What Is a University For?

Appraising academia as the walls close in

The stories from Columbia pile up. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Master’s graduate in International and Public affairs, ripped away from his pregnant wife and disappeared to a detention center in Louisiana. Leqaa Kordia, arrested shortly after.¹ Ranjani Srinivasan, a PhD student in urban planning, fleeing to Canada after ICE agents came to her door. Grant Miner, a PhD student in English and comparative literature and union president for Columbia’s student workers, expelled.

This much is clear: the federal government is going after students, particularly graduate students, at Columbia as retaliation for their campus's leading role in the Palestine solidarity encampment movement that spread like wildfire across the U.S. last spring. It’s clear, too, that the university is complying, even preemptively complying, with the government’s fascistic demands. Students, my fellow students: arrested, persecuted, harassed, expelled, deported. Made an example, made a warning, made a sacrifice.

Most anyone who cares even a little about basic human rights for Palestinians and the basic right to protest for Americans should feel sick following these stories. Those of us who are ourselves students and academics, I dare say, feel an extra twist of nausea.

For readers who don’t know, I am a humanities PhD student at Harvard University: an Ivy League grad student, like Mahmoud, Ranjani, and Grant. I am also different from them in important ways. Unlike Mahmoud and Ranjani, I am a U.S. citizen and I am white. Unlike Mahmoud and Grant, I do not hold a prominent leadership position in my campus’s student organizing. I was away from my campus in the spring of 2024 (after I completed my coursework and teaching requirements, I moved home to Philly to complete my dissertation remotely), and therefore was not a part of Harvard’s own encampment.² But we need not flatten our differences or pretend that we all face equal levels of risk to recognize that what is happening to these students is very, very bad for all of us in academia, and we should expect that it will come to touch us all in one way or another.

What is a university for? Columbia’s participation in this witch hunt against student activists is downright villainous, and I am quite sure that my own university’s administration would do no better. To a large extent, it all comes as no surprise. The hypocrisy of university administrations which preach liberal values of open debate and intellectual freedom while quashing student dissent is well-documented. Well-documented, too, is the role of universities as resource hoarders, neighborhood displacers, weapons manufacturing incubators, apartheid investors, and real estate developers, managing to do all this without paying anywhere near their fair share of taxes. Who is a university for? The banker, the broker, the grifter raking in coin at the public-private intersection.

And yet. There is more to this story. As we righteously document and condemn the craven participation of university administrations in this moment and beyond, and even with our well-earned disillusionment with the liberal promise of the university, we would do well to remember this: attacking academia is a key part of the fascist playbook for a reason. It can only benefit our solidarity with Mahmoud, Leqaa, Ranjani, Grant, the unknown number of other students expelled or suspended from Columbia for participating in protest, and any other students there and elsewhere who will be targeted in the future to remember that the university is also for more than the enrichment of the few. I don’t just mean that universities are places where books are written, skills are developed, and knowledge is advanced and imparted, though of course this is true. The MAGA movement and its ilk are deeply anti-intellectual; keeping tabs on this may help us keep from sliding into left-wing anti-intellectualism ourselves.

What I’m thinking about is something related to this but distinct. Universities are places where students can access a type of freedom and spaciousness that is all too rare in our productivity-oriented capitalist cultural landscape, and I know this from experience. Such freedom and spaciousness is very valuable indeed. Students are often (though not always) able to temporarily operate outside of or partially outside of the waged workforce, giving us more autonomy over our time. We are given access to massive volumes of books, journals, archives, and other resources for our studies. We are mandated, by our own choosing, to read, write, discuss, think, learn, teach as a vocation. It is no wonder that student activism has played such a huge role in every modern American protest movement: student life provides fruitful conditions for activism. What is a university for? I know from my own experience and from the brilliance of my student friends (not to mention the students I have taught) that the university can be for imagination, inquiry, making and remaking our knowledge of the world. It can also be for a much more mundane (but just as precious) type of exploration: a place to examine the minutia of one’s interests, pursue intellectual side-quests, to write bad papers and learn something from the writing. This type of time and space for creative pursuit³ is something that I cherish more than almost anything. It’s something that I think every person deserves.

The freedom and spaciousness of which I speak are unevenly distributed within the university, to be sure. Some students must work full-time while pursuing their studies. Depending on one’s economic resources and scholarship package, the degree to which one has to engage in waged work while a student varies wildly. My PhD peers at public universities with shallower pockets must work much, much more and for less pay than me and my fellow Ivy League grad students, for example. These are problems related to the economic structure of the American university (which is very clearly a house-of-cards situation) and problems of class inequality more broadly. Knowing this, I think, should sharpen our attunement to the value of the spaciousness and freedom to be found in the university. It should sharpen our will to seize it, to share it, to seed it.

The U.S. university system is broken in significant ways, most of all economically. Like with many other economic issues, the right basically understands this brokenness and is able to deftly exploit it in order to ultimately create more wealth consolidation and human misery, while the liberal left is largely in denial and/or offers only vibes-based solutions. We deserve better, obviously. What is a university for? As the fascists beat down the doors of non-citizen students and universities feel a new permission to boot their most troublesome student organizers, it’s time for those of us who are still here in academia, at least for now, to come up with our own answer to this question. It’s time to claim that which is good here, and to drag it beyond the campus gates.

1. It’s weirdly hard to find information on Leqaa. As far as I can tell, she is a Palestinian woman who studied at Columbia in some capacity on a student visa and stayed past her visa’s end-date, and she was involved in the encampment. If you know more about her, let me know and I will add it to this post.

2. Though neither was Ranjani - she was arrested while walking past the Hind Hall encampment and all charges against her were dropped. Though she is pro-Palestine, she was not involved in campus activism; she describes herself as a “rando” in relation to the encampment.

3. I mean “creative” in a broad sense here.