Policing the University and Tenure at the End of the World
What the arrest of Dr. Tiffany Willoughby Herard (and countless other faculty) teaches us about the limited utility of tenure protections for professors committed to justice.
by Charles H.F. Davis III, Ph.D.
Nearly two weeks ago, several hundred divestment protestors reportedly occupied the Physical Sciences lecture hall at the University of California, Irvine. There, several dozens of officers from the Irvine Police Department and Orange County Sheriff’s Office were called to campus by university officials. As has been the case at numerous universities over the last two months, police arrived in riot gear to subdue protestors, escalating an otherwise non-violent assembly into officer-initiated violence and brutalization. Ultimately, 47 people were reported to have been arrested, 26 of which were identified as UCI students and two others as university employees. Among them was Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a tenured professor in Global Studies, who was interviewed by local news as she was being detained.
In the opening of her testimony, Dr. Willoughby-Herard identifies herself to the press as a faculty member and tenured professor. For additional context, her work broadly engages discourses in Black and third world feminisms, comparative political theory, and decolonization, which has been internationally recognized through her designation of Professor Extraordinarious in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. She also, according to university communications, was the 2022 recipient of the Academic Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentorship and the two-time recipient of Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research in 2011 and 2015. I offer these details to situate the subjectivity of Dr. Willoughby-Herard’s work in relation to the ongoing resistance efforts against empire globally, but also to frame her exemplary contributions to the very university that facilitated her punishment and detention.
In her brief but powerful testimony, Dr. Willoughby-Herard offered several important critiques that are noteworthy. First, she names the university’s decision to spend considerable dollars to police protestors that could otherwise go to students in need of financial aid, scholarships, and other resources to support their academic success. According to reports, across the University of California system, policing budgets more than doubled from $75 million in 2009–2010 to $148.5 million in 2019–2020. During this same period, net spending on instruction and research at the UCs fell by 13 percent. Furthermore, UC Riverside and UC Merced have reported routine underfunding as well as 50 percent food insecurity among UC students, insufficient funding for counseling and psychological services, and the provision of less-than a living-wage for contingent faculty and graduate instructors upon which the UCs overwhelmingly rely to teach university courses.
Secondly, Dr. Willoughby-Herard provides a powerful retort to a journalist’s question about concern for her standing as an employee of the university as result of her arrest, stating “what job do I have if the students don’t have a future?” This profound and poignant question is one to which many, perhaps all, colleges and universities should be asking in this moment. It is certainly one being confronted by the thousands of Palestinian students and faculty whom no longer have institutions and have been relegated to holding educational exercises in exile. Additionally, this question reveals the darkest reality of the neoliberal university, which invests in death and destruction abroad while facilitating racial capitalist exploitation at home. That is, what future for teaching and learning exists if the primary institutions entrusted with preparing global citizens to lead in a diverse democracy are more committed to repressing political engagement than they are to heeding the moral and political instruction the pedagogical arena of student dissent offers? And what, if any, becomes of those expected to edify and encourage democratic participation — within and beyond formal political structures — when our universities routinely deny the police-free, demilitarized futures the once-erected Encampments for Gaza have exemplified.
Altogether, Dr. Willoughby-Herard’s testimony and the present realities of institutional authoritarianism raise the need for critical readings of the incompatibility between postsecondary promotion and reward structures and our political commitments. What is more, they should disabuse us of our investments in the elusive and inconsistent protections tenure is espoused to afford. That is to say, in the eyes of many universities, which function as extensions and legitimizing apparatuses of the carceral state, there is no distinction between faculty status and the ‘enemy combatant’ designation with which we have been categorically assigned. On the matter of Palestine in particular, lest we forget the always already denied rights of academic freedom afforded to Palestinian scholars in the ‘Middle East,’ but also the subjugation and punishment of pro-Palestine faculty in the U.S. The cases of Steven Salaita’s rescinded employment offer and institutional campaign against then Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill following his address to the United Nations are just two better-known instances. The more recent cases of faculty, tenured and untenured, being removed from classrooms, suspended, barred from their campuses, and even fired further evidence the ‘Palestine exception’ in American academe.
To be sure, those of us actively engaged in struggles against the carceral university and its longstanding entanglement with destructive U.S. foreign policy and militarism do not expect to be considered exceptions. We fully understand and take direction from critical theorizations of the intellectual from the works of Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Joy James and others, that we must refuse our collective position as a protected bourgeoisie class. We know that our intellectual production must attend to material conditions of everyday people and, therefore, require us at once to become traitors to the academic elitism that offers us protection in exchange for complicity and compliance. Nevertheless, if tenured status offers little in the way of protection against the new McCarthyism — and persecution by the state and its subsidiaries — emerging on college and university campuses, what is its actual value to those of us committed to people over profits, productivity, and prestige? Surely, it is almost nothing when, in the end, all that remains is our relationship to the humanity and dignity of ourselves and that which we either compassionately afford or cruelly deny to others.
Charles H.F. Davis III is an untenured professor, director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab, and member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
