Introduction

About 150 students congregated at the bottom of Prolutum University’s sloping hill, with a tense combination of excitement, exhaustion, and anxiety emanating from their eyes and bodily movements. Cars were shuttling sleeping bags and blankets to a nearby house that was volunteered to hold the belongings of those who were preparing to stay overnight in Prolutum’s Admissions office. After driving one of the cars, I arrived back to the spot just a minute before one of the organizers, a 22 year-old African-American woman, began calling everybody into line. Rather quickly, the densely packed group of people made their way up to the newly renovated, red brick building. As soon as we entered, ten students moved quickly, taping off areas where people could sit, having researched the fire code regulations the night before. Members of the Association of Critical Collegians (ACC) made homes out of various corners of grey carpet—some sitting and finding spaces to read, others grabbing some of the already prepared red and black spray painted cardboard signs to head outside: ‘diversity not diversion’, ‘community not conformity’, ‘reclaiming our education’. Students were taking a stand on the kinds of oppression they faced within the campus community, and demanding attention.

Standing on the stone steps, we noticed an employee from Buildings and Grounds standing nearby the building (one of the only people of colour employed on campus) directing those who worked in the Admissions Office to head down to the student union. It was clear that the university had been aware of what the ACC had planned for that Monday morning, and had made plans to address the situation—that is, ensuring that business as usual could take place in an alternative space. From the first few moments of what would turn into a 100 hour-long sit-in demonstration, the administration of Prolutum University took measures to ensure that outside of the Admissions Office, the institution’s daily functioning would continue as usual. Tours, information sessions, and other events related to the self-marketing of the university were simply dis- and re-located, and staff were trained accordingly. A movement started with two weeks of underground planning, initiated by four women of colour, both began and was regulated within ten minutes of its commencement.

I want to begin a discussion about US universities, student activism, and the whiteness of space by drawing upon an important ideation of how vectors of power run through us, how new kinds of precarity both demand and engender new forms of sociality—ways of knowing and being in the world. Radway’s words provide an entry point to the discussion of how neoliberalism and empire find themselves nested within the hearts and minds of individuals and institutions. The above narrative is my own felt account of attempting to resist the steeping of universalizing market forces into the body, and also an endeavour to create a different kind of well-oiled machine in the name of looking for something different, for what Ashon Crawley might call ‘the otherwise’ (2015: n.pag.).

There has been a noticeable rise of college activism in our time of neoliberal global precarity, following from perpetual war, uncontracted and flexible labour, and heightened forced global migration, to name a few contemporary violences. Like the academic and civil rights movements of the 1960s—those that achieved the recognition and inclusion of Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies—student activism today has transpired precisely because of the international, national, and local forces that call it into being (Ferguson, 2012). Specifically, and on campuses situated in cultures of whiteness and heteropatriarchy, these symptoms of the current moment become hyper visible—manifesting within university communities and too often being written off as individualized experiences and complaints. I offer some preliminary tracing about how student activism on one small, private liberal arts college campus, Prolutum University,¹ was read, interpreted and managed by university structures, and absorbed into the very assembly that its own movement was rallying against.

As scholars of critical educational studies have suggested, institutions of higher education in the United States operate in an environment imbued with values legitimated by our economic system (Readings, 1996; Tuchman, 2009; Washburn, 2005). Following political scholars such as Wendy Brown (2015), I understand neoliberalism to name an economic and historical moment that engenders social and political conditions of being. In this sense, the neoliberal present, named as such, suggests not only configurations of the nation-state, but also the ways in which economic terms come to inform individuals’ own thinking, feeling, relations, and interactions with one another. In the context of the university, neoliberalism and privatization work through both its structures and community. The drive for corporate profit and the rise of individualism contextualize how these values influence and become embedded within university culture. Specifically, terms such as accountability, logic, and efficiency are rehearsed within spaces of higher education, moulding the university as a corporate machine. The historical relevance of the university, its inception as a space of cultural imperialism and legacies of academic repression, policing of (racialized/queer/marginalized) bodies, and militarization of education provide some context to the university as both a corporate and imperial space. In the same way that critical geographers have theorized projects of urban gentrification in terms of cleaning, containment, and control as a ‘cleansing of the built environment and streets from the physical and human detritus … to make the city over into a pleasant site of and for bourgeois consumption’ (Wacquant, 2008: 199), I theorize the cleanliness of the university space—how Prolutum University cleans and sanitizes movements of activism and dissent, and particularly, the events that took place in the Fall of 2014.

