The Right to the City and the University

Conceptual clarity on the right to the city is necessary before deriving a right to the campus. For Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre, Kofman and Lebas1996, 67–68), the capitalist city is characterized by the maximization of urban space’s exchange value as a commodity over its use value for satisfying human needs. Defining space in terms of exchange value breaks up the city into isolated segments owned as private property (Purcell Reference Purcell2014, 149). Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 164) describes commodified urban spaces carved up as private property and defined by the capitalist logic of accumulation as “dominated spaces” while labeling those that prioritize collective cocreation, lived experience, and use value as increasingly rare “appropriated spaces.” Not only do capitalist actors develop physical spaces in accordance with their own profit motives, but their physical productions also have important social, cultural, and imaginative consequences. The proliferation of dominated spaces excludes many from the enjoyment of urban life through enclosure, eliminates the unique characters of certain sites through homogenization, separates urban residents through segregation, and alters routines, flows, and rhythms experienced at the embodied level through fragmentation (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991; Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore2004; see also Certeau Reference Certeau1984). In an urban condition characterized by dominated space, residents become alienated from their spatial environments—physical, social, and symbolic. Revolution through a geographic lens, then, involves not only changing relations of production but also changing relations of space. Lefebvre’s revolutionary model is one of local resistance to the state’s role as organizer of space for capital, which challenges and eventually replaces top-down, rationalized power through bottom-up, decentralized management (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 382; Purcell Reference Purcell2014, 145). According to Lefebvre, every society must produce its own characteristic space to fully assert itself. Under a condition of collective management of the means of production, a spatial logic defined by democratic cocreation of urban space would emerge (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 103).

The right to the city is thus the struggle for this cocreative spatial condition, the right to the full urban oeuvre, both in terms of collective design and collective enjoyment. Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre, Kofman and Lebas1996, 101) writes that “the city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product. If there is a production of the city, and social relations of the city, it is a production and reproduction of human beings by human beings, rather than a production of objects.” In his ideal city, urban residents continuously produce the city, both in its physical form and its immaterial social and cultural character. At the same time, urban residents are enlivened by access to the oeuvre and daily activities in the city. To fully enjoy the city, residents must possess the ability to shape the city as well as the ability to be shaped by it—both dimensions together define the core ideal of urban “inhabitance” (Purcell Reference Purcell2002). Lefebvre makes clear that, as actors who experience the world through embodiment, humans demand spaces designed for their communal flourishing. As such, he presents the democratic shaping of the entire urban spatialization process as a human right that is unfulfilled under a liberal-capitalist order but can provide the basis for a socialist-democratic one. While some question why, as a Marxist, Lefebvre turns to “rights” language at all (Attoh Reference Attoh2011; L. King Reference King, Meagher, Noll and Biehl2020), he refers not to a liberal, bourgeois conception of rights, but to a guiding principle for the pursuit of a redefined, collective, and participatory spatial production process.

Through a Marxist critique of the spatial subordination of use value under exchange value, Lefebvre obviously looks toward a future where capitalism is dismantled, urban power relations completely restructured, and private property abolished (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre, Kofman and Lebas1996, 154–59; Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 422). As a result, some argue that the right to the city cannot be understood as anything other than a revolutionary moment and should not be interpreted as a reformist endeavor or a progressive slogan (Purcell Reference Purcell2002, 101). But if we follow these recommendations, how can we make sense of contemporary urban activists who use the right to the city as a rallying cry for a diverse field of movements that aim to expand access to urban resources like affordable housing, public transportation, public space, and even clean water (Marcuse and Madden Reference Marcuse and Madden2016, 10; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2003)? While Lefebvrean scholars defend the right to the city as a postrevolutionary form of urban life grounded in collective ownership and the maximization of space’s use value, urban activists utilize the term as a more immediate rallying cry about access to urban resources and small-scale forms of self-management (Althorpe and Horak Reference Althorpe and Horak2023, 15).

When activists harness the language of “the right to the city” for particular forms of claim making, their demands often become reformist calls for those in control of urban resources to increase access for excluded populations, moving closer to a Hohfeldian claim right and further from the type of creative revolution Lefebvre imagines (Althorpe and Horak Reference Althorpe and Horak2023, 15, 17). As Domaradzka (Reference Domaradzka2018, 613) explains, according to most urban movements, “the right to a city is the right to redistribute resources, primarily to those who are deprived of privileges and whose basic needs are not met.” The Right to the City Alliance, for example, fights for housing justice, works to prevent evictions, and advocates for renter’s rights—as its cofounder puts it, “concrete involvements” of the term (Isensee Reference Isensee2013). While collective governance remains a central commitment of the global right-to-the-city movement, and several affiliated organizations pursue community self-management initiatives, demands often materialize around more immediate goals of social and economic rights compatible with a liberal-capitalist framework. Unsurprisingly, faithful Lefebvreans denounce this. As Harvey (Reference Harvey, LeGates and Stout2015, 272) explains, the right to the city is “far more than an individual right of access to the resources that the city embodies.” Lopes de Souza (Reference Lopes de Souza2010, 315) remarks that “the expression ‘the right to the city’ has become fashionable these days. The price of this has often been the trivialization and corruption of Lefebvre’s concept: in many cases it seems to mean just the right to a more ‘human’ life in the context of the capitalist city and on the basis of a (‘reformed’) representative democracy.”

Exposing this trend of emphasizing equitable access to urban resources rather than the transformative potential of radical democratic management is a fair critique. Activists operating under the right-to-the-city banner who prioritize resource access rather than struggles for cocreation risk deradicalizing the term’s political demands. However, contemporary Lefebvreans overlook the importance of concrete, institutional battlegrounds for the concept and the way it is claimed and concretized through episodes of protest—a theme powerfully highlighted by activists. In The Explosion, Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 68, 108–9) discusses existing institutions as sites where the spatial contradictions of capitalism become visible and potentially explosive, creating the conditions for radical contestation. As such, movements that emerge from and demand democratic transformation of key institutions have the potential to generate broader patterns of resistance, especially when they make efforts to extend their struggles beyond their immediate institutional context. Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 84) acknowledges the challenges of democratic self-management, at various points emphasizing that it does not eliminate conflict but raises “a whole range of problems.” As such, his suggestions for studying utopia’s “implications and consequences on the ground” and “propos[ing], try[ing] out, and prepar[ing] forms” (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre, Kofman and Lebas1996, 151) should be interpreted as encouraging experimentation with the right to the city, practicing self-management at various scales, and expanding resistance through concrete projects (Pinder Reference Pinder2015, 37).

