that enriches rather than stifles academic culture. Education isn’t a piece of paper or a line on LinkedIn, and an institution that suppresses dissent or resistance isn’t providing a rigorous education.

Yosso proposed the community cultural wealth model as a way of articulating and appreciating what students bring with them to school, but I think we could also see each kind of capital as a resource that can grow as it is “invested” and put to use in educational spaces. Resistance capital empowered students to protest and set up encampments in the first place, but as they learned from that experience and from one another, you could also say that their shares of cultural wealth continued to appreciate in value. Other students learned counterstories that were new to them and learned new habits of critical thinking, developing resistance capital that they might not have had before, but that they will now carry forward in their education and their lives beyond college.

The “Liberated Zones” on almost 140 campuses across the United States also carved out a safe place that restored students’ capacity to learn, a community grieving genocide together where liberation was not scoffed at as unrealistic, where Palestinian children were seen as innocent and entitled to the same human rights as any other children, and where protesting the deaths of Palestinian children was not interpreted as antisemitic. Tara Yosso and scholars of community cultural wealth look to what bell hooks calls “homeplace” as a crucial locus for resistant capital to reside and grow:

Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.

This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside.

The encampments established a “homeplace” for students, or a “counter-space,” to borrow a term from scholarship by Daniel Solórzano and Miguel Ceja with Tara Yosso.

Now that most (but not all) of the encampments have been taken down, either violently by police or peacefully by the protestors themselves after agreements were reached with their institutions, a generation of students have learned how to organize people on the ground and via social media, curate libraries, distribute food and supplies, de-escalate violence, and reach across lines of religious difference. They’ve learned histories of the Nakba, of settler colonialism, and of US imperialism and complicity in conflict abroad, such as the ongoing genocidal war in the Congo. They’ve investigated how much money their institutions and their government invest in weapons of war, and how institutions’ boards of trustees choose investments.

In the spring, a generation of students learned how to distribute food, organize people on the ground and by social media, curate libraries, de-escalate violence, and reach across lines of religious difference. They learned counterstories of Palestinian histories. They learned how much money their institutions and their government invest in weapons of war being used to kill Palestinian civilians, and at some schools, they’ll have an opportunity to make their case to the board.

I don’t know how long it will take for students’ demands for divestment, a ceasefire, and Palestinian liberation to be heard and taken seriously. For the students, that is the real question, and they already achieved some success as measured by the messages from Gazans who have thanked American students for seeing their humanity and their suffering and acting in solidarity. Unfortunately, many institutions are moving in the opposite direction: institutions including Princeton, Penn, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California system, the University of South Florida, UVA, and Indiana University have responded to the events of last spring by issuing new restrictions on protests and student gatherings (now termed “expressive activities”). NYU has updated their student code of conduct to provide protections specific to adherents of Zionism. GW has reportedly sanctioned student organizations. Virginia universities have restricted the wearing of masks, facilitating surveillance of student activities. The AAUP has issued a statement condemning these restrictions, as has the ACLU. Students at UT Austin, Indiana University at Bloomington, and Vanderbilt are taking action to hold their institutions accountable for violating their First Amendment rights.

What I do know is that these students (and many of their professors) got an awful lot of education last semester. If they came in with community cultural wealth in the form of resistant capital, their investment of it has paid dividends. When (and if) they return to formal classrooms in the fall, I can’t wait to see how they apply what they’ve learned.