My point of analysis is a 100 hour-long sit-in demonstration, in which over 300 students slept in the Admissions building, asking the university to take a formal stance on the institutionalized racism and anti-blackness that manifests on its campus.² The protest gathered momentum from the nation’s #BlackLivesMatter movement, importantly timed and ardently connected (Garza, 2014; Kelley, 2014; Taylor, 2016). Particularly notable about the sit-in was the way in which it made visible, through an anonymous social media app, the kinds of cultures of whiteness and institutionalized racism that students were rallying against. During the sit-in, students who didn’t participate wrote reactionary posts: ‘White people won, Africa lost. Sorry we were so much better than you that we were literally able to enslave you at our will’; and, ‘Racism is a problem worldwide, and if you can’t take it while you are here you’re pretty fucked when you graduate’ are but two examples. What helps guide my analysis is that the sit-in helped engender the conditions whereby the cultures of racism that were previously invisible to administration were actually made more present by its resistance. In an attempt to name both the issues the sit-in addressed and also how the university was to address the sit-in, administrative responses took up the language of ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘civility’. As a demonstration, the sit-in was capitalized on as a branding mechanism through which the corporate and imperial university reads and absorbs individuals and social movements. How do these formations simultaneously erase and also render legible the conditions of institutionalized racism and organizational whiteness for those from whom they are hidden?

In this article, I use critical discourse and institutional analysis as methodology, situating my own presence and influence within Prolutum University. I then contextualize the historical transformation of the modern university in terms of corporatization, neoliberalism, and imperialism as read through the example of Prolutum University. Weaving through theoretical framings of queer, feminist, and critical race theorists, I speak to institutional habits, using the petri dish as a metaphor for how we might think about the university space, envision the dynamics of activism, and think about (certain) bodies as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966: 42). In recounting these events, I hope to illustrate how readings of the sit-in demonstration both affirm and raise questions about contemporary institutional life. This project works as an intervention into the scholarship on the corporate university and also into the whiteness of institutions, and calls attention to why we cannot separate these two bodies of literature. By addressing these concepts in tandem, this article adds both nuance and dimension to our understandings of higher education, and to what we might unravel by looking at the conditions of university life through the lens of those for whom the academy has historically been inaccessible; those who have always called out the habitual patterns of institutions as a kind of muscle memory, holding itself in its own rehearsals of surveillance; those who are demanding something different. I close or, rather, leave open this project by thinking about what this critique might offer in a world dominated by institutions, containment, and individual regulation as we search for spaces of hope.

Understanding the Transformation of the Modern University

Dissent & The Detection of Deviation

Loaded with years of historical memory and experience at Prolutum University, the sit-in demonstration in the Fall of 2014 was the first student-initiated, drastic demand for change in over ten years. The action steps presented by the students addressed all areas of campus life as it related to structural racism and the experiences of students of colour on campus. It was a product of a group of students asking the administration to listen to what they had felt, experienced, and witnessed in the institution’s campus environment. Daily, community members of colour face discrimination and micro-aggressions, representative of the institutionalized racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and other systems of domination that are enacted within campus culture. Recalling Ahmed (2012), the institutional habits that are embodied by white members of the Prolutum community re-affirm the conception that certain bodies rightfully identify with the cultural codes of power, and other (racialized/gendered/classed) bodies are made to not belong. The sit-in was calling out the structurally violent processes of exclusion.

In the documents created, printed, and disseminated by the Association of Critical Collegians (ACC), there were written examples of hate that individuals had experienced—all recorded from only the two weeks of term before the sit-in. These ranged from, ‘a first-year student of colour [sic] [who] was approached by a white student on the second day of school and was told, “I can’t believe they let students like you in here”’ to ‘a professor who is a woman of colour [sic] … trying to go to her office on a Sunday and was reported to campus safety as a “suspicious person” by a white student’. The ACC presented the university with a set of 21 action point items, falling under the categories of admissions, financial aid, curriculum/faculty, and student life. While this was the beginning of week-long insular deliberations in the President’s office, wherein over 800 community members took part, reactions from students outside the administration’s buildings were telling. As on other college campuses, important information in the form of backlash can be found in virtual spaces such as Yik Yak, an app that allows individuals to post anonymously; Yik Yak has been the main source of instances of written death and rape threats towards student protestors. What I’m interested in for the purposes of this article are the ways in which this platform is actually a space where the whiteness of institutions—particularly their silence and institutionalized racism—manifests in ways that are intelligible to the current normative sensitivities to whiteness:

‘It’s not my fault that the most noteworthy think your people have done is to convince us not to enslave you anymore … And you couldn’t even do that without our help’.

