Campus Protests Are Revealing the Precarity of Student Housing

Life in college dorms is a perfect encapsulation of the best and worst of cooperative living. You’re trapped in a cell-like bedroom with bunk beds and decaying furniture, yet most of your ‘living’ takes place in generous common areas, hallways, or out in the world. Sure, the walls are concrete brick, but for the first time in one’s young life, you have a space to do what you please with. On-campus living has become sacred to university life: Dorms are where university culture is fostered and passed down, where teenagers are introduced to adulthood’s independence and all of the rights and responsibilities that come with it.

Yet over the past several weeks, a different sort of tradition has made major headlines: campuses as sites of social and political protests, leading to tenuous housing conditions. Students have begun mobilizing across the country, calling for university transparency and divestment from corporations profiteering from the Israel-Hamas war has surpassed six months, while others have showed up in counter-protest. And, as a result, some student protestors—including those at Columbia University, Barnard College, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Minnesota—have been evicted or threatened with eviction from their on-campus homes. In small college towns where off-campus living is scarce, or in places like New York City, where thousands of dollars a year in residential fees (often paid partially by student loans) may be more affordable than off-campus housing, expulsion from campus residences can be life-altering. Universities are exercising their bureaucratic tools to deter protest leaders, raising the question of these entities as sites of academic freedom and protected speech—and the laws and traditions protecting those actions—that also sit in tension with the realities of adulthood, and the long, exclusionary history of campus living.

Housing appears to have come into play in such cases in March, when four Columbia students engaged in a "Resistance 101" panel event were suspended; the Columbia Spectator states they were given 24 hours to leave their dorms. According to the Spectator, "...a suspended student received preliminary charges of disruptive behavior, endangerment, violation of law, violation of University policy, and ‘failure to comply’" based on standards set by the university’s Center for Student Success and Intervention. "The student was sanctioned with an ‘interim’ suspension, making them unable to participate in classes and extracurriculars or enter campus without prior arrangements through public safety." Evictions as discipline have continued to spread to other campuses, as elaborated by a recent Teen Vogue story.

One suspended Columbia student interviewed by Teen Vogue noted that such suspensions and related investigations resulted in "holding our housing, our careers, our academic careers, access to medical care overhead to force us into meeting with two private investigators," while the university responded by emphasizing their "disciplinary process." It is unclear (and seemingly unlikely) that if any suspension-related evictions become permanent expulsions the schools would refund evicted students’ housing and dining payments.

This isn’t necessarily novel—student housing is fragile. In 2020, three Harvard students were "dismissed" from campus for violating its residential compact when they threw a party during the pandemic lockdown. Students continued courses online but were charged residential fees for the time they occupied the dorms. At Haskell University in Lawrence, Kansas, another lockdown-era complaint against a student—an altercation between the student and security employee—resulted in the student being evicted from campus housing without an opportunity to appeal. He ended up moving into his car. It’s a tragic, unjust outcome, yet one that illustrates how essential student housing is, and how precarious students’ housing circumstances are: According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, studies by California’s Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council show that homelessness affects nine percent of university students in the U.S.

Such precarity is a case for universities to make on-campus housing more affordable, more available, and more flexible to the particular needs and behaviors of its student body. After all, these are young people learning the ropes of rights and responsibilities away from another governing body, their parents—including one’s responsibility to peacefully protest. But these recent evictions reveal how colleges regulate young people transitioning into adulthood: by establishing internal guidelines and definitions of misconduct and using them with disciplinary processes to enforce behavior deemed acceptable. Yet as Inside Higher Ed reported, these protests are testing the strength of that administrative power.

Using policies like campus codes of conduct, administrators are attempting to deter protestors by tying them up with internal investigations. Yet the IHE piece goes on to question whether or not these guidelines are equally enforced across varying protests. At Vanderbilt, where Teen Vogue reported on suspensions and dormitory evictions stemming from protests, the story describes other recent protests like a 2016 campus sit-in to demand a "sanctuary campus" after the Trump election. No student suspensions or evictions were recorded.

Granted, in 2016, the United States Congress wasn’t conducting investigations of university leadership on various social issues; IHE speculates that today’s climate and congressional hearings are putting pressure on administrators to act aggressively to squash these protests. But it also raises questions about which issues might get a student administratively disciplined that would lead to eviction, and which are acceptable within that university’s code of conduct.

The question is important because it’s rooted well beyond the university protests that occurred in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when students across the nation occupied campuses to demand divestment from the military-industrial complex that was, then, churning out corpses in Vietnam. Carla Yanni’s 2019 book, Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory, provides a vernacular history of how on-campus residences were built as a means to ‘moralize’ student populations; while socializing and networking were key to on-campus living, it was establishing exclusion and homogeneity amongst dorm residents that helped maintain order and codes of conduct. The author connects dorms with the history of asylums, which in her introduction, she says used depersonalization and rigid schedules—as well as discipline—to control student behavior.

"American colleges were not built for the purposes of punishment, or even for the strict separation of students from society," she writes. "But what if upper-class people used those same devices of social control and acted in a purpose-built structure in the service of replication of their own elite status? What might that look like? That might look a bit like a colonial or federal era dormitory."

While enforcement has definitely evolved—Yanni describes Harvard using corporal punishment until 1788, when the school instead began issuing fines for malfeasance—there are still echoes of moralization reverberating within today’s campus evictions. And, as the Bipartisan report states, the cost of higher ed, including tuition, room, and board, has overwhelmingly outpaced household income—in particular, universities, Yanni notes, are building increasingly luxurious on-campus living facilities to attract students. Some of the intent of that investment is, of course, to encourage the kind of enrollment and college allegiances that will be paid back to the school in alumni donations—which certainly pressures school leadership to react more aggressively. "Differing housing opportunities," Yanni writes, "exacerbate the social disparities between the poorest students and the richest."

Evicting those student protestors from their college dorms—especially protestors who are largely students of color—is an extension of campus housing’s exclusive origins, and is illustrative of broader precarity of housing in America. Some students are making that connection: on May 9, Gothamist reported that at least three disciplined Columbia and Barnard students had filed lawsuits against the university, claiming that the school "is subject to the same housing laws as other New York City landlords," and that such evictions were unlawful. (In two of the cases, Columbia appears to have allowed the students back into the dorms to collect their things, and their filings were withdrawn.) For even those whose families can pay the thousands of dollars a year for a shared concrete box, housing can be snatched away, held hostage until processes and procedures are executed. Maybe this is what universities are teaching students right now—not the typical rigorous curricula in the humanities, arts, and sciences, but the realities of a market where tenants are at the whims of their landlords.

This post was updated May 9, 2024 with further details about lawsuits filed against Columbia.

Top image of students at the City College of New York camping on the campus on April 26, 2024 by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images.

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