Against those who advocate reserving its use for complete urban overthrow, I argue that the right to the city should be understood as the contemporary demand for radical, transformative, democratic cocreation concretized through protest of existing institutions. The right to the city is heterotopic (Kohn Reference Kohn2016) not in the sense of being partially compatible with a liberal bourgeois rights framework, but in the sense of having episodic expressions within institutions generally characterized by its denial. Activist movements do this work, though oftentimes not those that explicitly claim a “right to the city.” Scholars must theorize the ability of activism to create transformative spaces for the right to the city within and surrounding institutional environments. Intermediate institutions with significant power over urban spatial design and influence over collective sociopolitical imaginations are particularly important within this retheorization. Specifically, Lefebvre retains the possibility for a right to the city clarified and expanded through attempts at institutional transformation of the university. While some ask how the capitalist university can be changed “as long as the society that supports her remains a fortress of imperialist capitalism” (Kahn Reference Kahn1970, 19), Lefebvre connects struggles over the university to broader patterns of anticapitalist resistance. Reflecting on the French student protests of 1968, Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 126) writes, “[A]n initially reformist attitude attempting to achieve no more than the reform of an institution such as the university may become transformed into extremely effective and revolutionary action.”Footnote ⁸ Lefebvre does not recommend destroying the university, nor does he ultimately theorize May ’68 as a true revolution. However, the university, for Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969), presents an important site of struggle due to (1) campuses producing student alienation in a way that mimics urban alienation at a smaller scale and (2) the university’s centrality within the ideological apparatus that sustains capitalist production.

Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969) describes the conditions leading to the 1968 university protests as characterized by student alienation, not only as a result of a growing specialization of knowledge within universities (104, 111) and students’ impending role in a society that offers them an “absence of possibilities” (107), but also due to the repression of social life on campus and physical spaces lacking community and imagination (105–6). While recognizing the privilege of students relative to the working class, Lefebvre describes the alienation of the former on campus: “[T]he students in general and the social science students in particular appear privileged, but they face practical and intellectual difficulties: lack of employment opportunities and acute awareness of a static social practice which offers no perspective or possibilities” (66). Others describe the “desolate landscape,” geographic isolation of students, and hierarchically imposed curriculum at Nanterre, where protests began (Crouzet Reference Crouzet1969, 330–34; Neary and Hagyard Reference Neary, Hagyard, Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon2010, 212). Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 67) explains that “students derive their sense of a marginal existence from actual social conditions which they feel justified in criticizing.” Student alienation, for Lefebvre, produces spontaneity in the form of urban resistance. Against critics who dismiss student protesters as nothing more than “bourgeois children,” Lefebvre argues that the students “[took] their places in the forefront of the political struggle” against dominating structures (108) and “[affected] a whole range of institutions by releasing spontaneity” (71). Lefebvre does criticize the student movement’s focus on negation and lack of stable organizational forms (82). However, he emphasizes how students initiated “a great contestation of the entire society, its institutions, its ideologies” (111).Footnote ⁹

Lefebvre situates the university’s knowledge production as a key element in the capitalist ideological superstructure and therefore an important venue for resistance. He describes the university’s social function as “chiefly pedagogic: it is a center for the production of knowledge, ideas, and people” (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 134). In capitalist society, the university produces “junior executives for the management of this society and transmit[s] a body of specialized knowledge determined and limited by the social division of labor” (104). While other scholars cite the importance of the university’s critical function in a broader public sphere (Butler Reference Butler2017; Holmwood Reference Holmwood2017), Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 87) discusses the power of turning this critique inward through “incessant self-criticism.” He describes student protesters as opening a wide field of cultural critique by questioning the university’s role in capitalist reproduction and interrupting their own position in the reinforcement of class domination. As one journalist recently noted, student protests at elite institutions are “fundamental challenges to the legitimacy of the whole system. … These are the factories that produce the people that end up running the media, running the political system, running the corporations. If you lose control of them, then ultimately, you lose control of elite opinion” (Ali Abunimah, quoted in Workman and Pritsker Reference Workman and Kei Pritsker2025, 1:13:38). Student protesters in 1968 France developed a “sharp critique of the capitalistic use of knowledge produced by the university” while simultaneously making efforts to “connect with other struggles” (Reeve Reference Reeve2018). As protests evolved and relocated to the Sorbonne, students declared the space open to workers, published documents on the united action of students and workers, and attempted to organize through the environment of the campus occupation (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Ehrenfeld1969, 131; see also “La Sorbonne est ouverte” 1968; PSU 1968).

As such, I argue that concretized demands for a democratic and anticapitalist university should be theorized as a valuable step in demanding, clarifying, and expanding the right to the city. While Lefebvre wrote in response to French university politics, the rest of this article applies this reinterpreted right to the city to the case of North American elite universities.Footnote ¹⁰ Contemporary elite universities in the US and Canada illustrate Lefebvre’s concerns about alienating student life while engaging in increasingly nondemocratic management structures and patterns of external spatial production that provide an opportunity to significantly extend his original analysis. While the binary between capitalism, hierarchical production, and exchange value on the one hand and socialism, democratic management, and use value on the other may not be as rigid as Lefebvre often implies—with university administrations at times investing in spatial use values for their communities and demands for democratic control often directed at market-driven forms—the right to the city provides a plausible framework for understanding contemporary campuses and connecting the university to broader networks. Because elite universities are major actors in capitalist spatial production (Harvey Reference Harvey, LeGates and Stout2015, 278; Heller Reference Heller2016) while simultaneously occupying a crucial position within the public sphere defined by knowledge production (Butler Reference Butler2017; Holmwood Reference Holmwood2017), attempts to transform them can fruitfully be understood as deeply intertwined with a broader right-to-the-city movement.

