Securitizing the University

By MARYAM JAMSHIDI. Full Text.

Since October 7, 2023, public and private actors have doubled down on efforts to securitize the American university. In large part, these initiatives aim to quash a vocal pro-Palestine movement that has become highly visible across U.S. campuses since October 7th. In targeting this group, these efforts have variously treated the university as an “object” of national security, namely, as a potential site of national security risk, while simultaneously encouraging or pressuring universities to “participate” in national security, namely, by actively and, in many cases, voluntarily furthering U.S. national security objectives. The university’s status as object of and participant in national security has a long history, dating back to World War II and continuing in relatively unbroken fashion to the present moment, at least until recently.

This Article examines the university’s historical relationship to the U.S. national security state—as both object of and participant in national security—and situates current efforts to securitize higher education against that backdrop. While this recent securitization drive has accelerated and expanded since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, this Article focuses on the origins of those efforts during the last fifteen months of the Biden administration. In doing so, this Article demonstrates how this recent chapter in the university’s securitization comports with endemic trends in U.S. national security, which include the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony; the anti-Palestinian animus at the heart of U.S. counterterrorism laws; a tendency to create “enemies”; and the important role of private parties in shaping U.S. national security law and policy. Together, this analysis demonstrates that, rather than being aberrational, this current moment in the university’s securitization is an unsurprising and predictable consequence of how U.S. national security has long operated.