The University We Wish to See: Or, Learning from the Encampments
In the height of graduation season, Gary Wilder reflects on the future and fallacies of US universities after the student-led pro-Palestine encampments.
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances … forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator
--Karl Marx
I
We have now marked the two-year anniversary of police brutalizing CUNY students with the blessing of the administration for demanding that the university divest from companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, sever ties with Israeli academic institutions, support the liberation of Palestine, abolish police on campus, and transform CUNY into a tuition-free university. These five demands deliberately echoed those made in 1969 by radical Black and Puerto Rican student protesters in the same City College location.
In April 2024, a wave of pro-Palestinian encampments created by U.S. college students exploded across the country. To many activists this seemed like a promising and powerful opening. Might this be the prelude to mass insurgency in a dark and darkening time? In fact, the encampments unleashed a wave of massive repression. Students demanding that their universities divest were beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled. Protest and dissent were, and continue to be, criminalized. This repression was a symptom of and another step toward the collapse of the liberal university. This unraveling was largely self-inflicted.
That evanescent moment of encampments was quickly swept away in what has been a relentless stream of political madness. This barrage has made it difficult to even register let alone process the many intense happenings that careen by us daily. Given the unwavering institutional support of Israel, the violence, the generalized despair, the encampments might seem like a distant and quaint memory. But we should not let this two-year anniversary pass unnoticed. Recalling the encampments may help us to cut across the false alternative, which has come to structure many debates between either protecting the existing university or abolishing the university as such. The encampments warrant the attention of all of us who are concerned with reawakening the critical and transformative potential of university life under current conditions. I write as a professor implicated in the processes I discuss.
II
We are living at the limits of legibility. We may situate the genocide in Palestine and the consolidation of MAGA fascism within a steady stream of uncanny phenomena that assault us daily. Many of us have long studied the nexus of liberalism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, fascism, and militarism. We know what we are seeing. We are not surprised. This is the thing! And yet, it is difficult not to be astonished and bewildered, stunned and disoriented, by the speed, intensity, and impunity – he sheer surreality– of what we watch unfold. We wonder: Is this the thing? What is this thing?
We might identify two responses to this uncanny crisis of legibility. From one angle are those who, from the standpoint of realist epistemology, rush to make the seemingly strange familiar by seeking the correct concept through which to grasp and manage the messy world. Such thinkers seek a correspondence between concept and object as if deciding whether Israel really is committing genocide or whether fascism really has returned would somehow make what is actually happening more or less real or dangerous, as if conceptual correspondence could guide our judgments and actions. Pierre Bourdieu called this the “scholastic fallacy” whereby we come to believe that the world works according to the concepts we invent to understand the world. This tendency is cause and consequence of liberal optimism.
From another angle are those who rush to make the seemingly familiar strange. Such critics may declare that our existing concepts and frameworks cannot possibly grasp these new developments. They often condemn attempts to make the world legible as expressing a positivist desire for illusory transparency. By conflating legibility with transparency, they conclude that the only way to oppose positivism is to insist on a foundational illegibility. They practice negative critique, by purporting to unveil the opacity that lurks within every claim to legibility. They debunk the will to know as an operation of power. They often deride visions of or projects for radical social transformation as further examples of a dangerous will to certainty. This tendency is cause and consequence of a faux-radical pessimism.
Both tendencies are politically complacent and disabling. Both also conflate immediate appearances with reality as such.
In contrast, I would suggest, Marxian dialectics may help us to better navigate the strange familiarity of these illegible times. Dialectics helps us to make the social world more legible in a way that neither imposes transparency nor celebrates opacity. It illuminates the deeper processes, networks of relations and heterogeneous unities that subtend immediate appearances. A dialectical optic reveals how phenomena that appear to be distinct, even opposed, may be intrinsically related. They become legible as interrelated moments of non-identical wholes. Conversely, entities that seem to be self-contained are revealed to be heterogeneous and contradictory.
This relational and processual way of knowing attends to how one aspect of a non-identical object may contradict another, how one of its tendencies may point in a different direction than the other. This allows for immanent critique, whereby we identify an aspect of a contradictory object that points beyond its existing form –an immanent tendency that, if further developed, would explode the existing object. Dialectics demonstrates how, in being itself, in following its own systemic imperatives, an object may become other than itself; it may negate itself or be negated. Dialectics allows us to think about transcendence or overcoming, sublation or aufhebung, as a process whereby the object of critique is simultaneously negated, preserved, and elevated. By actualizing its immanent potentiality, it is both radically transformed and more fully realized. Dialectics thus attunes us to how alternative possibilities may already dwell within, or may be created by, existing arrangements. It allows us to identify possible pathways between how things are and how they ought to be, between the degraded present and a desirable future.