Spatial Production and the Right to the Campus

Scholars of higher education situate the university within broader political-economic transformations since the 1980s, tracing how intensified globalization, neoliberal policy reform, and declining public funding have driven marketization across national contexts (Aidnik Reference Aidnik2024; Aidnik and Sharma Reference Aidnik and Sharma2023; W. Brown Reference Brown2015; Heller Reference Heller2016; Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023; Slaughter and Leslie Reference Slaughter and Leslie1997; Slaughter and Rhoades Reference Slaughter and Rhoades2004). Although the US is marked by deeper cuts and more overtly market-oriented practices, Canadian universities have likewise faced diminished government support and growing competitive pressures (Lewis Reference Lewis, Canaan and Shumar2008; Metcalfe Reference Metcalfe2010; Slaughter and Leslie Reference Slaughter and Leslie1997, 4, 18). While “academic capitalism” refers to the condition in which the capitalist profit motive permeates the university (Aidnik Reference Aidnik2024, 37; Heller Reference Heller2016, 173; Slaughter and Leslie Reference Slaughter and Leslie1997), a description of the “neoliberal university” emphasizes reconfiguration of the university rather than mere invasion (W. Brown Reference Brown2015; Canaan and Shumar Reference Canaan, Shumar, Canaan and Shumar2008, 3–4; Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023). Under heightened competition for revenue, the university begins to function—and be managed—like a neoliberal firm (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023; Rustin Reference Rustin2016, 154): knowledge is commodified (W. Brown Reference Brown2015, 187; Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 207), market demands shape programs (W. Brown Reference Brown2015, 181; Canaan and Shumar Reference Canaan, Shumar, Canaan and Shumar2008, 5; Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 205; Saunders Reference Saunders2023), students are recast as consumers paying high tuition fees (Canaan and Shumar Reference Canaan, Shumar, Canaan and Shumar2008, 4–5; Rustin Reference Rustin2016, 155), and professional managerial structures grow in popularity (Troiani and Dutson Reference Troiani and Dutson2021, 6; Waugh Reference Waugh2003). Boards of trustees and regents composed of external private actors—often financiers—increasingly control financial decision making (Aidnik Reference Aidnik2024, 95; Rustin Reference Rustin2016, 157; Waugh Reference Waugh2003), and though semidemocratic governance structures like senates and representatives on these boards exist (Waugh Reference Waugh2003), university governance suffers a stark democratic deficit (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023; 15; Neary and Winn Reference Neary and Winn2019, 276; Saunders Reference Saunders2023, 9) that marginalizes faculty, staff, and students in decision making.

While the framework of academic freedom has been used to resist the attack on faculty governance structures and the critical function of universities (Butler Reference Butler2017; Waugh Reference Waugh2003), it is too narrow to acknowledge the ways that campuses serve as vital communities for university members, often providing the primary spaces through which students especially, but also faculty and staff, realize meaningful existence. A defense of university insulation to secure academic freedom not only falls short of a democratic commitment to university governance that empowers students and staff (Holmwood Reference Holmwood2017, 931) but also ignores the nonintellectual demands members make on the university. A Lefebvrean perspective reveals that the university is not merely a collection of scholars (Muñiz-Fraticelli Reference Muñiz-Fraticelli2024) but its own space. Membership in the contemporary university is defined not only by opportunities for intellectual stimulation but also by material and social goods that include community with others, housing and dining needs, spaces for leisure and recreation, transportation, social programming and cultural events, and so forth. Universities are increasingly “multifunctional campuses” rather than “academic monoliths” (Den Heijer and Curvelo Magdaniel Reference den Heijer, Flavia, Meusburger, Heffernan and Saursana2018). The contemporary campus has become its own “self-reflective place” (Kumar Reference Kumar, Smith and Webster1997, 29). As such, the actor who designs the university oeuvre—the setting through which many university members most immediately realize meaningful existence—dictates whether these members experience Lefebvrean inhabitance.

Viewed as private property and an opportunity for revenue, the space of the campus, in terms of both its physical character and the social and cultural opportunities it provides, is increasingly dictated hierarchically, nondemocratically, and with exchange rather than use value in mind. The neoliberal university, to put this otherwise, not only shapes intellectual space but physical and social space as well (see W. Brown Reference Brown2015, 198; Shumar Reference Shumar, Canaan and Shumar2008; Troiani and Dutson Reference Troiani and Dutson2021). Some describe the contemporary campus as increasingly resembling a corporate research park designed to maximize productivity (Shumar Reference Shumar, Canaan and Shumar2008; Troiani and Dutson Reference Troiani and Dutson2021, 6), with fast-paced and individualized daily rhythms replacing a slow, contemplative academic culture (Troiani and Dutson Reference Troiani and Dutson2021). Students at various institutions have voiced concerns over the rates universities charge for housing, dining, parking, and fitness. Student housing is increasingly understood as a “profit driven asset” rather than “a basic need” (Jiang-Brittan Reference Jiang-Brittan2025, 1). Many institutions provide only limited and overpriced on-campus housing while simultaneously expanding enrollment, forcing many students off campus and thus spatially excluding them from engagement in the university community (Asmelash Reference Asmelash2022; Berrada Reference Berrada2024; Jiang-Brittan Reference Jiang-Brittan2025; Strang Reference Strang2014; Tsintsadze Reference Tsintsadze2025). Students, echoing those at Nanterre in 1968, also express discontent with curricula, rigid academic monitoring, campus surveillance, and strict regulation of social conduct. In such a situation, the right-to-the-city framework illuminates the experience and resistance of students, staff, and faculty on campus, understood as a type of Lefebvrean city, complete with its tensions, contradictions, and alienation at a smaller scale.

A novel “right to the campus” for university members describes the demands of students, staff, and faculty for participation in robustly democratic university governance toward the end of securing the conditions that make university life meaningful, both in the realm of knowledge production and with regard to everyday life. This requires the collective management of university surplus by its members and the democratic cocreation of university spaces—physical, social, and intellectual—in accordance with their use values for community needs. The right to the campus, like the right to the city, is not a liberal claim right corresponding to a duty for the institutionally empowered to provide certain economic, social, or educational goods. Rather, it is a principle that describes a situation of collective management and shared enjoyment of university resources and motivates resistance to hierarchy, alienation, and domination on campus. The right to the campus, like the right to the city, both motivates struggles against existing structures and posits alternative spatial governance visions based on self-management and use value (Althorpe and Horak Reference Althorpe and Horak2023). Further, the academic mission of the university makes the right to the campus a unique derivative of the right to the city. In line with its focus on critical inquiry and serious discussion, a democratic vision for the university must take a deliberative form. Aidnik (Reference Aidnik2024, 93) argues that “deliberation is a key facet of the democracy envisioned for the university. Academic culture—the culture of critical discourse—favours democracy based on deliberation.” Thus, a right to the campus for students, faculty, and staff should be conceptualized as the demand for participation in robustly equal and inclusive deliberative decision making on the use of university intellectual, financial, and other resources toward the end of the meaningful cocreation of campus spaces. The right to the campus does not, however, necessitate an elimination of differences internal to the university—for example, between faculty and students. Groups like faculty might retain unique roles in areas of expertise, but with decisions justified before and decided in collaboration with students rather than imposed upon them.Footnote ¹¹

Further, and perhaps more radically, the right-to-the-city framework prompts us to ask about the democratic implications of universities’ relationships to external publics, especially in view of elite North American institutions’ expansive real estate and urban development activities (Heller Reference Heller2016, 175). As such, the contemporary university must be theoretically repositioned as an institutional force preventing the full enjoyment of inhabitance not only for its members but for other residents as well, and thus spatially repositioned in accordance with the demands of a broader urban public. An example provides a helpful bridge for this discussion. Returning to the case of student housing, when students are denied affordable, on-campus housing by universities, their relocation off campus impacts other communities. Through “studentification,” a term describing the process through which neighborhoods become dominated by student occupation, the physical, economic, social, and cultural character of adjacent neighborhoods is permanently altered (Chatterton Reference Chatterton1999; Smith Reference Smith, Atkinson and Bridge2004, 74). For example, Cornell University provides housing for roughly 50% of students and relies on the small city of Ithaca to absorb the excess (Hassan Reference Hassan2022; Puzzi Reference Puzzi2021, 9). In this case and many others,Footnote ¹² traditional family homes in adjacent neighborhoods have been converted into rental properties of multiple occupancy and new student-specific accommodations have been built, maximizing their exchange values for private developers but ignoring their use values for a broader community. In these scenarios, university nonmembers are often priced out and relocated, face social and cultural changes to areas once central to their daily lives (Chatterton Reference Chatterton2000), struggle as resources are transformed to meet a set of needs other than their own (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 108), and experience drastic shifts in neighborhood rhythms. Studentification studies suggest that students, faculty, and staff may not be the only people who can demand a voice in university decision making; so too might university nonmembers, specifically in relation to the university’s external engagements. A Lefebvrean analysis illuminates the lived impacts of the university’s spatialized activities off campus.

Elite universities increasingly compete with locals for limited urban space on very unequal terms. Harvey (Reference Harvey, LeGates and Stout2015) describes the university as one example of urban spatial production’s monopolization among elite groups and institutions. He writes, “In the town of New Haven, strapped for any resources for urban reinvestment of its own, it is Yale University, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York (sparking neighborhood resistance movements in both cases)” (Harvey Reference Harvey, LeGates and Stout2015, 278). Dahl ([Reference Dahl1961] 1974) also cites Yale’s unequal influence over urban development in his famous study of New Haven.Footnote ¹³ Numerous elite universities have undergone expansion projects into adjacent neighborhoods despite resistance from university members and broader publics, and universities play an increasingly active role in the real-estate market (Heller Reference Heller2016, 177). To name just a few examples of the enclosure of city spaces as university private property, Columbia has expanded extensively into Morningside Heights and Harlem (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Gregory Reference Gregory2013; Kahn Reference Kahn1970), the University of Chicago has expanded residences into Hyde Park (Perry, Wiewel, and Menendez Reference Perry, Wiewel and Menendez2009), Harvard University has purchased huge chunks of Allston in Boston (Nishimoto Reference Nishimoto2022; Paoletta Reference Paoletta2019), and Johns Hopkins University has expanded facilities into the Baltimore Middle East neighborhood (Mariano Ilano Reference Ilano and Ashley2020). Heller (Reference Heller2016) describes Columbia as “one of the largest and most aggressive real estate developers on the planet” (111),Footnote ¹⁴ New York University as having a “massive real estate presence” and being “relentlessly committed to expansion” (180–81), and the University of California, Berkeley, as an “urban developer” that even appointed a vice-chancellor for real estate from a private development company in 2013 (122, 177).

Gentrification resulting from university expansion and real-estate investment dislocates urban residents, permanently alters the character of neighborhoods, and drastically changes the resources available for consumption in affected areas (Allen-Handy et al. Reference Allen-Handy, Meloche, Likely, Sterin, Thomas-E. L., McCullough and Datts2024; Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Moos et al. Reference Moos, Revington, Wilkin and Andrey2019; Revington et al. Reference Revington, Zwick, Hartt and Schlosser2023). Residents often become physically excluded from the areas they once called home, and when they manage to remain in these areas, they face major changes in their neighborhoods and lack the substantive exercise of inhabitance. Importantly, campus expansion projects and real-estate ventures disproportionately impact racialized communities due to both gentrification (Allen-Handy et al. Reference Allen-Handy, Meloche, Likely, Sterin, Thomas-E. L., McCullough and Datts2024; Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Kahn Reference Kahn1970) and the creation of university “safe spaces,” which surveille and police racialized bodies under the guise of student safety (Carpenter, Goldblatt, and Hanson Reference Carpenter, Goldblatt and Hanson2016). Such is clear in Harlem and Morningside Heights (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Gregory Reference Gregory2013; Kahn Reference Kahn1970; Kappner Reference Kappner and Cronin2018), the Baltimore Middle East (Mariano Ilano Reference Ilano and Ashley2020), West Philadelphia (Allen-Handy et al. Reference Allen-Handy, Meloche, Likely, Sterin, Thomas-E. L., McCullough and Datts2024), Montreal’s Parc Extension neighborhood (Jolivet et al. Reference Jolivet, Reiser, Baumann and Gonzalès2023; Milic, Megelas, and Guay Reference Milic, Megelas and Guay2022; Renzi et al. Reference Renzi, Vansintjan, Guay, Vukov and Kolinjivadi2020), and New Haven (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 135–40).

These trends increasingly extend beyond the fabric of the immediate city, with university involvement in globalized trends of nondemocratic spatial production. Though Lefebvre’s right to the city implies local struggles for democratic control, it is important to note that achieving this condition increasingly depends on resisting globalized patterns. The “triple-helix model” of university–industry–government relations situates the university as a powerful actor determining regional development together with governments and large corporations (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff Reference Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff2000). This framework emphasizes the influence these three sectors wield relative to the general population in the spatial terrain of the growing knowledge economy, producing areas such as science parks and professional development centers and setting off broader geographic patterns. Elite universities increasingly expand overseas through satellite campus construction (Holmwood Reference Holmwood2017, 927; Troiani and Dutson Reference Troiani and Dutson2021, 6), far removed from the immediate context of impacted neighborhoods and complicit in the denial of urban life across vast expanses of space. The university also exercises power over space through more indirect financial flows. Elite universities manage their endowments like hedge funds, with extensive investment portfolios typically managed by external private actors (Heller Reference Heller2016).Footnote ¹⁵ Investments in oil and natural gas, real-estate companies, and arms manufacturers contribute capital toward the production of space in an increasingly globalized sense, a process described by Marxist geographers who have updated Lefebvre’s original framework to account for globalization and uneven development (Harvey Reference Harvey2000). This provides insights into how criticizing the university’s broader activities is linked to struggles for local self-management and urban inhabitance, both on campus and in the city beyond.