‘Sorry my parents worked hard enough to pay for your financial aid. I didn’t come to school for you to waste their money’.

‘If you don’t want to deal with the realities of living in a white world, don’t try to’.

‘In honor of today, I will only hook up with a minority tonight’.

The support shown for the posts is measured through a number of ‘up-votes’–akin to a ‘like’ on Facebook. While these sentiments are quite familiar to students of colour through daily interactions—expectations of certain kinds of communication, questioning of whether students of colour belong at Prolutum, professors asking students to speak on ‘behalf’ of an identity—made visible on social media in ways that reveal a culture of power that is intentionally and consistently made absent by the university’s management of diversity. The visceral nature of these campus responses evidence how the diversity at Prolutum represented a ‘manufactured cohesion’ (Ahmed, 2012; Alexander, 2005) in order to serve the public image of the university. While some white students, faculty, and staff genuinely desire a more socially integrated campus, the corporate university’s investment in advocating for ‘diversity’ lies within its falsified production and profit maximization.

Throughout the sit-in, despite some of the campus response, there were a number of students working to get the news of the demonstration beyond Prolutum’s campus. In conversation with news sources, television channels, and radio broadcasters, members of the ACC were able to get their message heard by both local and national reporting agencies, spreading the news of Prolutum’s campus activism far beyond their physical location. Recalling Tuchman (2009), this became a worry from a communications perspective because negative publicity—or an illumination of the oppressive culture on campus—costs both money and power. The administration carefully monitored the ACC’s language in public forums, as evidenced by the number of emails we received from the Dean of the College throughout the course of the week. As an example, the ACC twitter feed was active during the week, offering its 1000+ followers live updates as responses were received from the administration. If there was a piece of information that was deemed ‘inaccurate’ by the administration, students were asked to remove the tweet. For example, when the feed tweeted that the administration had ‘kept us waiting for a response’, students received an email asking to correct this language to less accusatory tones. Representatives from the administration stated that because they never offered a time at which a response would be released, to have been ‘kept waiting’ conveys ‘inaccurate communication’ about what was occurring (Personal correspondence, 26 September 2014). Even while the demonstration was taking place, the pursuit of transparency and surveillance, as Tuchman (2009) and Washburn (2005) also suggest, gives voice to an investment in the public image of the university—to ensure that the University as a corporate entity would retain the money and power that the sit-in could have cost them. These forms of communication suggested tones of ‘collaborative effort’ between the ‘peaceful protestors’ and university administration. Sending out an average of two emails per day during the sit-in, the President’s rhetoric focused on the demonstration’s aims to ‘support inclusion and diversity’, and assured the Prolutum community that the administration would respond with the same sort of ‘civility’ that they used to describe the protest (Personal correspondence, 22–26 September 2014). It is here that we might recall Chatterjee and Maira’s (2014) ‘academic civility’, and how we might read this as symptomatic of imperial cultures of academic containment.

Cleansing and Decontamination

As articulated in the above analysis, while some institutional subjects are made to belong, and therefore inhabit and reproduce the structures of the university space, others are both marked and made to feel as though they do not belong within the larger habitus. As opposed to the kind of ontological complicity that unmarked/white bodies experience within institutional spaces, other bodies are marked as ‘trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically, and conceptually) circumscribed as being out of place’ (Puwar, 2004: 9). With this experienced (dis)location and demarcated boundaries of who becomes an insider versus outsider, not only does the institution enforce cultural codes of power through processes of affirmation, but it also inscribes onto ‘out of place’ subjects that they do need to fit in. Therefore, the ‘space invaders’, as Puwar (2004: 8) notes, are pushed by both internal and external forces to conform to the institutional climate. Through this process, individuals who are able to successfully navigate and conform to power structures become transformed into institutional subjects, even though their identity profile may constitute them otherwise. Ahmed (2000) articulates that the production of subjectivity is constituted only in relation to the stranger—that entity which is recognized as being out of place.

