On Monday, right before 5pm, dozens of masked people, several of whom were students, flocked to the University of Washington’s new Interdisciplinary Engineering Building (IEB). One group walked into the main entrance. Another group trotted down the stairs leading to the ground floor entrance. More went around the back. Vans and cars pulled up on E Stevens Way NE, stopped momentarily, and deposited more people and supplies such as bisected garbage cans-turned-shield and large metal sheets. Inside the 700,000-square-foot building’s glass walls, the new arrivals asked students and faculty to leave because they were taking over the building. As they left, informational flyers in hand, the protesters began to chain the IEB’s doors shut.

The IEB cost UW $102 million. Ten million of that came from Boeing. For a century, Boeing has been one of UW’s top donors and the top employer of school alumni. In an April 2022 collaboration proposal between UW and Boeing, UW says that they will “work in close partnership with subject experts at Boeing to make sure the curriculum and research topics are highly relevant for top-priority challenges within the company.” And since 1948, Boeing has also been a key arms supplier to the Israel Defense Forces. The university’s relationship with Boeing is why these people had come to the IEB.

For several hours on Monday, protesters affiliated with the Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return (SUPER) UW took over the IEB. They hung a sign renaming it the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building, honoring a Palestinian teenager slain by Israeli forces.

In a press release, SUPER UW said they were “responding to the call” of the student movement in Gaza following the October 7 attacks in Israel, celebrating the way it “shattered the illusion of zionist-imperialist domination and brought Palestine to the forefront for all justice-loving people of the world.”

“Our brothers and sisters in Gaza are living under a sky of constant US-funded rocket fire, while the zionist regime is continuing its land thefts and the torture and imprisonment of over 10,000 Palestinians who are facing lengthy sentences and unspeakable abuse,” the press release read. “Meanwhile, American and western institutions, like UW, continue to fund these atrocities and attempt to demonize the just struggle of the Palestinian people.”

UW reported the protesters caused $1 million in damages, saying protesters spray painted messages like “Boeing Kills” on the walls, ripped a classroom door off its hinges, sealed doorways with epoxy glue, and smashed the glass doors housing specialized machinery that cost upwards of $100,000 a piece.

(When reached for comment, Noah Weight, a student in SUPER UW, didn’t comment on the reported damage. Instead, he pointed to the group's mission. “Every single university [in Gaza] has been reduced to rubble,” Weight wrote, “but Western journalists, academics, and the public seem more concerned with damage done here, to a building that is intended to expand the scale of that destruction,” Weight wrote.)

Late into Monday night, police in riot gear gathered. They faced off with protesters, and together with University of Washington Police, the Seattle Police Department arrested 32 protesters on Monday night for criminal trespass in the first degree, a misdemeanor.

This marked the first significant pro-Palestine on-campus demonstration since Donald Trump took office and began targeting, detaining, and deporting international students involved in last spring’s protest encampments. Thanks to this administration, the landscape for protesting in general, and especially protesting against the war in Gaza, has changed. And our local responses show diverging paths: those who parrot the Trump administration’s propaganda, and those who resist it.

This morning, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown released a statement about the damage to the school. He called the protest “disturbing,” and said that “it is clear that there was substantial damage to public property and threats to the overall safety of the university community.” He continued: “I am thankful that those responsible were arrested and, if found guilty, should be held accountable. I fully and always support people’s right to protest and to express their views. Indeed it is foundational to our democracy. But everyone has a right to be safe on campus and UW must enforce the law.”

This is the kind of standard law and order statement you can expect from the powers that be when protests go down—especially when there's property damage in the mix. 

The university struck a different tone. After Monday’s building occupation, UW President Ana Mari Cauce sent an email to the UW community where she condemned the protest and said the university would “continue our actions to oppose antisemitism, racism and all forms of biases.” The official UW statement on the matter from UW spokesperson Victor Balta called the protest an “antisemitic statement” and said UW “will not be intimidated by this sort of offensive and destructive behavior and will continue to oppose antisemitism in all its forms.”

Yesterday, in a press release, Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, a collaboration of some of the biggest idiots in our government (an Avengers assembly from hell of the Department of Education, Department of Health, and General Services Administration) weighed in on the situation, using their same tired rhetoric. U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the protest “yet another horrifying display of the antisemitic harassment and lawlessness which has characterized many of our nation’s elite campuses over the last several years,” and said it disrupted the lives of “Jewish students who live in fear on campus, of their equal opportunity protections and civil rights.”