Although universities provide a range of resources to surrounding communities, access to those goods offers only a partial account of what the right to the city demands (Harvey Reference Harvey, LeGates and Stout2015; Lopes de Souza Reference Lopes de Souza2010; Purcell Reference Purcell2002). A right to the campus that claims, for example, access to green space and libraries, open-attendance events, transportation services for nonmembers, or even local hiring falls short of Lefebvre’s standard of radical transformation. At times, universities even collaborate with neighboring communities over resource allocation (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Paoletta Reference Paoletta2019; Springer Reference Springer2025). This is not the issue from a Lefebvrean perspective. Rather, it is that these goods remain discretionary, provided and withdrawn according to institutional priorities, as was rendered visible when schools including Columbia, Harvard, and McGill closed their gates to locals in 2024 (Amponsah and Kim Reference Amponsah and Kim2024; Gilmour Reference Gilmour2024; Kodé Reference Kodé2025). Recent conversations about widening participation in university decision making center on increasing the influence of faculty and students relative to other stakeholders (Aidnik Reference Aidnik2024; Aidnik and Sharma Reference Aidnik and Sharma2023; Butler Reference Butler2017; Muñiz-Fraticelli Reference Muñiz-Fraticelli2024; Waugh Reference Waugh2003) but rarely address doing the same for nonmembers. While universities face external pressure from their communities to behave in certain ways, they lack proper mechanisms for integrating a broader range of voices into university decision making, leaving complaints as pleas to those in power. The right to the campus requires institutionalized participatory power for surrounding publics, specifically in connection to the university’s external spatial activities and the use of surplus that shapes the broader urban oeuvre .

External interference in university life has long been denounced in the name of academic freedom, and there are real tensions between the university accountability Lefebvre emphasizes and the autonomy that enables universities’ critical knowledge-production function (Calhoun Reference Calhoun2006; Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, xl; Goddard and Vallance Reference Goddard and Vallance2013). While a right to the campus for nonmembers most clearly targets the university’s external spatial practices, there may be cases where community input on intellectual activities or things like the use of on-campus venues is necessary to secure a broader right to the city.Footnote ¹⁶ A radical right to the campus must therefore be negotiated alongside and against other university values and should not be presumed in matters of core academic operations. At the same time, the right-to-the-campus approach seeks to reposition academic freedom as one important value among other values relevant to university governance rather than an automatic warrant for insulation; the university cannot be declared “an enclave set apart from politics” (Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, x) in the vein of the 1967 Kalven Report while its external behaviors remain deeply political in the sense of right-to-the-city denial. Further, while some might imagine internal democratic governance by university members and public participation in university decision making as opposed forces, campus occupations illustrate that student and nonmember demands do not simply run parallel (Ferman et al. Reference Ferman, Greenberg, Lee and McKay2021) but are deeply connected empirically.

Campus Occupations: Lessons and Reinterpretations

The 1968 Columbia case provides an example of private universities and the right to the campus even prior to the neoliberalization of the 1980s, as well as an opportunity to extract lessons for studying the recent wave of student encampments. It also strengthens the right-to-the-city framework by demanding attention to the experience of university-related alienation at the intersection of race and class, which Lefebvre’s original framework largely ignores.Footnote ¹⁷ Columbia University’s relationship with students and Harlem residents in the late 1960s involved several dimensions of conflict—university expansion and landlord activities in Harlem and Morningside Heights; university participation in military research through the Institute for Defense Analyses in the context of the Vietnam War; denial of participation in university decision making for students; and the alienation of students, especially Black students, from social, cultural, and intellectual life on campus (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Heller Reference Heller2016; Kahn Reference Kahn1970).Footnote ¹⁸ But protests were catalyzed by the planned construction of a segregated gymnasium in Morningside Park. Columbia has long competed for limited urban space with the largely racialized residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights, using its financial influence to impose spatial production on these populations (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 21). Through the 1960s, Columbia used safety language to justify a series of property acquisitions that dislocated many residents from these neighborhoods (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 28; Kappner Reference Kappner and Cronin2018, 155; see also Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, xli; Haidu Reference Haidu and Cronin2018, 100–1). In this context, the university proposed a gym construction in Morningside Park, the primary green space for locals, rather than on existing university premises. The university’s plan to “share” the gym with the community determined that Columbia members and nonmembers would enter through separate doors, with the latter only given access to 12.5% of the space (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 50).

As protests began at the construction site of this “Gym Crow,” multiple constituencies emerged as major protest actors: the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS), and the residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights. Among many students, there was a “suspicion that impersonal institutions had lost contact with ordinary humanity and with moral behavior” (Berman Reference Berman and Cronin2018, xxiv), with this lack of authentic human experience increasingly defining life on and near campus. The SDS had broad goals related to transforming university governance into democratic self-management, challenging the unfreedom experienced on campus and in society, and cutting university ties with the military (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 66; Feldman Reference Feldman and Cronin2018; Kahn Reference Kahn1970). The SAS rallied primarily in opposition to Columbia’s external spatial production (R. Brown Reference Brown and Cronin2018, 15), together with nearby residents, but would eventually demand the inclusion of Black studies in Columbia’s curriculum, increased enrollment and funding for Black students, and the hiring of Black faculty members (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Kahn Reference Kahn1970). Black Columbia students cited “a profound sense of alienation” (Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, xlii) resulting from frequent security stops, the lack of Black faculty members and administrators, and the university’s Western curriculum (R. Brown Reference Brown and Cronin2018, 19). As one Harlem community member put it, “the Columbia protests were fundamentally about the politics of domination. The university administration was representative of maximal, top-down control, with elites imposing themselves on everyone else, and for years, the result on campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods had been a minimum of actual democracy” (Johnson Reference Johnson and Cronin2018, 145). Undemocratic spatial management by the university administration, according to protesters, denied both Columbia students and nearby residents meaningful inhabitance.

After police retaliated against protesters at the gym site and the campus center, students occupied Hamilton Hall, home of Columbia College, the university’s undergraduate liberal arts school. Activists described the occupations as a “disruption tactic” meant to generate decision-making power for protesters by “disturbing the campus and making it difficult to reach certain classrooms” (Bradley Reference Bradley2009, 73). As one participant explained, “the taking over of university buildings is, I think, the first step past a sit in; it is a power move, a challenge to the administration’s right to run the place paternalistically” (Raskin Reference Raskin1985, 260). Students would eventually occupy and barricade themselves inside five key buildings on campus (Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, xxxi), and the occupation of Low Memorial Library was especially disruptive due to its central location and housing of important administrative offices. Classes were cancelled for over two weeks (Raskin Reference Raskin1985, 257), forcing administrators to engage with student and community demands, come to the negotiation table, and eventually agree to halt gym construction, increase student decision-making power, and withdraw support for the Institute for Defense Analyses (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Kahn Reference Kahn1970). Through occupations of campus spaces, students and community members realized meaningful participation in university governance.

