Carceral academia

American universities might seem to be going overboard with violent cops, student arrests, and criminalizing protest but academia has always been a place where carceral logic is front and centre.

Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who was one of leaders in the Palestine solidarity encampments on campus was arrested in his New York City home by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers, a unit overseen by the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). Two agents in plain clothes were let into the building by Khalil’s 7-months pregnant wife and when told that Khalid has permanent US residency through a Green Card, they informed him that his green card had been revoked. This story has been widely reported since Khalil’s arrest and the revoking of his green card presents a shocking confluence of state, academic, and border regimes that moved collaboratively and swiftly to terrorize and incarcerate a “lawful” citizen of the United States.

For many, these supposedly prestigious American universities relentlessly calling cops on their own students might seem like a new development stemming from the last sixteen months of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. But academia has always been a place where carceral logic is front and centre.

For starters, all education relies on surveillance and metrics whether its marking up student attendance, nonstop swiping of IDs, or an over-the-top reliance on grading and exams. A favorite activity in the university world is the writing of a “report.” This ubiquitous yet charged genre can range from student reviews of faculty or a dean’s review of faculty or a report about an academic unit’s performance or a report of research and teaching activities or punitive compliance reports about various breaches of policies — you name it, the university will “report” the hell out of it. More and more, police reports have come to fit nicely with the university’s obsession with snitching, surveillance and detention as universities now rely heavily on their police force and on the criminal justice system for all kinds of small and large issues.

The happy marriage between incarceration and academia in the US was solidified when universities opted to have a large police presences on campus with Yale being the first to get its own police force as early as in the late 19th century. Campus police are trained and sworn law enforcement officers who have the power to lay down local, state and federal laws. In short, there might be minor nuances with regards to jurisdiction and university-specific training but campus cops are quite simply, cops.

American academia has been laid bare by small but powerful coteries of pro-Palestinian student protesters on hundreds of campuses in the last year and a half. The violence has been staggering to behold with cops body slamming students and faculty alike, going amok with batons, allowing vigilante militias into the protests, and making unhinged mass arrests. Cops do what cops are trained to do but the institutions that call large forces of armed police to terrorize their own students are unconscionable.

And it has not stopped there. Universities have meted out unreasonably harsh sentences on their students. Protesters have been suspended, expelled, and banned from entering the university. But far worse has been the deliberate criminalization of the protests with students being charged with misdemeanors like trespassing and felony charges for “mob action” or “resisting a police officers.” Students as young as 19 and 20 years old are likely to end up with year long prison sentences as well as a lifelong stain on their records. It is despicable to see the universities use the civil and criminal court systems to further corrupt, unlawful and ideological agendas.

For the most part, we have been blaming presidents, chancellors and deans who have been mandated to control the situation and are appeasing boards of trustees, Zionist donors, and various weapons manufacturers who have significant investments in universities. But academic “Karens” have been in overdrive too — various faculty reporting their students for comments in seminars, writing up a storm of Islamophobic and anti-student letters in listserves, policing their colleagues, policing various social media accounts and reporting them, and other such actions. These individual acts of violence towards students and colleagues have been so numerous across so many campuses that it has served to strengthen the existing carceral logic across universities.

A side effect has been that the excessive brandishing of the term “anti-semite.” Everyone being deemed antisemitic has meant that the term has been diluted down and stripped of its power entirely. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism has been completely normalized.

I have been in academia for over two decades and have seen this world up close for the longest time. Having started graduate school right after the events of 9/11, I have also been part of resisting and protesting so many academic policies and practices over the years that I understand deep down how broken, cruel and utterly arrogant this profession is. In fact, I’ve been fighting academia for so long and have tried out a gamut of things including attempting to reform the system from within, to dismantle the system, to burn it all down, to rebuild it, to create alternate institutions and so on and so forth. Nothing has worked. And it is fitting that my own academic career shattered like glass one fine day.

I was canceled and pushed out by my own English department at the University of Connecticut a couple of years ago. I criticized a course that celebrated the literature of the British empire with an all white male authors syllabus but that labeled itself as “anti-racist.” It even drew funds from an anti-racism grant. Suddenly, a department of majority white faculty, around 70 in number, closed ranks around me. Ironically, they all ganged up against a woman of color who actually taught race and colonialism to defend their supposed version of well-intentioned anti-racism. I was first reprimanded, even slurred at, then iced out, and eventually I lost graduate students, was placed in other units, given an excessive workload, and over time, all of this took a toll and my career slowly derailed. I filed a legal complaint against the unit for the racist discrimination and workplace harassment and it somehow swung in my favor. We settled on me keeping my job for a little longer until I can find my footing in a new job or even a whole new profession. (I dare to dream!)

It will be a bittersweet closure but I learned how pointedly violent academia can be, and how much academics will surveil anyone they see as not towing the line. This is also the one vocation where research and action have no co-relation. Someone can study radical subjects like decolonization or the pernicious nature of racism but come out completely in favor of colonialism and be a raving racist too. And since most academics fancy themselves as learned and as good writers, it is shocking how many of them are invested in take-downs, cancelations and copious amounts of policing of their own students and colleagues.

I plan to divulge the details of my journey as a fallen academic on a different Substack someday. For now, Mahmoud Khalil is on my mind as are the courageous and incredibly young protesters who are being harassed, arrested, beaten and broken by American universities that have become drunk on power. It is a new twist in the tale that Khalil’s green card was actually revoked and that his whereabouts are still not known. Almost three months ago, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was disappeared in front of our eyes in Gaza and for weeks on end, no one knew where he was. Plunging everyone into a state of unknowing and forcing us all to speculate the worst is a way of inflicting psychological terror. Our global incarceration regimes are skilled at these dirty, fear-inducing mechanisms and these tactics are meant to take away our desire to speak out and resist. As for carceral academia, it is so far gone that it is hard to imagine a way for this profession to ever find its moral center. But I hope we can all stay grounded, keep fighting, and not let them take our fire.

Love and solidarity,
Bhakti Shringarpure

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It's March and we are excited about our book club in just 3 weeks. On March 29, we will discuss We, the Kindling, a novel by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek about three friends who survive captivity in the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. We are also very excited that the author will join us at the book club. Sign up here