by Motyl, April 10, 2025, 11:00 ///
At first glance, Woodlawn Residential Commons is like any other modern building. If you’ve had the displeasure of living there, you might have been hounded by false alarms or driven half-mad by paper-thin walls that didn’t even touch the ceiling—you could hear almost every word your neighbor said, and almost every word you said could be heard by your neighbor. But on the surface, the dorm doesn’t instantly give away its flimsy, rushed construction. Next year’s class of incoming students will take Woodlawn as a given. Yet the building only went up in 2020. It represents yet another one of uchicago’s gentrifying incursions into the Woodlawn neighborhood, pushing the limits of a treaty the university signed with The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in the sixties. The agreement prohibited the university from building past 61st street—an agreement the university had already violated in the 2010s. The growing gap in students’ recollection of how Woodlawn came to be speaks to a larger problem for organizers at and around uchicago: this campus is designed to disappear memories of struggle.
Structurally, ideologically, and physically, the university launches a multi-pronged assault on our collective ability to remember what it truly is and the violence it carries out. Initially, we forget in seemingly innocent ways: another cohort graduates; a new nine-week quarter begins, blurring the one before it. We’re so burnt out that we aren’t paying attention to anything going on around us or can’t pass on our memories to people who’ve picked up where we left off. The past bleeds out from under us and we don’t understand why.
But the gaps in our memory aren’t incidental—our administration has drilled them in through calculated targeting, censorship, and removal. When a student is forcibly evicted by police days before an academic break, that is an administrative choice. When a student receives notice of suspension in the middle of one, that is an administrative choice. When the university charges at students at their most vulnerable—when their peers are busy or gone—they are strategically dependent on the inattention of the student body to succeed. And when they retreat behind fuzzy disciplinary policies or horseshit police narratives, they fill the gaps back up with their own slop, leaving us with no recollection of what really happened and a barrage of false memories to take cover against instead.
Through its repressive crusades, the university attacks the ties we maintain with one another and attempts to plunge us back into a collective forgetting. Even before we set foot on campus, we are taught to keep ourselves at arm’s length from the surrounding community—a product of uchicago’s long, storied history of racially restrictive covenants, mass surveillance, and invasive pig outbreaks (ucpd presence) far beyond the borders of Hyde Park. Consequently, our memories of the neighborhood are captive to a campus bubble that constantly spits out graduates and leaves us at a crushing loss about what’s changed between now and even five years prior. Can you name a friend who saw the Woodlawn dorm in construction? From there, the university picks off students. In targeting a select few students and removing them from campus, administrators hope to induce a chilling effect on student action that reverberates across the entire organizing infrastructure, derailing the lines of communication through which we typically transmit our skills, experiences, and reflections to fresh faces.
A culture of amnesia allows the university to control the terrain of student mobilization as it currently exists, foreclosing a range of more radical—and effective—possibilities lingering outside of the window of campus memory. During last year’s encampment, student organizers began tedious negotiations with university administration. An essential takeaway from the Trauma Center campaign the previous decade, where organizers successfully pushed the university to open a level-1 adult trauma center in Hyde Park, was that administrators had intentionally used negotiations to waste students’ time and energy. Had this remained in our collective memory, we might have been able to forcefully reject negotiations and the larger respectability politics that solidified the university’s tenuous hold on our encampment, keeping us in limbo and wearing us down. But in the eyes of the amnesiac, things have always been this way; when bald paul extends a handshake, you take it; there is no other option in working memory. Since then, the university has dragged its feet on implementing whatever concessions UCUP was able to pry from them last year. Dramatically different strategies and tactics, recovered from behind the blinding smokescreen of the present, urgently demand our consideration.
Just this past summer, under the cover of an empty campus, the university unleashed yet another act of aggression onto the surrounding community. On Friday, August 16, 2024, at 7:30 in the morning, cpd and ucpd broke through a blockade and forcibly evicted Christiana Powell, a Black third-generation Woodlawn resident, from her home along with three other families in the same building. Just a few blocks away, hundreds of police from outside the city strolled into the Woodlawn Residential Commons with their luggage. The university was hosting them for the Democratic National Convention the following week. The Woodlawn dormitory—a pitiful building thrown together only four years prior, a building that never should have existed—was now the site of bright-eyed, enthusiastic administrative collusion with a federal institution. Faced with the terrifying pace of this development, we can no longer afford to assume that the way things are is the way they always have been. Through the struggle for our memory, we can imagine a past without uchicago—and we will create a future without it, too.
This is the first part of a two-part article. The second part will discuss specific ways we can resist this culture and improve our organizing.
Motyl, UChicago United for Palestine