When Universities Turn Carceral: Between Academic Freedom and Elimination

Abstract

On April 18, 2024, Israeli police arrested Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian following statements she made about Israel, Gaza, and the ongoing genocide. The arrest was unusual even within East Jerusalem's carceral apparatus: a tenured professor at a renowned research university taken from her home for academic speech. Yet the police were not the first to act; the liberal academy moved first. Before the arrest, the HUJI administration had suspended Shalhoub-Kevorkian through expedited procedures, with the university's Rector and President declaring that HUJI “prides itself on being an Israeli, public and Zionist institution” and that her expressions “push freedom of speech and academic freedom to their limit”. Faculty letters stated Shalhoub-Kevorkian could “no longer be accepted as part of the academic community.” By August 2024, the university announced her departure. Though strikingly violent, HUJI's response is emblematic rather than exceptional. Across Israeli higher education, Palestinian students and faculty face intensified surveillance, disciplinary proceedings, and permanent removals, reflecting a climate of censorship and intimidation (Abu-Rabia-Queder and Hager 2024; aChord 2024; Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Otman 2025a, 2025b). A resonant pattern is visible in the United States, where universities increasingly employ illiberal measures within their own confines: mass arrests, retroactive rule-making, housing evictions, visa revocations, programme cancellations, and enhanced digital surveillance. By May 2024, over 2000 people had been detained on U.S. campuses (Shaheed 2024). In September 2025, the University of California, Berkeley reportedly provided federal authorities with the names of 160 faculty, students, and staff as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents,” and Harvard University Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism (2024) proposed expanded surveillance through “regular, in-depth demographic research,” stricter admissions screening, and oversight teams. While campuses have long employed exclusionary measures, recent developments starkly illuminate the entanglement between liberal institutions and carceral governance. A prominent liberal account attributes this dynamic to exogenous forces that increasingly “penetrate” (Mutua et al. 2024) liberal institutions. This essay challenges that view by foregrounding the liberal-carceral nexus: the longstanding, co-constitutive relationships between liberal institutions and carceral security, especially in imperial and settler colonial contexts. Drawing from settler colonial studies, Du Boisian sociology, and punishment and society scholarship, I argue that what often manifests as external pressure may also reveal endogenous relations. This disavowed relationship has long been maintained through “the governance line” (Aaronson and Rothschild Elyassi 2025): a material and symbolic boundary that differentiates those governed through freedom and regulatory inclusion from those subjected to coercive control and carceral exclusion. When this line is breached or destabilized, carceral technologies can increasingly contract inward. By suggesting that universities “turn carceral,” then, I do not name a new phenomenon but rather refer to the inward contraction of the governance line. Crucially, these moments of destabilization are also revelatory in that they expose the governance line's enduring brittleness. When infrastructures that sustain longstanding divisions falter—whether through crisis, institutional overreach, or violent excess—they generate ruptures in which horizons previously foreclosed may come into view. Such ruptures are contingent and possibly catastrophic, but they illustrate that the liberal–carceral nexus is less a finished architecture than an ongoing, high-maintenance achievement. The liberal-carceral nexus manifests across scales: it operates not only through territorial divisions but also via epistemic and subjective enactments. Epistemically, the analysis suggests how academic freedom in racialized political economies is often institutionally entangled with the elimination of certain peoples and knowledges that threaten foundational arrangements. This becomes particularly visible when scholars center Palestinian knowledge: documenting catastrophe, linking Zionism with empire, and challenging the fiction that settler liberties are independent achievements. Subjectively, a relational perspective helps illuminate how academic subjectivity in settler-liberal institutions is paradoxically co-produced with eliminatory processes. This fractal dynamic reveals how liberal academic subjectivity itself, along with the liberties and protections it affords, remains entangled with carceral technologies that operate at territorial, institutional, and intimate scales. This essay does not articulate a general theory or offer a comprehensive comparative account; rather, it develops conceptual tools for understanding the liberal-carceral nexus and examining its variable manifestations. While the analysis suggests that this nexus is resonant across contexts, it treats neither liberal institutions nor carceral governance as monolithic. Their degrees of differentiation and entanglement vary in meaningful, path-dependent ways. Accordingly, the argument proceeds through a theoretically oriented, multi-scalar analysis that emerges primarily from the Israeli case while drawing on U.S. examples illustratively rather than comparatively. What follows maps key architectural contours of the liberal-carceral nexus in settler colonial and imperial contexts, while remaining attentive to the localized specificities through which it takes shape. The stakes extend beyond our campuses. If what appears as an external threat is also a contraction of longstanding entanglements, then responses that seek merely to defend liberal institutions against authoritarian penetration will fail to address the infrastructural relationships this essay traces. What becomes necessary is not simply a defense of liberal autonomy, but rather confronting the governance line: the material, epistemic, and subjective infrastructures through which liberal institutions continuously separate those fit for freedom from those requiring removal. Such an undertaking—inseparable from decolonial struggles for land return, the dismantling of settler colonial governance, and the formation of solidarities across established divisions—requires building institutional capacities that do not rely on carceral outsourcing, cultivating alternative organizational forms capable of working through conflict without defaulting to elimination, and imagining institutional life beyond the liberal-carceral nexus. As the governance line prefigures not only spatial arrangements but the very horizon of institutional possibility, it may determine not just who can enter but what can be imagined, not just which bodies are removed but which worlds are rendered unthinkable. Building infrastructures beyond the governance line may therefore require organizational possibilities not yet fully imaginable from within existing institutions. 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