Michael Powell

Updated at 11:15 ET on April 22, 2024
Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide.

Photographs by Chase BarnesThree years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges.