Inside and Outside of the University

On the morning of Saturday, April 27, 2024 the Instagram account of a collective at Washington University in St. Louis posted a message proclaiming “WASHU IS EVERYWHERE” in bold, red text. Seeking to preempt the reactionary trope of outside agitators invading the campus’s hilltop enclave on the city’s edge, these students argued that “there is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of Washington University” due to the global reach of the university and its decades-old defense industry entanglements as well as the university’s outsized influence on the economy of St. Louis. The students put forth an inclusive narrative of citywide and international solidarity, inviting others to join a common struggle.

In advance of a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and WashU’s complicity through ties to war-profiteer Boeing—the third such protest in as many weeks—student organizers encouraged the local community to join them. For those living and working in the shadow of WashU, those dependent on WashU as healthcare provider, those displaced by WashU’s endless landgrabs and gentrification, those moved to stop the endless bombing of hospitals and universities in Gaza, there could be no “outside” of the university.

Within hours, WashU police violently arrested over 100 people to clear a nascent Gaza solidarity encampment. I was one of them. As I was released from jail that night—with notice in hand that I was indefinitely banned from my own campus—university administrators sent an e-mail decrying the protests, adding specifically that organizers “put out a call for more people, including those not affiliated with the university, to come to campus to join their demonstration.” In the administration’s eyes, it was this invitation to outsiders that, much like the presence of tents or chants for Palestinian liberation, made the protest dangerous.

The following Monday, university Chancellor Andrew Martin doubled down on this narrative, emphasizing repeatedly that “the majority of this group were not WashU students, faculty, or staff”—conveniently forgetting about the university’s alumni and denying any relationship with the city’s residents and students at neighboring institutions. His letter was a diatribe against the action, declaring disruptive protest unacceptable. “We will not permit students and faculty, and we certainly will not permit outside interests, to take over Washington University property,” he warned. “We cannot allow this type of behavior on our campus.” He closed with an ominous declaration: “You will not do this here.”

That same day, I was suspended along with five other faculty. By the end of the week, the university erected a massive fence around part of campus—the part that faces St. Louis city. An administrator sat in on my office hours; I was locked out of my e-mails after I submitted grades. For two months, the university told faculty, students, and staff close to nothing. At the time, I wondered whether the administration considered us unaffiliated with the university. Perhaps we had become outsiders.

We were eventually informed of conduct charges and most suspensions were lifted by summer’s end. Graduating students had their degrees withheld until September, continuing students received probations that came with the threat of punishment for any future conduct violations, and at least one student still faces charges a year later. In the meantime, faculty attempts to investigate the administration’s response to the protests were obstructed and undermined by the Board of Trustees, with the Board Chair implying that faculty were unqualified and biased to conduct such an investigation, putting shared governance into question. Who gets to run the university? In this instance, support for free speech, solidarity with embattled students and colleagues, even concern for university governance were not tolerated. Of course, the university eventually exonerated itself, finding that its response to protests was justified. In the year since the protest, our chancellor has vowed that campuses must not allow disruptive protest and that universities must not be political in the face of attacks on higher ed—equating anti-war demands for change with Trump’s campaign to eviscerate universities. Refusing to recognize politics in the university as an institution is saying that students cannot imagine a better university, that the campus community has no right to demand change. We are not the university, we merely inhabit it. To the contrary, as a group of Occupy Cal activists fifteen years ago declared: the university belongs to those who use it.

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In some ways, WashU’s response last year was typical in a spring during which university after university responded to campus pro-Palestine activism with excessive police violence, over 3,000 arrests, suspensions, evictions from student housing, firings, the withholding of degrees, collective punishment, false accusations of violence and anti-Semitism, and more. In many cases, however, administrators at least pretended to tolerate the protests at first, dangling the possibility of negotiation or de-escalation before unleashing force. At WashU, the police lines formed as the tents were erected and advanced soon after. One of the largest mass arrests related to Gaza campus activism since the current genocide began occurred before tents were even occupied. The whole ordeal lasted less than four hours.

By its own admission when pressed by the Faculty Senate, the administration went into that day refusing to let an encampment stand, no matter how peaceful it was. In this way, WashU’s pre-emptive, collective, excessive response helped normalize the use of mass arrests over dialogue (in fact, a professor who offered to mediate between students and the administration was suspended for doing so). Through these actions, the administration simultaneously entrenched the divide between the campus and so-called “outsiders” and punished those in the campus community who dared to oppose the university, effectively exiling us. Contrasting student narratives of solidarity, university administrators insist that there is in fact an inside and an outside of the university—and if you speak out, you’ll be cast out

The student declaration that “WashU is everywhere,” that there is no outside of the university, is worth taking seriously not only because it anticipated the administration’s obsession with outside agitation but because it reflects the conditions of WashU’s presence in St. Louis. WashU is one of the largest employers, land-owners, and care providers in St. Louis and exerts significant influence in the region, affecting even those who have never set foot on campus. Though the current chancellor vowed that the university would be “in and for St. Louis” and has taken steps to make the university more accessible to the city and region, the story is more complicated. WashU’s growth has come as neighboring universities struggle and the expanding campus has gobbled up property across the city and its suburbs. Yet, Wash U pays no taxes to these communities. When the Board of Aldermen considered a resolution condemning WashU’s response to the protests, the university and its allies reminded us that WashU is one of the city’s largest employers. Many lawyers declined to defend those arrested at the encampment because of conflicts with the university. This only proves activists right: there is no “outside” of the university if St. Louis is WashU’s company town.

The university’s reach goes far beyond town-gown relations. As anti-war activists have pointed out for generations, WashU and St. Louis are both deeply entangled with the defense industry—local corporations like Monsanto, Mallinkrodt Chemical, Olin Industries, and McDonnell-Douglas have produced everything from Agent Orange and napalm to military rifles and helicopters. In the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, these companies’ CEOs all sat on WashU’s Board of Trustees. To today’s WashU students, these names still adorn campus buildings. Just whose university is this?

Fifty years before the Gaza solidarity protests, another anti-war movement rocked WashU’s campus. The 1968 Brookings Hall occupation, undertaken by the Association of Black Collegians in protest of campus police treatment of Black students alongside anti-war protests against campus ROTC, is an oft-celebrated piece of WashU history as part of its “tradition of activism.” Despite viewing this occupation with reverence—photos of it supposedly adorn the upper administration’s conference room—in 2024 university leadership feared that students might be too inspired by this tradition of activism: Brookings Hall was placed on heightened security after the protest, locking the doors and bringing in additional security. The line between insider and outsider was tightening.

If 1968 is a notable year in anti-war activism, so is 1970. On May 4 of that year, students rioted on WashU’s campus and across the country in response to the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia and the National Guard shooting and murdering students at Kent State. Thousands of WashU students marched on and burned down the Air Force ROTC building on campus in a night of rage. In the aftermath, twelve students were arrested and banned from campus as the university and government sought to suppress anti-war activity. Again, WashU’s response was an excessive outlier: on a day that saw radical actions across the country, only in St. Louis were students charged under the Civil Obedience Act of 1968—most famously, undergraduate Howard Mechanic was falsely accused, convicted, and sentenced to five years in federal prison with little evidence (a sentence he escaped by going on the lam and living a new life a few miles from where I grew up in Arizona). In her sweeping podcast about Mechanic, My Fugitive—recommended to me after the campus protests—historian and filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavey highlights the FBI’s determination to dismantle the anti-war and Civil Rights movements in St. Louis. In the podcast, historian Walter Johnson reflects on the environment in which anti-war activists were operating at WashU in the 1960s: “It’s as if those protests were in the middle of a military base. They [the students] thought of those protests as being in the middle of their campus, where they went to school, and instead from the standpoint of the FBI or even the administration of WashU it looks as if they are right in the middle of some sort of strategically essential asset.”

Fifty years later, a new generation of anti-war activists are facing the same knot of a university invested in war. Today’s WashU students argue that there is no outside of WashU. The university’s enduring entanglements with war profiteers and its prioritization of investments over education reveal that, maybe, there’s no inside for students who dare challenge the institution. When asked about recent calls to divest from fossil fuels, WashU’s chancellor called it a “settled issue” and suggested that “if students want to choose universities based on… their endowments, there’s lots of places one could look.” Students imagining a better university simply aren’t welcome.

For their part, pro-Palestine student activists have set their sights on Boeing. Employing over 17,000 people across St. Louis and St. Charles counties, Boeing is a major stakeholder in the region. It has outposts on WashU’s campus including partnerships, scholarships, and recruitment pipelines. One WashU alum and former Boeing employee, who was arrested at the encampment and suddenly found himself no longer welcome at his alma mater, quit because of the “moral gymnastics” required to work there. Such acrobatics stem from Boeing’s ties to genocide: the company manufactures many of the weapons used by the Israeli military in its endless bombardment of Gaza, which have killed tens of thousands of people. When I first began writing this essay last May, reports linked Boeing’s GBU-39 small-diameter bomb to the inferno in one of Rafah’s displacement camps that left 45 people dead and over 200 injured and the bombing of an UNRWA school in Nuseirat in central Gaza that killed 40, including fourteen children. These are just two instances of the endless carnage wrought by Israel, thanks to Boeing, courtesy of the United States government—manufactured in Missouri. After Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Boeing rushed over 1,000 such bombs to Israel—anyone scrolling through social media or watching the news has seen the deadly results. The company won another $7.5 billion contract to make more bombs at its St. Charles, Missouri facility. Viewing the destruction in Gaza, anyone with a moral compass should be doing everything they can to end this genocide—including prying at the defense industry’s hold on higher education—whether you have a university ID or not.

This is the reason that students have called for the university to cut ties with Boeing. WashU’s Student Union passed a divestment resolution that the Chancellor explicitly ignored. Students and their community supporters peacefully protested multiple times on campus, to no effect. With few other options, they occupied a lawn—and were arrested for it. While students and community members reject the administration’s outsider narrative, insisting that there’s nowhere outside of the university’s orbit, administrators have cast students, faculty, and staff off the campus for challenging its investments, proving that there’s no place inside the university for dissent. If the university is a site of struggle, the battle over who is considered the campus community is at the heart of answering who the university is for.