The Campus Does Not Exist
How campus war is made
Samuel P. Catlin
Recently, something did not happen to me.
I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective were irrelevant to the process, in which I was not an agent but an object: an asset to be safeguarded; a liability to be managed; an investigation to be foreclosed.
The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in need of protection. I was not a victim, yet the very presence of this camera figured me as somebody who might imminently become one. I wasn’t afraid, but the camera figured me as somebody who ought to be. It figured me, in short, as a target. Precisely because something had not happened to me, I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight, into the type of person to whom something might happen.
My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my workplace. Now I was on “the campus.”
This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course, some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first, of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I call campus panic.
*
The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.
The correspondences between that moment and this one were unmistakable to those of us who watched, in person or through screens, as the NYPD hauled 108 Columbia University students off of their institution’s campus on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Like the campus panic of the 1960s–70s, this one is aroused by the spectacle of young people speaking out against the inhumane actions of the US and its imperial client states, as well as against the complacency and complicity of their own educational institutions. Now, as then, the act of protesting against injustice undergoes a curious transfiguration in the media, which refashions this action into the object of frantic scrutiny, surveillance, and suppression.
Harvard University professor Walter Johnson, in an essay about experience of working at Harvard since October 7 titled “Living Inside a Psyop”—the psyop being, precisely, “the campus”—calls this the “two-step maneuver” of campus panic: (1) Look over here, (2) Do not look over there. Overreact to this, overlook that.[1] Look at the US, not at Palestine. Look up at what is happening in the clouds over Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a plane trails a banner declaring, “HARVARD HATES JEWS”; do not look at what is happening on the ground in Gaza, do not look at the masses of the displaced, the bereaved, the starving, the wounded, the sick, the dying, and certainly do not look at the dead, murdered with artillery supplied by the US government and funded by American citizens’ taxes. When student protestors chant, “From the river to the sea,” hear a speculative antisemitic canard; do not hear a reference to an actual river, an actual sea, an actual and ongoing history of dispossession and occupation.
Of course, one objective of such a protest is often to direct public attention in exactly the opposite direction. A protest demands that we look toward it, but only so that it can reroute our gaze to the thing being protested. The two-step hypostatizes the dynamic speech act of protest, dissevering it from its referential function so that it cannot achieve its goal. The cameras of the mass media turn away from the referent and toward the protest, which is presented to the audience as the actual crisis worthy of our attention, fury, and terror. In the present instance, glossing the protest as antisemitic occludes its intended referent from public view.
It is easy enough to see how such a maneuver furthers the propaganda aims of both the American and the Israeli governments. What is less obvious, though, is why the camera turns toward the campus in particular. The American media’s obsession with—its panic about—the campus has pervaded coverage of the war, to the point that this coverage ceases, really, to be coverage of the war at all.
To some extent it is a matter of supply generating demand. The US is, after all, a nation whose local newspapers consist mainly of syndicates of a very few for-profit conglomerates, while social media platforms subject users to the (again profit-motivated) whims of an algorithmic apparatus which is, at best, only glancingly and accidentally concerned with the tedious business of actually informing people. That narratives about “campus antisemitism,” “the campus free speech debate,” and “campus culture wars” are manufactured to appeal to consumers and thereby drive revenue, however, still does not explain why the narrative is appealing. Harvard, for instance, educates about 0.047% of the total current American undergraduate population. Yet, somehow, the assertion that this institution “hates Jews” occupies a more prominent place in public discourse than the fact that a considerably greater percentage of the total Palestinian undergraduate population has been bombed out of existence or turned refugee. The war on Gaza is being rewritten for American audiences as a “campus war.” Often quite literally: for example, in March 2024 the Atlantic, a sort of conservatism-laundering machine for liberal elites, ran an essay by a Stanford University sophomore under the title, “The War at Stanford.”[2]
“The war on Gaza is being rewritten for American audiences as a ‘campus war.’”