This recognition of the subject versus the stranger is well articulated in the metaphor of the petri dish. That is, within certain spaces, some bacteria are more likely to thrive, while others are not. Those bodies less likely to thrive, that is, racialized, gendered, classed bodies, are only deemed as such when in relation to the host bacteria in the petri dish—the ‘good’ bacteria, or the institutional subject. As a consequence, we might understand how certain bodies are characterized as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966: 44). The ‘bad’ bacteria are then pushed to the periphery, excluded from the petri dish, or are assimilated or productively folded into the normative population. However, there comes a point when the ‘bad’ bacteria become threatening to the health of the petri dish itself. The ‘bad’ bacteria then become autoimmune; they attack the healthy or ‘good’ bacteria that allow the petri dish to function as usual. Here, we find important relevance to the Association of Critical Collegians’ social movement: the autoimmune bacteria. Social movements that question or call out by name the systems of domination that operate as part and parcel of the institutions are the autoimmune phase of the ‘matter out of place’ bacteria. However, and as Derrida (2002: 83) articulates, autoimmunity is also a ‘contradiction or counter indication’ in that its logic is both ‘self-protecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison’. It is precisely the revelation that the so-called ‘bad’ bacterium operates within a source of weakness in the petri dish, or source of resistance to the power of the university, which causes it to attack part of itself. Derrida presents autoimmunity as ‘a double-bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in the promise itself’ (Derrida, 2002: 82). Therefore, the threat of certain bodies, and thus social movements born out of the mass power of those bodies, comes with their power to dis-order—the bacteria’s power to infect or invoke disease (and dis-ease) to other parts of the university (or petri dish). While the university as a corporate and imperial space clearly provides certain kinds of incentives for self-cleaning and maintenance, the ultimate goal is to create an environment where members of the campus community do not disrupt the daily functioning of the university—happy (and clean) enough so that they do not become autoimmune bacteria.

In the lens of Ferguson (2012: 4) who suggests, ‘foreign subjects [are] made recognizable through their regulation’, the language of diversity, inclusion, and civility represents a kind of management and strategic (read: productive, sanitizing) framing of the sit-in demonstration. That is, the sit-in or the sentiments expressed by the sit-in are no longer positioned as actions polluting the air of ‘happiness’ (Ahmed, 2010), but, rather, the sit-in becomes co-opted into the image of the university. It is positioned as something wanted and for which the university had strived. This point is furthered by the website platform that was curated by the university, branding the entire sit-in movement as ‘Prolutum for All’—presenting the changes that were to be made to the institution as an initiative started by the institution itself. The language and rhetoric not only affirms the corporate culture that exists, but also serves as evidence of the mechanisms employed to ensure that the sit-in demonstration was seen as nothing other than welcomed, part of, and perhaps even planned by the university.

In confluence with the materials produced by Prolutum’s administration, the campus culture produced by students and faculty was equally sanitizing in the months following the demonstration, or, as regarded on campus, ‘the events of last semester’. Refusing to name the sit-in indicates a reluctance to recognize its importance, or the magnitude of the issues it represented. Some students name the sit-in as the origin of racial tensions that continue to exist on campus, rather than a manifestation of institutional histories of discrimination. Many faculty members are reluctant to speak about the sit-in at all. Others term it ‘an act of rebellion’ or, worse, a ‘cry for attention’. No longer did it represent real and persistent issues, but, rather, an event whose purpose was to gain attention from the administration, sentiments echoed by students on campus. Many made it clear (mostly in anonymous forums) that they were ‘sick of’ hearing people ‘complain’ about being at Prolutum. ‘If you don’t like it here, you don’t have to stay here. But don’t spoil it for those of us who do have a good time’, an anonymous post read. With the same kind of ‘business as usual’ mentality reinforced by the administration, students have turned the sit-in into a kind of discursive formation—it represents an event that upset people in the past, but also one that the community has since ‘gotten over’. The cleaning mechanisms the university employs manifest in the mundane functioning of the day to day. As a participant observer, I heard the subtle ways that the sit-in was disavowed in relationship to the historical scheme of Prolutum University. Others have written that they think the ACC, made up of ‘impoverished free-riding pussies’ [sic], has transformed Prolutum into a ‘liberal cesspool’, because (and most likely in part because of the sit-in) the speaker for the 2015 commencement was a professor of African-American Studies.