III
Let us consider the current crisis of the university. This crisis is composed of at least three converging forces.
First is the long-term function of the liberal university as an adjunct of capital, state power and bourgeois norms. It confers status, reproduces class and racial divisions, grants access to elite networks and professional opportunities. It reinforces divisions between university and society, academic specialists and the general public. It creates knowledge and expertise that serve nefarious forms of power. It ghettoizes and neutralizes critical thought.
Second is the medium-term process whereby, over the last several decades, neoliberal austerity policies have hollowed out the university: defunding fields that cannot demonstrate their instrumental utility in a capitalist marketplace, gutting faculty governance, creating new strata of superfluous administrators; surrendering policy decisions to legal departments, packing boards of trustees with ultra-wealthy anti-intellectuals, exploiting adjunct labor, servicing the needs of finance capital by crushing students and their families with debt using methods that foreclose their futures, amassing endowments that profit from the worst kind of corporate harm and state violence, engaging in real-estate speculation and fueling gentrification and destructive policing.
Third is the current catastrophe, born of an odious intersection. On one side, neoliberal universities are colluding with Zionist pressure groups to violate academic freedom, freedom of speech, the right to dissent and tenure protections. On the other side, they are colluding with the far-right attack on higher education, which is instrumentalizing the Palestine exception and Title VI civil rights protections to destroy what remains of the liberal university. In the last two years, it has become clear that these institutions would rather expel, fire, brutalize, imprison, even facilitate the illegal abduction of their own students, faculty and staff than risk non-alignment with organized Zionism or the MAGA fascist state.
This craven collusion and capitulation have combined, for the most part, with faculty passivity and paralysis. Imagine what might have happened if Columbia University workers, at that crucial moment in fall 2025, when the whole world was watching, had turned out en masse, the way their own students had months before (or that the people of Minneapolis recently did against ICE)? We should therefore beware of any self-congratulatory attempt to posit a facile opposition between evil administrators and virtuous professors.
The veil that may have obscured the nasty core of university business has fallen. We behold hedge funds masquerading as debating societies while profiting from mass death, fueling carceral violence, dispossessing working families, and consigning generations of students to debt peonage. The university’s underlying anti-social and anti-democratic imperatives have been illuminated. Its contradictions sharpened.
So, what is to be done? What relation should we academics have to these institutions?
I am sympathetic to those who are ready to abandon the university as irredeemable. Yet, on some level, I still believe that we arethe university, and it would be a colossal mistake to simply concede it to these forces of reaction. We must reject one-sided approaches that seek either to defend the existing university or to abolish the university as such. This also means challenging the cynical, defeated, pragmatic and hyper-professionalized currents of academia that concede the hollowing-out, remain silent, and want above all to return to academic business as usual.
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IV
We might begin by recalling that the U.S. university has never been just one thing. It is not only an expression and instrument of dominant ideology and oppressive arrangements. It also allows, even nourishes, ways of being, knowing and relating that interrupt the utilitarianism and profit seeking that mediate so much of social life in our world.
No one had been more attentive than the late Edward Said to the odious complicity between professional academics, scholarly knowledge, and imperialist violence. Yet in a 1999 lecture at the American University in Cairo, he notes, “in every known society … the academy … was a protected, almost utopian place. Only there could collective learning and the development of knowledge occur and … [and] it could occur only if academic freedom from non-academic authority was somehow guaranteed and could prevail.”[1] In a lecture the following year at Columbia University, he declares that our intellectual work “ought to be devoted” to “dismantling” the “reified representations of the world that usurp consciousness and preempt democratic critique.”[2] He then reminds listeners that “the American university remains the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world [today … the academy … allows one freedom from the deadlines, the obligations to an importunate and exigent employer, and the pressures to produce on a regular basis, that afflict so many experts in our policy-think-tank [71] riddled age.”[3]
Said thus calls on us to work against the existing order by deepening democratic critique, while reminding us that such critique depends partly on relatively autonomous spaces, like those afforded by the American university. I take him to be saying that, however compromised it may be, we should not take this space for granted; it is worth struggling to protect.
In the US, academic inquiry is not (yet) directly subordinated to the imperatives of profit and power. When properly employed, faculty are allowed, even encouraged, to pursue creative work in ways that are not immediately subject to an employer’s instrumental or ideological directives. However ghettoized, it is one of the last remaining spheres for critique and dissent, where left-wing discourses are allowed to exist, and radical networks may form. Professors also have an unusual potential to seize a sizable degree of self-management through faculty governance.