But the administration had a surprise for UW. Seattle is generally the Big Bad Radical Left in the Trump administration’s commentary, but yesterday, they broke that streak. The task force specifically commended UW’s “strong statement condemning [Monday] night’s violence.”

Under a Trump administration that is already withholding research grant money, threatening funding over diversity and inclusion policies, and directly attacking universities like Harvard and Columbia, where prominent protests were held, the tenor of the University of Washington’s reaction to these protests has shifted. Echoing Trump administration talking points, faculty and administrators lambasted Monday’s demonstration as antisemitic.

Last spring, when a pro-Palestine tent encampment sprung up in UW’s quad, UW’s tone was different. For three weeks, students and non-students gathered and refused to leave until the university cut ties with Israel and Boeing. It ended after UW agreed to increase transparency about its financial holdings and provide scholarships for displaced Palestinian students among other things.

In her statement regarding the encampments, Cauce only referenced “vile rhetoric.” Now, “vile rhetoric” has become clear, actionable “antisemitism.”

Alex Stonehill, the associate director of communication leadership at UW, rebuked the claims of antisemitism in these protests.

“[Universities] are supposed to be these bastions of critical thought and critical inquiry about what’s happening,” Stonehill said. “When we see pretty baseless accusations of antisemitism on campus and when we don’t interrogate that and push back against it and try to figure out what’s actually happening, we’ve given up. It’s important to take a stand.”

Student protesters such as Eric Horford believe in their movement, regardless of the higher stakes under the current administration.

“We know the Trump administration is incredibly repressive,” Horford said. “But ultimately, regardless of whether it was Trump or Biden and Harris in office, the federal government has been incredibly anti-Palestinian and anti-student movement. The repression is always strong, and that's why we remain optimistic that no matter who we're up against, that our movement can stay strong and grow.”

“We are demanding that Boeing and the influence of other companies that profit off of war be removed from our educational spaces here at UW,” Horford said. “We think it is shameful that after the developments of last year, they would continue and finish the construction of a building that's been invested in by Boeing.”

But the situation is different for UW these days. They may not be as willing to appease protesters when they are busy appeasing a dictator.

In the last month, the Trump administration has escalated its throwdown with the university system, specifically calling out the pro-Palestinian protests and anti-semitic, and calling on universities to quash them. In a letter sent to Harvard by the same clown brigade that ordered a review of UW, the administration claimed that “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” And among other things, they demanded that the school report “individual faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7, and the University and federal government will cooperate to determine appropriate sanctions for those faculty members within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment.”

The letter lists the ways Harvard can get on its knees and win its federal funding back. When Harvard refused, Trump threatened not only its federal funding, but its tax-exempt status. And just yesterday, Columbia University announced layoffs of nearly 180 people after Trump cut $400 million of federal grant funding from the university, claiming that it “repeatedly fails to protect students from anti-Semitic harassment on campus.”

UW would struggle to survive a similar attack. Funding has never been more tenuous for the university. It received around $2.1 billion in federal funds for research in 2024. To make matters financially worse, the proposed state budget trims state funds allocated to UW by over $166 million.

And this has been piled on top of an already struggling university budget. Back during the 2008 recession, the state cut UW’s per-student funding by half. The funding has yet to recover to where it was before 2008. According to UW Magazine, the state funded UW the same amount in 2019 as it did in 1990.

Can a cash-strapped university still stay true to its values under the Trump administration? Universities have the potential to be an essential tool in standing up to dictators. UW prides itself on “being boundless,” except maybe boundlessness is limited by who holds the capital. In the 15 years Stonehill has worked at UW, he’s seen the public service mission eroded due to the loss of federal and state funding.

“The university had to move more towards corporate funding and wealthy philanthropists to make things happen here,” Stonehill said. “What we're seeing now is the downside of that. Corporations like Boeing are making weapons that are being used to kill people, and we can't say anything about it because we’re reliant on their money. I’d really like for that to change.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect new documentation that shows a collaboration proposal between Boeing and the University of Washington. It has also been updated to include more details from the SUPER UW press release.