I recognize the ways in which the institution has re-located what manifested as ‘matter out of place’ by cleaning and re-integrating the events into the daily habits of the institution. The rhetorical use of describing the ‘civility’ of the ‘collaborative’ work of the sit-in plays a hand in both invalidating and trivializing its significance whilst calling for action which includes ‘teaching’ more diversity and inclusion. Further, the way the institution has also brought Black speakers to campus in the name of representation, whether or not the voices behind those faces are intended to actually challenge the status quo of institutional life, is consonant with the original intentions of the ACC. This indicates that Prolutum has indeed returned to business as usual.

At Prolutum today, the legacy of the sit-in manifests in the forms of increased programming, reiterating what it means to ‘teach diversity and inclusion’ via YouTube media clips and advertisements for the zeal of Prolutum students. To lament the lack of ‘civility’ and indeed articulate that students do not ‘feel fully included’ begs questions about the politics of inclusivity and prompts further conversation regarding whiteness as property. Yet, what does this indicate about students and student movements using this same rhetoric? As Robin Kelley observes, there lies a ‘tension between reform and revolution, between desiring to belong and rejecting the university as a cog in the neoliberal order. I want to think about what it means for Black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them—of loving anyone, perhaps’ (Kelley, 2016: n. pag.). Diversity and inclusion become a checkmark that the university maintains in order to keep status quo, and I suppose this begs a question that haunts this project: is there another option?

Conclusion

Through understanding the university as a corporate and an imperial space, and the mechanisms by which it is corporatizing and imperializing, this project offers an analysis of how such a space deals with student activism. Thematically, this article covers three main territories. First, it provides a necessary understanding of the contemporary US university as shaped by the national politic. Second, it seeks to understand how the space of an individual university (Prolutum) influences how the university at large performs a kind of cleansing function. As argued, this cleaning and sanitizing is a significant manifestation of the current neoliberal agenda reflected and reverberated within global society. Thirdly, this article addresses the way in which activist movements and the corporate and imperial university renders legible certain (e.g. racialized, gendered, classed) bodies. Going forward, I hope that this project opens up space of understanding, critique, and applicability to other university contexts of student protest. While the sit-in demonstration at Prolutum was but one of the many forms of activism on one specific college campus, the project of the corporate and imperial university and student activism has endless and necessary possibilities—it is important that we commit ourselves to this task.

Radway’s epigraph (cited in Gordon, 1997) illustrates the power of market logic both intentionally to obscure and to gain supremacy at the cost of human suffering. I have attempted to examine several iterations of this process as it manifests on one university campus, and in the same stride, perpetuate certain kinds of violences. By attempting to render legible human experience for the purposes of an ethnographic study and the production of research, I question the kind of violence that I induced in order to bring to light the violences of the university. This, first and foremost, is my biggest limitation to this study. What does it mean that I produce work within the academic machine? Is this project simply another form of self-exclusion from its processes? Given that the basis for this article was an honours thesis project at Prolutum University, is there something to be said about how the university might commodify this research into another ‘student accomplishment’, rending my project merely as more fuel to power the university’s marketized standards of excellence, which are used to sell its academic programs? What might it mean for us to negotiate this tension, and what does it mean to sit within its grasp?

My interests in exploring the theoretical and foundational dynamics of how students and administrators interact within a contact zone of protest lie in trying to get closer to naming the ecological environment of the US University in today’s political climate. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013: 115) suggestion that ‘the uncanny feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the Under commons [of the university],’ requires us simultaneously to understand tensions of how the dynamic, and neoliberal and imperial, terrain shapes student movements, themselves, and also to realize that we have not yet given up the kinds of radical hope needed to imagine an alternative. It seems to me that this imagination might enliven such an oppositional project through naming and seeing that which we are up against. In conversation with Stern and Brown (2016), who offer a critical example of how qualitative studies in education might allow us to find ‘armed love’ and ‘critical hope’ in what can often feel like hopeless and loveless places, it is my hope that this article occupies a similar niche; that we might further critically analyze our own collusion and resistance within formal and informal educational spaces; and that we might do this as a way of un-knowing and un-doing what the corporate and imperial university has, for so long, disciplined us to know and do.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.