Notes on Political Repression, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the University
In the second semester of my first year of full-time teaching as a “newly minted Ph.D.,” I stood before my class rehashing an email we had all received regarding university protocol if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were to enter our classroom to apprehend students suspected of being in the United States “illegally.” This seemed unlikely, but plausible enough to merit a warning to prepare students for this possibly traumatic upending of our class. What is unsettling about feeling the need to make these statements has not been so much the imminence of such an incursion into our space, but its seemingly growing likelihood as we become further entrenched in the absurdities of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The threat of these intrusions is serious, but not singular; it is part and parcel of a broader campaign of repression that threatens the institutional survival of the university.
The crises the university faces are both material and existential. They have the potential to affect not only faculty working conditions and student experiences, but also the survival of the ideals on which higher education supposedly rests, like fostering critical thinking, maintaining academic freedom, and exposing students to diverse views. To this end, faculty may find themselves in a vice grip between declining career prospects in the post-COVID economy and the persistence of a lurch towards authoritarian censorship, both from within the academy and in American social and political life more broadly. These threads come together more clearly as the federal government attempts to economically extort academic institutions into policies that amount to endorsing the political ideology of the current regime like trying to gut any “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs and censoring criticism of the State of Israel’s ongoing commission of what has variously been described as war crimes and genocide in Gaza.
The most striking examples of these tendencies have been the ICE arrests of students or recent graduates who were essentially accused of nothing more than political dissent. In many of these cases, those taken into custody were legally in the United States and had their visas quickly revoked owing to their political activism. Mahmoud Khalil, perhaps the most high-profile of these, was whisked away from his New York City apartment in March of 2025 and brought to an immigration detention center in Louisiana, while his pregnant wife was unable to contact him. Khalil was detained for 104 days and missed the birth of his son. His detention coincided with a flurry of others related to political activities on or affiliated with college campuses, like the apprehension of his fellow Columbia University students Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Ranjani Srinivasan, or the arrest of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, whose “offense” was co-authoring an op-ed that claimed the institution was dismissive of the concerns of the student-run University Senate.
The media spectacle around these examples and other similar cases is unsurprising given the degree to which these actions undermine the American ideal of “freedom of expression” in general and also strike at the more specific notion of “academic freedom.” Critical theorists have long pointed out that a strong analysis of violent spectacles necessarily engages the social, political, economic, and racialized structural forms that enable their persistence. In other words, how might we imagine the university and its functioning in relation to the political economy, imperialism, racialization, and state violence? The use of ICE—which has now been directed as part of its general operations to make approximately 3,000 arrests per day nationwide—as a forceful means of actualizing the Trump administration’s desire for political repression, along with the persistent threats of federal defunding of universities that do not comply with the administration’s ideological orthodoxies, rather explicitly demonstrates some of these connections.
While these recent accelerations have been alarming, it is worth recalling the baseline for what the current administration claims was not enough repression to curb these “illegal protests” on campuses. The response to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the University of California, Irvine is an instructive example. On May 15, 2024, student protestors entered a campus building, dropping a banner that read “Alex Odeh Hall,” a reference to a Palestinian activist who had been assassinated a few miles up the road in Santa Ana, California. This prompted the university administration to utilize the campus’ emergency alert system to communicate that a violent protest was occurring and that people in the area should shelter in place. The university proceeded to call in at least twenty different police departments. Hundreds of officers clad in riot gear arrived to violently disperse what had been a peaceful protest.
These events were striking for me, as they occurred while I was rounding out my studies on this campus, and I witnessed how fundamentally peaceful and nonviolent the encampment demonstration was before the administration chose to send scores of heavily armed riot police to destroy it. This level of force, while extreme, was hardly unique, with large-scale police interventions happening at dozens of other campuses nationwide.
There is little reason to believe that these tendencies toward forceful repression will not continue to intensify in the U.S. context, in general, and on its college campuses, in particular. In San Diego, California, where I live and teach, federal agents have been arresting people at court proceedings, attempting to apprehend street vendors downtown, and conducting highly militarized workplace raids on local restaurants. These escalations, which are essentially punishments for being a “sanctuary city,” have picked up in the few weeks following commencement ceremonies. As a new year approaches, the usual optimism and excitement of returning to campus may give way to apprehension, and standing in front of the class explaining what to do in an ICE raid may feel more like preparation than precaution. In the broader scheme of things, we may be at an inflection point: will the university retain its potential as a space for critical thought, or slide further into something more like a site of Orwellian control?