This relocation of the theater of war to the campus refashions the very real violence visited upon Israelis and, in vastly greater numbers, upon Palestinians into an ambient anxiety about American Jewish safety. Are American Jews, the media asks, safe on campus? Do they feel safe on campus? (Note that unsafety and its perception are treated as interchangeable concerns.) I am not suggesting that anyone is necessarily wrong to feel unsafe on any campus, after October 7 or before it. Nor am I suggesting that there is not antisemitism in higher education—recall the poster in my hallway—although it is true that its prevalence is overstated when all anti-Zionist speech is counted as antisemitic. My point, rather, is that regardless of the actuality of these phenomena, it is rather odd that they should prove so newsworthy. What is it about the notion that something is happening, or might happen, “on campus” that so engages the national imagination?
The scope of this question exceeds the post-October 7 moment, for all its proximate urgency. Campus panic is a sustained note in the American public conversation; from Vietnam to Gaza, it has never let up. Reliably, every few months something happens “on campus” that the media inflates to the status of a national emergency: a speaker is invited, a speaker is disinvited, a speaker is not disinvited, a professor teaches, a student complains, a protest takes place. The media offers these incidents as scandals so fascinating and disturbing that they eclipse even a genocide.
Perspectives from a range of academic disciplines can help us understand campus panic’s persistence. From political economists, media critics, American historians, and sociologists, we can learn about higher education as a switching-point of class mobility and reproduction; about how legacy media institutions serve as clearing-houses for the best, or least most expensively, educated Americans; about simmering populist anti-intellectualism and resentment of the academy; about the history of student protest; about ballooning tuitions and debts; and about the contradictory status of the most elite schools as emblems of American identity. However, we also need to be more precise about what we are talking about when we talk about “the campus.” For campus panic is, specifically, campus panic. It is the campus which we have collectively cathected—not the university, not higher education. For instance, the trope that circulates in the media today is not “university antisemitism,” but “campus antisemitism,” and this rhetorical pattern holds across the history of campus panic. Anecdotally, I find it exasperatingly difficult to get non-stakeholders to care very much about “the university,” a social institution which is, in fact, suffering an ongoing polycrisis (albeit not the one narrated in the discourse of campus panic). Yet some of the same people who could not care less about “the university” get alarmingly excited about “the campus.”
To explain this, we will need to think psychoanalytically—to think about fantasy and desire. We need, in short, a theory of the campus. What follows is a series of preliminary theses intended to contribute to such a theory.
*
Thesis: The campus is a fantasy and a media trope. The camera produces the campus. The camera is at once a security camera—like the one installed in my department’s hallway—and the camera of the mass media. Each camera, the police and the media, feeds back into the other, in the paranoid spiral characteristic of panic: acceleration, escalation, inflation. (That these words also describe the tendencies of university tuitions, endowments, and administrator salaries is, perhaps, not merely coincidental.)
To say that the campus is a fantasy and a trope is also to say that the campus does not actually exist. It is not a geographic site. Colleges and universities, like the one that employs me, have campuses, but these are not the campus. The campus is not even the genus of which discrete empirical institutions are species. When Liz Magill was forced to resign from her position as president of the University of Pennsylvania after testifying in a congressional hearing which turned out to be a trap, something happened to Liz Magill and to the University of Pennsylvania. But the purpose of the trap was not to implicate her or that university; it was to implicate the campus as such. Magill was targeted by right-wing political forces because, at that moment, Penn served as a convenient synecdoche for the campus. However, this status was provisional; even as the same bad-faith, well-moneyed actors who orchestrated Magill’s ousting immediately set about dismantling academic freedom protections for Penn faculty,[3] the camera’s gaze has moved on to new synecodches: Harvard and its (now ex-) president, Claudine Gay. Any given institution’s literal campus stands in for the campus only for as long as the synecdoche secretes sufficiently the juices of scandal. The dismantling of faculty freedoms is not a scandal; it is business as usual, a basic plotline of American higher education’s decline for the past half-century.
Thesis: The campus is no institution, and it is every institution. But it is some institutions more than others.