The student movement was managed by a strike coordinating committee composed of representatives from each occupied building, but each building developed as a “self-governing commune” (Cronin Reference Cronin and Cronin2018, xxxi) with a “society of unique individual character” (Kahn Reference Kahn1970, 176). Each space developed its own identity, and there was an “overall resonance” within the movement about resisting nondemocratic, elite control (Greenberg Reference Greenberg and Cronin2018, 91). SDS-occupied buildings focused on prefiguring participatory democracy, making “an active effort to avoid creating and enacting systems that reflected the hierarchical privileged-based structures [they] were battling” (Ehrenberg Reference Ehrenberg and Cronin2018, 39). This included frequent opportunities for replacing leaders and extensive deliberations among large groups. The SAS-occupied Hamilton Hall was barricaded with desks and file cabinets to prevent outsiders from entering and safeguard racial self-determination within the space (Raskin Reference Raskin1985, 256). Critical of the slowness of participatory politics, major decisions were openly debated but decided by trusted leaders (Branch Reference Branch and Cronin2018, 13). Both student groups, albeit in different ways, practiced the self-management that characterizes the right to the campus within the occupied spaces. While occupiers knew they could not ultimately “run a socialist communal university in a capitalist city and society” (Raskin Reference Raskin1985, 260), they practiced their ideals for transformed university spaces through the protest episode, even offering “counter-classes” to Columbia courses focused on practical education (“Liberation Classes—Friday” 1968).

Neighboring community members played vital roles in the occupations. Racialized Harlem residents provided security services outside Hamilton Hall, and university nonmembers participated in occupations at the Low Memorial Library, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and other buildings. As one SAS occupier explained, “Harlem mothers, community church groups, and civil rights leaders were all supportive, bringing food, sleeping bags, and messages of encouragement. … [T]hose ‘outside agitators’ were our brothers and sisters” (Branch Reference Branch and Cronin2018, 12; see also R. Brown Reference Brown and Cronin2018, 16). In large part, the university did not attempt to clear protesters from Hamilton Hall sooner because of the students’ connections to the Harlem community and fears that doing so would cause a race riot on campus (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Kahn Reference Kahn1970; Raskin Reference Raskin1985). Before the protests, linkages between Black Columbia students and Harlem residents were not cemented (Bradley Reference Bradley2009), with students often dismissed as privileged. However, the concrete tasks of defending and supporting the material existence of the occupied spaces provided an anchor for the establishment of political connections between Black students and Harlem residents and the linking of struggles within the university to those within the city more broadly.

The 1968 Columbia case provides insights into the particular ways that student protests challenge hierarchical and profit-driven university governance by asserting control over campus space, suggesting three concrete dimensions for analyzing the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampments through the right-to-the-campus lens. First, by achieving a continuous presence in strategically located physical spaces, campus occupations can disrupt university activities and empower student and community participation in university decision making. Second, occupations can provide venues for rehearsing university life defined by collective self-management and spatial use value. Third, the material tasks of maintaining occupied spaces can provide opportunities for organizing between students and broader publics. Campus occupations have the capacity to simultaneously become vectors of counterpower against existing institutions, sites of democratic reimagining of these institutions, and anchors for broader contestation (though there are often trade-offs between these different functions). However, the 1968 case also reveals conflicts internal to occupied spaces over demand content, decision-making methods, and identity-based differences. After white protesters were asked to leave Hamilton Hall, activists grappled with how the SDS could support SAS self-determination while remaining part of the same resistance movement. Ideological differences were plentiful (Greenberg Reference Greenberg and Cronin2018, 91), participants cited gender-based mistreatment (Biberman Reference Biberman and Cronin2018; Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg and Cronin2018), and some thought SDS leaders manipulated democratic processes or lacked procedures for managing conflict (Johnson Reference Johnson and Cronin2018). The occupied spaces were not perfect utopias, but “introduced Columbia students to the practical possibilities of democratic participation and student autonomy” (Slonecker Reference Slonecker2006, iii). Protesters confronted political and social difference and unequal treatment, pursuing participatory politics in the face of the challenges Lefebvre predicted self-management would bring.

The 2024 Gaza solidarity encampments recreated the spatialized strategies of these earlier protests in an era of heightened capitalism and globalization. Instead of resisting local campus expansion and direct military involvement, student protesters linked their lack of decision-making power to investments made with tuition money at both private and public universities. Analyzed through the framework of the right to the campus, these protests were not about using civil disobedience to make pleas to those in power within a university system that one ultimately accepts. Nor were they merely defined by students resisting specific instances of injustice through uncivil disobedience (Delmas Reference Delmas2018). Rather, protesters’ physical presence in encampment spaces was directly tied to a critique of undemocratic structures: by positing control over “private” campus spaces from the bottom up and in accordance with the needs (including political ones) of students and community members, the encampments contested the top-down management and market logic determining the use of campus space and characterizing the university’s activities more broadly (for a similar argument, see Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2025). Campus occupations are a spatialized challenge to existing university governance structures, characterized by students, staff, faculty, and outsiders laying claim to a seat at the table where university decisions are made.

In interviews with researchers, filmmakers, and journalists, activists repeatedly cite the lack of administrative response to divestment decisions by student governments motivating their construction and continuation of encampments. At numerous elite universities, including Columbia, McGill, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), students democratically—and decisively—passed motions for their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers in the months leading up to and overlapping with the encampments (Cartier Reference Cartier2024; Feith Reference Feith2023; Kodialam Reference Kodialam2024; Noxon Reference Noxon2024; Scull Reference Scull2024; Vance Reference Vance2024). At both Columbia and McGill, students cite high turnout rates for these votes (Feith Reference Feith2023; Noxon Reference Noxon2024; Scull Reference Scull2024). Student governments at many other institutions passed boycott and divestment motions in the years leading up to and since the encampments, but administrations generally respond without attempting to integrate student voices into university governance. Columbia students describe their referendum as having never been properly processed by the university (Walton Reference Walton2024; Workman and Pritsker Reference Workman and Kei Pritsker2025, 7:07). Following its referendum vote, the McGill administration threatened to terminate its agreement with the student union, which would effectively cut its funding and prevent it from using the university name (Feith Reference Feith2023).Footnote ¹⁹ UCLA simply released a statement reaffirming its opposition to boycotting and divestment (UCLA 2024).

