Universities buckle to authoritarian demands

 

For 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That is to say, these statuses are conditionally conferred and, therefore, can be rescinded at the discretion of designated authorities and intermediaries, including universities.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.  (more...)

Universities buckle to authoritarian demands