Whether public or private, elite or not, universities often assemble diverse cohorts of students whose collective experiences may point beyond the institution’s conservative social functions. Universities certainly work to amass institutional power and promote bourgeois norms. But in so doing they also gather a critical mass of young people who now have access to potentially subversive opportunities: to think in anti-normative ways; to study radical bodies of thought; to benefit from intergenerational association; to connect with longstanding political traditions; to inherit the legacies of emancipatory struggles and movements; to engage in campus organizing; and to enter into novel relations with one another.
Universities often afford conditions that are less atomizing and alienating than those most Americans face in ordinary life. Residential campuses may allow for a relatively fluid relation between living, learning and socializing. Such integration and collectivity can nourish anti-normative political subjectivities.
Students may be further radicalized by their first-hand experience of the university as an instrument of repression, exploitation and dispossession; as composed of layers of hypocrisy, corruption and bad faith. They directly confront the glaring contradiction between the institution’s stated values and its actual practices. They may see clearly that their own freedom, security, and learning have been obstructed by supposedly progressive administrators long before the MAGA state started issuing directives.
Here then is a dialectical process. By serving to reproduce itself (and existing society), the university unwittingly provides students with the perspective and tools through which to transform the university (and society). This possibility surged forth in the wave of pro-Palestine student protests, occupations, and encampments that swept across the U.S. in spring 2024.
V
For a moment we beheld a nationwide insurrection led by militant young people. This movement built on the legacies, and was propelled by the spectral energies, of the 2020 Black Lives insurrection, of the Occupy movement and of the longstanding Palestine solidarity movement, which merged with the anti-Iraq War and alter-globalization movements. It also identified with the 1980s South African divestment movement.
These activated students claimed public spaces and confronted reactionary forces. They scorned the frayed logics and narratives that authorize institutional complicity with state barbarism. They refused to participate in the normalization of US funded mass death. They made legible a web of complicities that linked Israeli genocide, American imperialism, global capitalism, domestic police brutality, and US universities. They recognized that they are directly implicated in this horrific system and bear shared responsibility for such harms. They rightly identified the Western university as a crucial front in the struggle against US imperialism and for Palestinian liberation. And, in doing so, they identified the Palestine exception as a crucial front in the struggle for a free and democratic university.
Of course, this insurgency was quickly crushed. But such extreme repression made legible the university’s subordination to wealthy donors, reactionary lobbies, and feckless politicians –its investment in the twisted logic and brutal actions of the carceral state.
I do not want to idealize the student movement as problem-free.[1] My point is that these protests, occupations and encampments may help us to think about legibility in uncanny times. As academics, the onus is on us to learn from these experiments.
VI
Ironically, the real threat posed by this movement seems to have been more legible to the ruling classes than to so many offended liberals, demoralized leftists, and cynical academics. It was especially revolting to hear tenured radicals smugly deriding these activated students.
A liberal discourse quickly denounced the police brutality and excessive punishments universities imposed on students. Such liberals deployed bourgeois common-sense to make these events misleadingly legible. They framed this as a gross overreaction to peaceful protests by innocent students and rightly denounced the violation of free speech, association and academic freedom. But it would be an analytic and political mistake to understand this as simply a confrontation between innocuous students and punitive authorities, between liberal rights and illiberal repression. Doing so obscures the movement’s subversive character and transformative potential.
These students rejected liberal norms. Their actions insisted that: order does not take priority over justice; protest is never a crime; property damage is not violence; liberal laws, institutions, and ideology may themselves be sources of horrifying violence; calls for reconciliation under conditions of domination perpetuate that domination; established authorities and institutions cannot be trusted to pursue just policies; meaningful transformation requires direct action, mass movement, and material risks. The student movement disrupted the mechanism that impels us to accommodate to the webs of uncanny barbarism that encircle us.
I would like to suggest that the ruling classes were right to fear the potential juggernaut signaled by these insurgent students. They shuddered before this display of collective power and resolute action, recognizing the threatening specter of an uprising grounded in internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-liberal, and anti-capitalist commitments to real democracy in Palestine and the United States. The intensity of their reaction suggests that, on some level, they grasped the fact that the US imperial hegemony and Zionist legitimacy are currently unravelling.
The student movement did not only denounce university hypocrisy and complicity, nor did it merely demand university reforms. It envisioned and enacted a different kind of university. Encampments often had open libraries. They organized practical workshops and teach-ins. Many faculty members held their classes in the encampments. Normal hierarchies between teachers and students thus became more porous. These spaces of collective study were also scenes of group poetry readings, song and dance circles, art builds, and film screenings. There were strategy meetings and democratic assemblies. These were multi-racial and multi-faith spaces in which days were punctuated by prayer. Students also undertook the collective work necessary to protect and maintain what they had built. Residents of local neighborhoods were typically invited to participate in these activities. Encampments served as mutual aid networks, distributing free food to anyone who wanted it. They thus displaced conventional boundaries between campuses and communities.