Student protesters complain that their governance votes have no immediate impact on university policies (Noxon Reference Noxon2024; Scull Reference Scull2024; Workman and Pritsker Reference Workman and Kei Pritsker2025, 6:35) and describe the failure of administrations to take the votes seriously in terms of a democratic deficit in governance. They call administrative decisions “a threat to student democracy” (Feith Reference Feith2023), note “how the university continues to ignore the demands of students” (Winward and Hamilton Reference Winward and Hamilton2024), and argue that “students pay more tuition than they do taxes; we believe students’ interests should be represented in university decision making, especially as their tuition is entangled with the university’s investments, development projects, and academic partnerships” (Cartier Reference Cartier2024).Footnote ²⁰ As one University of Chicago professor explained, as “our universities are becoming increasingly undemocratic and increasingly only interested in their endowments and the interests of a small number of profiteering donors,” the encampments are a “statement about who the university belongs to” (Bawab [Reference Bawab2024], quoting Eman Abdelhadi). Linking these radical democratic elements of the protests to their spatial expression, the right to the campus provides a conceptual vocabulary for activists challenging hierarchical university structures and a novel analytic framework for interpreting the encampments and campus occupations before them. As such, conclusions about the successes and disappointments of the encampments as an event, and of specific encampments in particular, must assess their ability to concretize a right to the campus. Like the academic freedom and civil disobedience frameworks, the right to the campus can ultimately be used to defend or criticize the encampments. However, this assessment does not depend solely on interpretations of disruptiveness but rather on multiple dimensions of spatialized activity. The lessons drawn from the 1968 Columbia protests provide valuable resources for this analysis.

Like their counterparts in 1968, contemporary encampment activists describe the disruption of university programming like commencement ceremonies as a deliberate tactic to bring university administrators to the negotiating table and contest market-driven governance. The encampments that were able to achieve a continuous presence on spaces central to daily university operations—quads and plazas near administrative offices or key buildings—created leverage for student voices to be heard in university decision making. Activists at institutions including McGill, the University of Toronto, and the University of British Columbia stress that the resulting meetings were the first time that administrators negotiated with pro-Palestine student groups directly.Footnote ²¹ From a radical democratic perspective, these linkages between student spaces and governance bodies are significant, transcending specific issue-level demands and concretizing influence for students within university decision-making processes, if only episodically (Hartocollis Reference Hartocollis2024; Patel Reference Patel2024). Less promising are agreements that merely route demands to trustee meetings and investment boards that remain structurally undemocratic, such as those that occurred at Brown University (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2024; Patel Reference Patel2024). However, during negotiations, activists describe administrators stating plainly that certain demands were “off the table,”Footnote ²² most commonly invoking institutional neutrality to avoid debates about boycotts and university statements (see also Beilock Reference Beilock2024; Pollack Reference Pollack2024a; Saini Reference Saini2024). Activists, for their part, sometimes treated the right to the campus as nonnegotiable, refusing to decamp until all their demands were met (Powell Reference Powell2024b; Workman and Pritsker Reference Workman and Kei Pritsker2025, 16:45) or declining dialogue altogether.Footnote ²³ The upshot is not that the right to the campus should be absolute, but that it should be treated as a central governance value whose claims must be weighed against those that protect the university’s core function, including academic freedom—a deliberative exercise some universities attempted in sustained meetings, but a missed opportunity for others.

Activists also highlight internal encampment activities as core elements of their political engagement, a dimension ignored by the civil disobedience framework. In addition to claims about injustice, the names chosen for encampments reveal goals related to democratic self-management: these include “People’s University for Palestine” at Columbia, “Popular University for Gaza” at Princeton University, and “People’s Circle for Palestine” at the University of Toronto. As Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2025) has recently argued, some encampments inverted the hierarchical production of campus “property” by practicing popular management of occupied spaces that looked and functioned like “villages” or small cities (see also Hodali Reference Hodali2025). Encampments provided housing, food, and educational, social, and cultural spaces including library tents, common areas, and prayer spaces. Activists decorated the encampments with art created at community events, redesigned spaces to respond to the evolving needs of occupants, and collectively managed architectural rebuilds following weather events. One activist at McGill described how the “organic makeup” of the encampment space “made it so that it addressed [their] needs directly,” echoing the Lefebvrean prioritization of spatial use value over the administrative focus on exchange value.Footnote ²⁴ Many encampments hosted workshops, teach-ins, and film screenings designed to respond to what students wanted to learn and encourage self-criticism of university activities (Cadenhead et al. Reference Cadenhead, Boehmer, Beran and Driggers2024; Lalonde Reference Lalonde2024; Majed Dweik Reference Dweik and Cathryn2025; Shields Reference Shields2024). However, some encampments approached management in more democratic terms than others. Some committed to fully horizontal decision-making processes with nightly, hours-long deliberations; others elected representatives to supervisory committees; and still others were led by small groups of unelected leaders. Across these categories, procedural challenges and ideological disagreement remained. The most successful encampments experimented with democratic and use-driven models of campus design while learning from and adjusting to challenges that arose, linking oppositional struggle with an alternative vision for collective campus management through prefiguration.

Conversely, when universities called on police force and sought legal injunctions to clear encampments, they reasserted exclusive control over campus spaces and reaffirmed neoliberal property and managerial logics (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2025; see also Bhandar Reference Bhandar2013). This reassertion has continued and deepened since the end of the encampments in the form of both temporary protest regulations and permanent changes to university codes of conduct (Taft Reference Taft2024). In addition to emphasizing and clarifying bans on encampments, Columbia and UCLA have codified changes that ban the use of face coverings during protests, the latter has banned unauthorized demonstrations from key campus areas (including the site used for the Gaza solidarity encampment), and the former has banned all protests inside academic buildings and other “places necessary for the conduct of university activities” (Bordoff Reference Bordoff2025; see also Kaleem Reference Kaleem2025). Students cite changes as intentional efforts to depoliticize campus spaces and “criminalize protest.”Footnote ²⁵ Many governments and police forces encouraged and assisted administrations with clearancesFootnote ²⁶ and, especially in the case of the Trump administration, have pressured universities to make sweeping policy changes in the period since. However, some state actors have resisted: a Montreal judge rejected McGill’s request for an injunction to clear its encampment (Cherry Reference Cherry2024); police forces in Montreal, Toronto, and Washington, DC, reportedly declined to crack down on protesters (Cohen Reference Cohen2024; Hermann Reference Hermann2024; Lalonde Reference Lalonde2024); and most recently, a New York judge vacated the punishments issued by Columbia University against protesters who occupied Hamilton Hall during the encampment episode (Hu Reference Hu2026; Otterman Reference Otterman2026). Such moments suggest that opportunities remain for the “redeployment of state authority” toward protecting spaces that experiment with collective self-management and contest hierarchical university governance (Althorpe and Horak Reference Althorpe and Horak2023, 34).

