With the significant red shift this election, led by a man who is described by many as a fascist, resisting and reversing fascist creep is more important now than ever. Even at our supposedly most liberal institutions, we have seen increasingly unreasonable overreactions to dissent dictated not through democratic means, but through authoritarian decree.
Take, for example, the University of Pennsylvania. Early in the morning on October 18, a dozen armed university police stormed an off-campus student house to issue a warrant related to the throwing of red paint on a campus statue on September 12 as part of pro-Palestinian protests—red paint that was pressure-washed off within hours. Would UPenn faculty agree that an armed raid is an appropriate response to their own students who are angry and feeling helpless against the injustice of tens of thousands killed in Gaza? Where is shared and democratic governance when it comes to protest response on campus?
Penn Students Against the Occupation announced the paint incident on Instagram as being done by an “autonomous group.” They included a grainy video clip of a masked individual (let’s call them Sam) throwing the paint, echoing protest tactics used for decades from PETA showing disgust in fur coats to Just Stop Oil activists highlighting the hypocrisy of the attention paid to art versus the climate. Sam, presumably a student, clearly did not want to be caught—most likely because they saw how UPenn responded to protests last academic year—with arrests and academic sanctions and increased rules that prohibit protest activities like chalking and civil disobedience, including interrupting a guest speaker. Students know that if they want to be heard but don’t want to risk expulsion, they need to turn to subterfuge. And on a residential university campus, this is particularly tricky.
For free expression, students and faculty need to feel safe in expressing their ideas that push the boundaries of their institution, and they won’t feel safe to do that with complete surveillance of their activities.
While we are all subject to daily state and corporate surveillance of our activities, college campuses are unique examples of Foucault’s panopticon. Colleges serve as internet service provider, landlord, doctor, corner store, laundromat, gym, department of public safety, and, oh right, educator. And they have access to data for all those services, all handily linked to a student ID, collected in one place densely covered by surveillance cameras. What is unique about colleges compared to the broader U.S. is that the surveillance data is held by one institution rather than many. U.S. colleges are also known to employ analytics on their surveillance data: automated license plate reading, social media monitoring, face recognition, device tracking. Sam would have been easily identifiable despite wearing a mask if their phone automatically connected to campus wifi or if they were caught on camera without a mask approaching the scene.
Universities will say this surveillance is for the students—for their safety, health, and success. Yes, campus shootings are real and scary, but surveillance measures have a very limited ability to stop them. Yes, our youth are experiencing a mental health crisis, but monitoring student’s online behavior hasn’t proven to help either. Visible security has been shown to not increase student success, and if we need to track students to make them go to class are we really legitimizing the existence of higher education? The level of surveillance that universities engage in is more reminiscent of that undertaken by fascist and other authoritarian systems than means to support education.
But perhaps universities simply are fascist. After all, they are led by appointment rather than election. They are capitalist, in competition with one another to accumulate enrollment bases. They have their own rules and policies including strict guidelines on student conduct, which in many instances go far beyond those of broader society. They are awash with unbridled nationalism school pride with a deep hatred of other schools’... colors. And sadly, they have resorted to police intimidation and violence against student protesters of university policies, or allowed truly violent opponents to do this on their behalf.
When, last spring, universities set up mobile surveillance units (MSUs), either rented from private companies or on loan from the Department of Homeland Security, around peaceful and non-destructive protest encampments, it became hard to view campus surveillance as anything but a tool to maintain the institutional status quo. Particularly when those MSUs likely didn’t have any capabilities beyond what the campuses already had. They only served to remind students and faculty that the university is watching, and it is watching because it doesn’t approve.
This all makes universities sound like the fascist institutions that Vice President-elect JD Vance wants and that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is building rather than bastions of academic freedom and liberalism run by shared governance.
From private schools like Brown and UPenn to publics like UCLA and UC Davis, universities grossly overreach in their responses to students protesting injustice. For faculty and students to have a stake in campus response to protest, they need to start with a say in campus surveillance. There is no academic freedom or freedom of expression without privacy. FERPA, the federal law that governs student privacy, really only keeps student information from leaving the ivory tower. Universities need privacy policies that govern how information is shared and used within campus.
Colleges are ahead of the curve when it comes to surveillance creep, and the ivory panopticon will only get worse as surveillance technologies get more advanced. For free expression, students and faculty need to feel safe in expressing their ideas that push the boundaries of their institution, and they won’t feel safe to do that with complete surveillance of their activities. Which means the subjects of surveillance need to have a say in the surveillance. Students and faculty ought to demand answers as to why their institutions collect the data they do. They ought to demand evidence that their data policies holistically support student safety, health, and success. They ought to demand clarity as to whether their institution is being run as a Vance-approved or a DeSantis-built campus or as a place for academic freedom and legitimate higher education.
But then, will they be able to make these demands without being expelled or fired?