In media coverage of the Magill affair, Penn was represented by stock photographs of a single, manicured quadrangle bounded by brick buildings, despite the fact that the rest of Penn does not much resemble this quadrangle in architectural style or landscaping. Arguably, Penn would be better represented by the shiny new buildings it erects atop the ruins of the neighborhood it rapaciously consumes; residents of West Philadelphia who are not affiliated with the university interact with it less as an educational institution than as an aggressive real estate enterprise. Nevertheless, that quadrangle circulated as the signifier of Penn. This is because it is the image of Penn that most closely aligns with the fantasy of the campus. As something like the aesthetic ideal of the campus, the quadrangle limns the fantasy’s contours.[4] It reveals how the campus is imagined on the model of a certain type of educational institution, one that is decreasingly representative of American higher education. In a pinch, a university like the one I work at can be pressed into service as the synecdoche of the campus, but the media clearly prefers a quadrangle. It aesthetically articulates the campus as a bounded zone.
Thesis: The campus is the fantasy of an inside. There is the campus, and then there is the outside. On campus/off campus. But the boundary between the campus and its outside is a permeable membrane. The quadrangle, with its gated walls, is, after all, not really where the space of the university ends. The empirically existing campus is integrated into its environs, so that it is difficult to say just when one is off campus. An enclosure, the campus is never quite closed enough. For this reason it must be policed. There lurks always the possibility that the real world will penetrate the campus, violate the campus.
To date, the fullest theory of the campus is in Jennifer Doyle’s 2015 book Campus Sex, Campus Security. Throughout this book, Doyle meditates upon a notorious incident from 2011, when police pepper-sprayed protestors involved in the Occupy movement at the University of California at Davis. The files compiled during the ensuing investigation contain an interview with the university’s then-chancellor, Linda Katehi, who explains that the police were sent in to clear the Occupy tent encampment because “We were worried at the time about non-affiliates.” Whence these “non-affiliates”? Helpfully, albeit unreflectively, Katehi unspools her own chain of panicky associations: “Because the issues from Oakland were in the news, and the use of drugs and sex and other things, and you know we have here very young students…. We were worried especially about having very young girls…with older people who come from the outside.”[5] (Oakland is 68.2 miles away from Davis; there is no direct public transit between them.) This specter of the “non-affiliate” from “off campus” would, the administration fears, exploit student protest to cross the phantom borderline and impinge upon the campus to violate “very young girls.”
It is impossible to miss the pornographic overtones of Katehi’s statement. But whose desire is she narrating here? Not her own, surely. Rather, she is being ventriloquized by the administration of the University of California system—and, behind that, a whole social order. Lurid, prurient, gothic, and almost farcically blunt in its racism, this institutional fantasy of the rape of the “very young girl” (white, of course) by the “non-affiliate” is the primal scene of the campus. Ostensibly so that it may be prevented from ever actually coming to pass, this assault must be ceaselessly imagined (a worst-case scenario for the university’s general counsel) and narrated (a cautionary tale for incoming coeds). A paranoiac security apparatus gets up and running entirely on the frisson of this rape fantasy. The campus is imagined as the place where there are people—“very young girls”—to whom something might happen. There must be somewhere the girls can be kept safe from the non-affiliates; there must be a campus.
Such security measures will never be enough to guarantee total safety on campus. Not even sealing off the campus and managing access to it via checkpoints, as is now the case at Columbia, can keep the students safe—not least because the majority of the sexual assault that does happen to college students is committed by affiliates. Yet even if securitization is insufficient, it is also the only allowable response to a perceived threat, and so it gets ratcheted up, up, up. This is the nature of panic. The panic itself produces “the campus,” about which there is always more panicking still to do.
Thesis: The essential components of the campus, therefore, are not the classroom, the library, the laboratory, or even the dormitory, but rather the security camera and the cruising police SUV. The aesthetics of the quadrangle launders these paraphernalia: the ID card with the magnetized strip is allegorized as the ivy-adorned brick edifice.
The coherence of the campus as a fantasy depends upon the aestheticization of its security apparatus. Consider a recent incident at the University of Southern California. On April 15, 2024, the USC administration canceled the graduation speech of its 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. The rationale administrators offered Tabassum was that her speech somehow posed a security risk. While they admitted that USC “had the resources to take appropriate safety measures” for the speech, Tabassum later reported that they told her “they would not be doing so since increased security protections is not what the University wants to ‘present as an image’” to the tuition-forking parents visiting campus for the ceremony.[6] Security is something that should be felt, not seen.