Administrations often justified clearance by accusing encampments of privatizing shared campus areas by constructing barricades, walls, and securitized doorways (French Reference French2024; Friedersdorf Reference Friedersdorf2024; Powell Reference Powell2024a; Sun Reference Sun2024).Footnote ²⁷ This reversal of the privatization narrative overstates the extent to which campus green spaces are ordinarily enjoyed as a genuinely shared good and overlooks the reality that experiments in appropriation require boundaries and defense against dominating spatial forces (Hodali Reference Hodali2025). More convincing objections argue that closed encampments prevent discussion between those who disagree and therefore interfere with the critical discourse processes central to the university’s educational mission (Müller Reference Müller2025). The deliberative character of the right to the campus requires balancing disruption and protection of prefigurative spaces with democratic engagement among a broader, pluralistic set of university stakeholders. Some encampments attempted this through “come talk” booths, free stores, and public-facing events, while activists at others avoided these interactions. Maintaining a deliberative orientation, however, also depends on the behavior of others toward activists. This was a problem on many campuses, most strikingly at UCLA, where violent counterprotesters initiated a complete breakdown of serious discourse (Bedi et al. Reference Bedi, Erden, Hernandez, Jhaveri, Lajka, Reneau, Rosales and Toler2024) and a troubling erosion of deliberative campus culture.

Crucially from a Lefebvrean perspective, many encampments did more than encourage self-criticism among university members. They rendered the place of elite institutions in capitalist structures visible to a wider public audience. Activists explicitly cite “raising awareness” of elite universities’ financial activities as a core aim,Footnote ²⁸ and media coverage was central to this educative and agenda-setting function. Although mainstream outlets often reduced the encampments to a transgressive spectacle, student newspapers,Footnote ²⁹ small local outlets, and social media productions by activists tied the occupied spaces to divestment demands. Mobilizing a larger community in protest of university activities, students challenged the image of the university as an insulated ivory tower, forcing “that imaginary line at the gate to be open.”Footnote ³⁰ In response, even public universities asserted their right to determine the use of their “private property,” closing their gates to outsiders and thereby excluding the local publics they ostensibly serve from participation in contestation (Gilmour Reference Gilmour2024; Kodé Reference Kodé2025; Marantz Reference Marantz2024).Footnote ³¹ In the period since, universities have restated their “right to restrict access to visitors and nonaffiliates at any time” (Bordoff [Reference Bordoff2025], quoting Columbia policy). So-called “outside agitators” provide a fundamental challenge to this view. While neighboring residents legitimized their participation in the 1968 campus occupations with reference to university-related gentrification and displacement, and though these local concerns still played a role in the 2024 case (Workman and Pritsker Reference Workman and Kei Pritsker2025, 11:24),Footnote ³² more recent “outside agitators” push the right-to-the-city framework in a generative direction. By suggesting a contemporary right to the campus (and right to the city) that pairs localized resistance with a context of capitalist globalization, these outsiders invite a radical reconceptualization of the role of broader publics in university politics.

Activists confirm not only that outsiders were present in many encampment spaces, but also that local communities were vital for the encampments’ longevity—with political organizations, mosques, nearby businesses, and families providing food, material supplies, and support. Various encampments made active efforts to connect with labor unions and local activist networks “to link the city-wide movement with the student movement, because that’s a bridge that has been disrupted practically.”Footnote ³³ However, the longest-lasting encampments, notably those in Canada, faced deep rifts between different groups as time went on. This suggests an upper limit to how long encampments should last and the risk of “fetishizing space” (P. Marcuse Reference Marcuse2011), holding occupied spaces for the sake of doing so even when it is no longer productive—or in fact is counterproductive—for organizing goals in the pursuit of a broader right to the city. Lefebvre’s worry about the lack of persisting organizational forms coming out of these protest episodes remains a challenge, and locating future campus occupations within the right-to-the-city movement ultimately depends on the development of innovative worker–student organizational forms. This challenge stems, in part, from the lack of a vocabulary available to activists for both asserting their participation in university governance and rendering this struggle legible and relevant to broader activist networks. Popularizing the vocabulary of the right to the campus provides a promising organizational starting point for linking students to a variety of anticapitalist urban activist networks and situating university activities as a direct concern of the lively right-to-the-city movement.

Conclusion: A New Conceptual Vocabulary

Campus occupations like the recent Gaza solidarity encampments raise important theoretical questions about physical campus spaces, participation in university governance, and outside influence on university life. While the encampments have generated extensive commentary, political theory has been slow to supply concepts that capture their distinctive normative stakes and engage the questions that universities face today. This article has argued that Henri Lefebvre offers such resources. Reading the events of May ’68 with Lefebvre, I reformulated the “right to the city” in terms of institutional transformation and episodes of protest, and I positioned the university as a strategic site for demanding, expanding, and clarifying the right to the city. On this basis, I developed a derivative concept—the right to the campus—as a demand by students, faculty, staff, and local nonmembers for participatory power in university decision making to enable use-driven cocreation of spaces both on and off campus.

Using lessons from the 1968 Columbia protests, I applied the right to the campus as an analytic tool for better understanding the character, successes, and disappointments of the 2024 case. Encampments can establish meaningful linkages between student spaces and university governance, prefigure collectively managed campus spaces characterized by use value for members, and/or make visible the university’s capitalist entanglement. These experiments proved most promising when activists understood their demands in negotiation with other core university values, maintained a deliberative orientation toward plural constituencies, and built organizational forms capable of connecting student actions with workers and surrounding publics.

The right to the campus provides both an analytic lens for assessing campus occupations and a normative vocabulary for articulating democratic demands within university governance. It also clarifies how university politics intersect with wider urban and global processes and struggles, providing a basis for linking students with other movements. Finally, because the right to the campus is meaningfully pluralistic—capable of registering conflicts over gentrification, racialized exclusion, investment and divestment, and academic boycotts—it can help political theory to better grasp the spatial and radical democratic dimensions of varied types of campus movements and the institutional designs they contest and propose. As such, it offers a valuable and widely applicable framework for the future of university politics.