Barricades at the Ivory Tower: The University as a Site of Struggle

Abstract

This essay argues that the current assault on academia represents not an unprecedented crisis of academic freedom, but the enduring contradictions of liberalism and the U.S. university. Rejecting liberal nostalgia for a past that never secured freedom for women, queer people, people of color, or workers, I position Palestine as a paradigm through which the limits of free speech, institutional autonomy, and liberal rights are made visible. Drawing on my location as a Palestinian feminist scholar, I show how bipartisan repression of Palestine activism exposes the university as an elite institution of power rather than a refuge from it. Against calls to defend the university as it was, I argue for a radical reimagining of what it could be. The essay advances a three-part intervention for feminist scholars: articulating an emancipatory vision of the university as a democratic commons; shifting from episodic mobilization to sustained organizing that builds material power; and embracing a coalitional, multi-flank strategy across students, faculty, staff, and communities. I conclude that Palestine has not only laid bare the university’s failures but has opened new horizons for demanding a fundamentally different institution aligned with justice and collective liberation.