On the evening of December 11, 2023, Brown University administrators sent in the police to arrest students, including not a few Jewish ones, who had peacefully occupied University Hall to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and university divestment from Israel. Police officers booked and fingerprinted students right there on the spot, in a building which looks, in photographs, like nothing so much as the campus. The scene was disorienting, not because something was out of place, but because nothing was. The fantasy and the material reality of the campus had coincided. What was strange was not that the campus had suddenly become a police station, but rather that it turned out already to have been one all along.
*
Thesis: The campus has essentially to do with students. “The campus” exists for students; as the number of undergraduates in the US increased, so too did the media discourse on “the campus.” Professors figure into campus panic only insofar as the media takes their research and public statements to indicate something about their relations to, influence on, students.
Katehi’s statement quoted by Doyle in Campus Sex, Campus Security vividly displays the campus’s essential connection with students. The story Katehi tells about the campus is a story about keeping students safe. In this story, something happened—student protestors were victimized, brutalized by the police—so that something else would not happen, so that somebody else would not become a victim of a different type of brutalization. Katehi figures the non-victim of the rape that does not happen as a child: “very young students,” “very young girls.” But most college students are, legally speaking, adults. So how is it that the actually existing undergraduate woman becomes, at the precise moment when the institution fantasizes about her assault, the “very young girl.”
“What was strange was not that the campus had suddenly become a police station, but rather that it turned out already to have been one all along.”
As soon as the discourse of the campus becomes a libidinally fraught fantasy about children to whom something might happen, we find ourselves on the theoretical terrain mapped by the Lacanian theorist Lee Edelman two decades ago in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). As I have previously argued in this magazine, in the discourse of the campus the student turns out to be a type of the Child—the organizing trope of the heterosexist ideology Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.”[7] Reproductive futurism is, among other things, an ideology of security: the sacrosanct Child, “the telos of social order, …the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust,” must be protected at any cost; the naturalness of heterosexuality and the gender binary must never be questioned.[8] Katehi’s narration of the primal fantasy of the campus exhibits reproductive futurism at its most histrionic. In the imagined body of the “very young girl,” collective anxieties about the Child and about social reproduction—always raced; note, again, the specter of miscegenation hanging over the narrative—are given pornographic form.
And then thought stops abruptly: whenever there is a risk that something might happen to the Child, the time for thinking is over. It is time for action, reaction. Time to call the police. That actual UC Davis students, engaged in an act of passive resistance, were hurt as a result of this frenzy to protect the “very young girls” of UC Davis belies the phantasmatic status of the latter.
Viewed through the lens of Edelman’s argument in No Future, the fantasy of the campus appears as an allegory of the nation-state. The future of the nation itself is taken to be at stake in what happens “on campus.” Both nation and campus are supposed to be securely bounded, to keep safe the Child; in both cases, this safety proves impossible to guarantee, and this ineluctable exposure—to violence, to liability, to non-affiliates—spikes the panic. When there is “campus unrest,” panic flares because the campus is supposed to be where unrest does not happen, where the Child is safe from reality. Panic nudges both campus and nation toward ever more extreme, ever more militarized practices, aesthetics finally subordinated to terror. Borders, checkpoints. An especially shrill Columbia Business School professor has taken to demanding, on any media platform he can access, that students who chant “Free Palestine!” should be expelled and banned from the Columbia campus.[9]
The Child must be defended. So, enemies must be banished. So, a camera must be installed. So, a wall must be built. But let it be covered in ivy!
*
Taken together, my theses suggest that what is most libidinally threatening to the social order about protest “on campus” is that the students themselves incite and participate in it. In this situation there are no non-affiliates to target or to blame for the threat posed to the Child. But still, the illogic of the panic demands a non-affiliate, and so a non-affiliate is, inevitably, produced—from within the campus.
Consider the letter sent by Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to NYPD Deputy Commissioner Michael Gerber on the morning of April 18, in which Shafik requests that the NYPD arrest the 108 Columbia students participating in the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a peaceful occupation of one of the lawns of the Morningside Heights campus’s main quadrangle. One day after being grilled by the same congressional committee that set in motion the downfalls of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay, Shafik writes: “[…M]ore than 100 individuals are currently occupying the South Lawn…. The group has been informed numerous times and in writing that they are not permitted to occupy this space, are in violation of the University’s rules and policies, and must disperse. All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. At this time, the participants in the encampment are not authorized to be on University property and are trespassing.”[10] In these sentences we read Shafik rhetorically and bureaucratically producing non-affiliates where before there had been only affiliates. By suspending the students, Shafik made them into non-affiliates, “individuals” available for state violence.