In short, these students modeled a different kind of learning that is autonomous, collective, lived, inclusive horizontal, practical, and political They practiced what Nietzsche would call a joyful knowing, in which study, struggle, art, festival, and everyday life are organically connected. The encampments were self-organized and self-managing collectives that operated according to principles of mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity. In them, students practiced forms of radical care and social love. By welcoming a wide range of social subjects, they created conditions for new forms of solidarity and new political subjectivities to emerge.
These evanescent formations envisioned and enacted a different kind of university. [By challenging the existing university from a standpoint, experience, and consciousness partly nourished by the university, they attempted to transcend the existing university.] And by prefiguring the university they wished to see, they anticipated a different kind of society
VII
So what can we now learn from the student movement?
First, like them, we should recognize how our universities are directly colluding with the converging Zionist, neoliberal, and white supremacist war on higher education. We too might have some leverage over a situation in which we are directly implicated. We too should recognize our location on a crucial front in the struggle for Palestinian liberation and against MAGA fascism.
Second, student protests revealed what should have long been clear: we are academic workers whose interests are not the same as those of management. Join and support your union or AAUP chapter (or try to form one). Stand in solidarity with your student!
Third, the student movement demonstrated the need to operate on two fronts. From one angle we need to confront existing university authorities and arrangements, demanding that they change their policies. We should certainly defend academic freedom, free speech, the right to dissent, the right to protest. We must oppose every iteration of the Palestine exception. The university needs to be free of outside political interreference and free of cops. It also needs to be free of charge. Student debt must be cancelled. We need to reject austerity regimes and challenge instrumentalist attempts to reduce higher education to vocational training for bullshit jobs. We need to reclaim faculty governance and transform boards of trustees. We must challenge adjunctification and end the exploitation of casual labor. University funds must be re-oriented into more ethical investments; we cannot allow these institutions to profit from corporate harm and state violence
From another angle, we need to forge alternative ways of producing knowledge, teaching courses, communicating publicly and gathering interlocutors that point beyond the limitations of the bourgeois university and its professionalized professoriat. We might emulate how student encampments exploded disabling boundaries between thought and world, theory and practice, knowledge and politics, facts and values, public and private spheres, specialists and the general public, the university and local communities, intellectual and manual labor.
This means promoting spaces for popular education, on and off campuses, by engaging in dialogue with a range of organic intellectuals, activists, creatives and ordinary citizens. It means supporting collective learning and effective knowledge production in and beyond the academy. It means challenging the guild mentality of disciplines and professional associations. Too often, academic habits, norms and pressures promote a depoliticized conception of knowledge production as a scholastic end in-itself, or as mere currency in professional status games whereby specialists demonstrate mastery of method and material [esoterica] for other specialists, to win acclaim, position, and institutional power.
The students rightly identified the university as a vital social institution. They acted as if a transformed university may indeed serve as a catalyzing node in the struggle for a different kind of society. We too have an opportunity and responsibility to envision and enact the kind of university we wish to see, as one step in forging a world we wish to see.
I close with three interlinked questions. What kind of social arrangements need to exist for the university we envision to be possible? What kind of university might help make possible that kind of society? Can we identify pathways between existing arrangements and such alternatives?
To answer these questions, we need to look beyond the false alternative between declaring transparency or celebrating opacity. They call for a different kind of legibility grounded in dialectical ways of seeing and knowing. They require concrete practice rather than abstract contemplative relation to the world we seek to understand. The vision we need can only emerge through experimental practices. This is what Lefebvre meant when he invoked the dialectic of the lived and the conceived. These questions also counsel against one-sided calls either to defend or abolish the university. The current crisis has created both subjective and objective conditions favorable to the task of abolishing the university we inherited in order to actualize that which exists potentially within this contradictory formation.
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VIII
We should anticipate a situation in which a growing number of left academics are identified as domestic terrorists. Those who do not remain silent, or recant, or refuse to toe ever more reactionary political lines will be fired. We can look to Turkey and India for clues about what may come. But what if this emerging mass of renegade faculty began to organize itself into radical networks? They could form economically self-sustaining cooperatives that students would join. During their course of study, they would work, and perhaps live, and learn in community with these professors. Each collective might serve as a hub in which a range of local community groups could gather, plan, learn and educate the educators. They would, in other words, be communes. A federation of such communes could form the infrastructure of a radical people’s university. Such an organ may serve as both element of and catalyst for broader experiments in collective self-management where inherited divisions between work, study, play, art, love, and politics become obsolete. Under such conditions the university might realize its immanent promise to promote individual and collective flourishing through autonomous democratic praxis.
