The Right to the Campus: Student Occupations, the University, and the Right to the City

While the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampments and campus occupations before them have been the objects of significant debate among academics and broader public audiences, the spatialized and radical democratic dimensions of these protests remain undertheorized. This article argues that turning to Henri Lefebvre provides valuable tools for better understanding campus occupations and answering the questions that universities face today. Grounded in Lefebvre’s comments about students, knowledge production, and campus life following May 1968, I argue that the university is a key site for demanding, clarifying, and expanding the “right to the city.” Extending Lefebvre’s analysis through a discussion of the spatial production activities of contemporary elite North American universities, I propose a novel “right to the campus” defined by radical democratization of university governance and use-driven spatial design. Finally, I draw lessons from the 1968 Columbia University occupations before applying the right to the campus to analyze the successes and disappointments of the more recent wave of encampments. Viewed through this framework, campus occupations posit control over university “property” as a mechanism for challenging the undemocratic management and market logic characterizing both campus spaces and university activities off campus.