Stripping the protestors of their student status by sovereign fiat, Shafik casts them in new roles in the fantasy of the campus: no longer the Child, now they are the dangerous non-affiliates that threaten the Child. She continues: “The actions of these individuals are in violation of University rules and policies, including that they have interfered with the operation of the University, refused to identify themselves, refused to disperse, set up tents on campus space, failed to comply with policies, and damaged campus property. The continued encampment raises safety concerns for the individuals involved and the entire community. … I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the university.”[11] When “these individuals” were students, their actions were technically permissible; now that they are non-affiliates, they are “in violation,” “raise safety concerns,” and finally “pose a clear and present danger.”
Danger to what? “To the substantial functioning of the University.” Which University functions were endangered—if a “University function” even can be endangered—by the Gaza Solidarity Encampment? NYPD Chief John Chell pointed out to the Columbia Spectator that this assessment was Shafik’s, not the NYPD’s: “[…T]he students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”[12] What the encampment did do was occupy the lawns in front of Columbia’s main library. It was an image that was in danger. The protest disrupted, in other words, nothing so much as the fantasy of “the campus” itself. For the sake of “the campus,” 108 students peacefully protesting a genocide were suspended and arrested.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that fantasies are powerful, but it also teaches us that once we recognize them for what they are, we can free ourselves, at least a little, from their tyranny. When we see that the campus is a fantasy, we can begin to resist the pull of panic. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment itself demonstrates this lesson. The students involved in the protest refused to be cast as the Child in a national fantasy. Camped out on the campus, they instead occupied that fantasy. Offered a panicked, irrationally terrified future of security for some, they courageously demanded a future of freedom for all.
The day after the arrests, the official death toll in Gaza passed 34,000.
[1] Walter Johnson, “Living Inside a Psyop: Three Months at Harvard,” n+1 (January 10, 2024): https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/living-inside-a-psyop/.
[2] Theo Baker, “The War at Stanford,” The Atlantic (March 26, 2024): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/.
[3] Irene Mulvey, “The AAUP Condemns Escalating Assault on Academic Freedom at Penn,” AAUP.org (December 19, 2023): https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-condemns-escalating-assault-academic-freedom-penn.
[4] Dylan Davidson has insightfully probed the aesthetics of the elite university in connection with its political economy; see Davidson, “To Be Transformed,” Post45: Contemporaries (March 13, 2022): https://post45.org/2022/03/to-be-transformed/.
[5] Jennifer Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security (South Pasadena: Semiotext[e], 2015), 15–16.
[6] “Provost announces valedictorian won’t speak at graduation in May,” USC Annenberg Media (April 15, 2024): https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2024/04/15/provost-announces-valedictorian-wont-speak-at-graduation-in-may/.
[7] See Samuel P. Catlin, “Lee Edelman’s Lesson,” in Parapraxis 3 (Winter 2023–24): 32–39, at 33.
[8] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 11.
[9] We have only to ask which nation-state we are talking about here to begin to grasp why pro-Palestinian speech, in particular, incites campus panic. As Doyle comments, “otherworldly conflict zones haunt the first-world imagination. In our minds, we wall off the campus as if it were a middle-class home in Johannesburg.… The way…in which the campus is being walled off does bear some resemblance to the day-to-day security practices of that other post-Apartheid state.” Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security, 44, emphases in original.
[10] Minouche Shafik, “Letter to NYPD,” publicsafety.columbia.edu (April 18, 2024): https://publicsafety.columbia.edu/content/letter-nypd.
[11] Shafik, “Letter to NYPD.”
[12] Amira McKee and Isha Banerjee, “Adams, NYPD announce over 108 arrests in ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ sweep,” Columbia Spectator (April 18, 2024): https://www.columbiaspectator.com/city-news/2024/04/18/adams-nypd-announce-over-108-arrests-during-gaza-solidarity-encampment-sweep/.