The Electronic Intifada 21 March 2025
In conjunction with the Trump administration, universities and colleges are moving against students protesting the Gaza genocide.
UPIFor the better part of two academic years, many colleges and universities have reacted rather than responded to organized study and struggle against Israeli genocide in Palestine. Most notably, this has included administrative decisions that encouraged and directed the criminalization and brutalization of involved students, staff and faculty members by campus and municipal police.
In so doing, these institutions have all but abandoned their positions of moral authority in exchange for proximity to profits and political power, creating the conditions that led to the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian and recent graduate of Columbia University, by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on 8 March.
Consistent with even selective First Amendment advocates and constitutional law experts, what happened to Khalil should be deeply concerning to all of us, especially those in the university.
Minimally, the question of how a legal permanent resident (i.e., a green-card holder) could be summarily detained and held captive by federal agents without due process remains insufficiently answered. And yet his abduction, which occurred despite having expressed concerns to university officials about ICE or other “dangerous individuals” coming to his home, demonstrates how an acute focus on legality obscures the interpretive nature and malleability of the law by authoritative power.
As critical legal and critical race theorists have instructed us, the law is a tool constructed and commonly wielded (or disregarded) to preserve the status quo, not change it. In Khalil’s case, as well as other less visible and perhaps less horrific instances, both citizenship and student statuses are fraught categories, circumscribed by legalese and racial politics, and always already precarious under domestic foreign policy regimes.
That is to say, these statuses are conditionally conferred and, therefore, can be rescinded at the discretion of designated authorities and intermediaries, including universities. This is why the established pretext for detaining Khalil has remained without any material evidence of legal wrongdoing.
Furthermore, the often parallel processes adjudicated by universities in clandestine disciplinary proceedings lay the predicate for students (and others) to be targeted by the state for subsequent persecution.
As Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Palestine Legal, wrote for The Nation earlier this month, the university is not merely a site within which civil liberties are routinely violated by outside parties under simple pretext. Rather, the university has chosen to be an active collaborator and facilitator in the neo-McCarthyist erosion of legal due process, free speech (and academic freedom), and shared governance, to the detriment of its reputation and future relationship to the public sphere.
Dereliction of duty
Failing to protect the dignity and material safety of concerned university citizens is a dereliction of duty, particularly dangerous for those systemically and disproportionately rendered vulnerable to harm and violence for exercising their First Amendment right. Even worse, subjecting pro-Palestine activists, including anti-Zionist Jewish students, to pretextual surveillance, police brutality, criminal detention and deportation is an egregious form of institutional betrayal of civil liberties and the public trust.
Without immediate and forceful redirection, these repeated instances of institutional negligence and malfeasance will only fortify postsecondary delegitimization, a position from which the higher education enterprise may never fully recover. Lest we forget, colleges’ and universities’ compulsory (and anticipatory) compliance with anti-democratic directives and fascist executive orders has proven a poor strategy for legitimacy and self-preservation.
Their compliance has functioned as a permissive and reactionary gesture, one that has expanded rather than constrained or contested authoritarian power. For instance, such impulses did not spare Columbia, Harvard University or the University of Pennsylvania from public ridicule in the US Congress during the Biden presidency.
Nor have they protected dozens of other institutions from being threatened, reprimanded and – in the case of Columbia – effectively sanctioned by the Trump administration.
In fact, Columbia has today conceded to the Trump administration’s threat to cut $400 million in federal funding by accepting increased criminalization of its students and the dismantling of academic freedom for its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. The Columbia administration has made enormous concessions with no certainty of even salvaging the federal funds.
This decision by Columbia has set a new precedent for institutional susceptibility to political influence, legislative overreach, monied interests and decreased operational autonomy, especially at colleges and universities more reliant upon federal grants and government programs. More importantly, however, the public trust that has been lost following months of compliance and capitulation is far more difficult to replace than research and programmatic funding.
Contrary to popular belief, social capital and public confidence are not infinite or unconditional resources; they cannot be easily mobilized with performative rhetoric and non-performative gestures to which many colleges and universities have grown accustomed.
So what becomes of the university when it is stripped of its resources while exhausting the good will of its students and its workers? What value does compliance actually offer when it fails to prevent the incapacitation of college and university research functions?
Most importantly, are relinquishing moral authority and accepting moral bankruptcy too costly a price for an uncertain future under increasingly authoritarian rule?
These are the animating questions higher education administrators need to be considering as they assess the cost-benefit of their actions in the weeks and months ahead. For certain, and as the current president and secretary of state have made clear, what has already transpired is the first of many affronts to civil liberties and the institutions entrusted to uphold them.
What colleges and universities do next, in the courts and on their campuses, may very well determine whether higher education and the American democratic project will survive long enough to pursue a redeemable future.
Charles H.F. Davis III is a professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education and director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab at the University of Michigan.
