On the Educational Case for Encampments

Months before the Trumpist onslaught on higher education, US universities were rushing to prohibit protest encampments. Why do some ramshackle tents on lawns present such a threat to authority – as opposed to demonstrations and marches, which remain generally permitted, subject to certain regulations?

Encampments make a claim to land; and they contest the authorities’ control in a way that isn’t true of marching. People can hide in them, retreat into them and use them as staging grounds for further protest actions. They can be noisy and dirty, sometimes on purpose. Their aim is to put pressure on universities to change policy (there are no anti-Putin encampments in the West); noise and dirt may force administrators to react. Proponents of encampments might say that if they become part of the landscape, they have failed. They should resemble, to borrow an image from Robert Lowell, fishbones in an institution’s throat. No wonder, then, that universities have cracked down on encampments in the name of protecting property and safeguarding public order.

The core issue isn’t property, though, and it isn’t whether encampments are inherently unsafe, as some administrators have claimed. The question is whether they can be justified with regard to an institution’s educational mission, and hence receive some protection under the rubric of academic freedom. That appears to be the implicit wager when encampments proclaim themselves ‘free universities’. It also appears to be the assumption when university leaders negotiate with students, granting them some legitimacy – as opposed to treating them as simple trespassers (as happened with the most brutal crackdowns last year).

Those of us who teach at universities can’t simply include encampments in our pedagogy: regular seminars should not be held there, since that would amount to professors de facto coercing their students to take part in the encampment; any ‘free university’ should be free to access, but it must also remain free to enter and leave.

There is also a genuine issue with claiming property, which doesn’t have to do with bourgeois notions of ownership. A Canadian judge ruled last year that a student encampment at the University of Toronto ‘constituted a private appropriation of the university’s lands’. When others have good reasons to want to be in a space that has been occupied, they have a justifiable complaint. It’s tempting to say that being on the lawn to discuss war and peace is part of the educational mission; being there to chat with friends, shop online or make TikTok videos is not. But as Timothy Zick has argued, universities cannot legitimately make ‘content-based speech restrictions’. And yet there is still an educational argument for universities to tolerate encampments.

In principle, such spaces could become sites of serious discussion, both among the (broadly speaking) like-minded and among those whose views differ profoundly. At an encampment you can easily find people willing to engage on a particular topic. Encampments also allow for a productive ambiguity: with a march, you either join it or you are clearly a bystander. But entering an encampment does not signal commitment as such: you might be part of it; you might just be checking it out (and, unlike in a seminar relocated to the encampment, you remain free to leave at any time). Exactly contrary to the claims made by administrators, encampments can be a safe space – from a pedagogical point of view.

This strengthens the case for keeping encampments open. Plenty have been more like fortresses, with those inside bracing for a confrontation with the authorities. Beyond such quasi-military logic, the case for closure rests on the function of the encampment as fostering community, which may be less likely to happen when people come and go all the time, or when a site becomes a target of something like political tourism. Critics of the open encampment may say it that it ceases to be an uncomfortable fishbone and instead becomes part of an easily digestible educational menu.

Encampments are set up in particular places; but they echo recent methods of civil resistance in that their structures are light and easily moved. The quasi-monastic solemnity of neo-Gothic university buildings contrasts with what often develops as a festival atmosphere in encampments. More than half a century ago, a visionary designer tried to make the case for tents – quickly assembled and disassembled – as a new kind of campus:

I would counsel you in your deliberations regarding getting campuses ready now to get general comprehensive environment controls that are suitable to all-purposes like a circus. A circus is a transformable environment. You get an enclosure against ‘weather’ that you can put up in a hurry, within which you can put up all kinds of apparatus – high trapezes, platforms, rings, nets etc. You can knock it down in a few minutes … I would get buildings where it is possible for many to meet … You don’t have to put any ‘architecture’ there at all. You don’t have to build any sculptured architecture – use the ephemeral. Work from the visible to the invisible very rapidly.

Buckminster Fuller’s invocation of a circus might seem frivolous, bringing to mind the condemnations of student protest as a pseudo-revolutionary ‘carnival’ (as May ’68 was dismissed by liberals like Raymond Aron, for instance). But the ephemeral, and the effervescent, can also loosen up the atmosphere – making for encounters, difficult conversations and even productive conflicts that otherwise would not have happened. All of which can contribute to learning.

This is an expanded version of a text for ‘Genius Loci’, part of the ‘Time Space Existence’ exhibition at the European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Mora, Venice.