Disciplinary Pedagogy

-- By WillDamarjian - 20 Feb 2025

“The free mind is a mind that is constantly practicing and in praxis. Nefarious forces of oppression will always target a mind in praxis and one that is committed to practicing towards freedom.” Birzeit Union of Professors and Employees

Campus Crisis?

Cops on campus are not a crisis nor an aberration to an otherwise ‘educational’ environment: Discipline is a pedagogical tool at Columbia University. The University's physical layout, grading, and hierarchical structure instructs students and disciplines them through individualized observation and correction.

Disciplinary Instruction

Columbia utilizes education as a disciplinary mechanism instructing students in proper values. The Center for Student Success Intervention described its mission for the Spectator, “Instead of ending with the completion of sanctions, student conduct will proceed with the center’s educational approach and guide students to learn from their experiences.”

Another discipline apparatus, the Office of Institutional Equity OIE repeatedly references educational goals in its guidelines “A Report concerning allegations of Prohibited Conduct that would typically result in Sanctions no more severe than a warning or reprimand may proceed through Educational Resolution.”This ‘resolution’ is granted on the basis of mere allegations; a supposed alternative to ‘discipline.’ The disciplinary structures diagnose ‘failing’ students and offer them corrective work.

Learning Rules

The University assigns modules on its values and disciplinary policies, covering everything from sexual ethics to plagiarism. These modules both instruct students on University policy and call attention to surveillance. A recent email to students assigned a new course on the updated OIE policies, “...providing a learning, living, and working environment free from unlawful discrimination and harassment…The training you have been assigned was created to provide you with an understanding of your obligation to uphold that commitment by complying with the Anti-Discrimination & Discriminatory Harassment Policy and Procedures for Students.” This reminds students they are being watched, on email and through cctv, and must internalize this surveillance. It models correct behavior while normalizing judgment. Not only threatening future discipline, these modules collectively punish students for ongoing protests by assigning them homework, collapsing any distinction between the disciplinary and educational goals of the university. Education becomes a corrective measure for students who think improperly.

Criticism of these disciplinary procedures emphasize their punitive nature as though in opposition to an educational response. Without minimizing the real differences between forms of punishment, it is important to recognize that discipline is instructive by nature and Columbia’s apparatus explicitly models an educational structure seen throughout campus. The University not only contains disciplinary elements but the education disciplines.

Learning Through Discipline

Disciplinary hearings, like exams, provide the University essential knowledge. Exams create individualized student metrics, allowing them to be sorted and known personally to the University. Likewise, the disciplinary process, “...transform[s] his pupils into a whole field of knowledge.” Foucault 186. In hearings, students are instructed to name co-conspirators, identify themselves in photographs, reveal past transgressions providing the University the knowledge it needs for its own burden of proof. Forcing students to reveal personal information demonstrates “...the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.” 192 These hearings range from informal chats to mandatory adjudications of formal charges; they all provide the University opportunity to exercise power over individual students through observation. Not only does the University gain literal knowledge, the exercise of interrogation and observation act upon the student as a demonstration of the University’s internal power.

Resistance

The very crisis that brings disciplinary pedagogy to the forefront contains a possibility of a way forward. On May 7th, Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted their call to action, “Over 100 people have just flooded Butler Library and renamed it the Basel Al-Araj Popular University…The Popular University is not only a demand for divestment. It is a living counter-institution, a revolutionary pedagogy in practice, and a declaration that another university—and another world—is already in formation.” The protest highlighted the University’s willingness to brutalize its students and the role of officially designated education as a cudgel to alternative education, “Disrupting academic activities in Butler Library during the reading and final exam period, as alleged, is among the most serious violations that can occur under the Rules.” Spectator

Palestinian struggle offers an alternative model of education. Birzeit professor Khalida Jarrar, imprisoned for her trade unionist activity, hosted university classes from within her prison cell and encouraged her fellow prisoners to study literature as a means of feminist empowerment and mental liberation within the occupation’s prison. In her 2020 letter from prison, Jarrar describes the work of smuggling in literature and learning behind bars, “We are turning the prison into a cultural school where prisoners learn about other experiences and where we spoil the occupation’s attempts to isolate us from the rest of the world.”Letter from Damon Prison

Conclusion

While more obvious repression is a response to the student solidarity movement, there is a long genealogy of the American university’s role in reproducing cultural hegemony. Small resistance to the logic of discipline through refusing to administer exams or calls to protect international students are insufficient because they do not address the base of the problem. If the campus crisis shows anything, education is not outside of politics but an essential site of struggle. Addressing Columbia’s repression requires looking beyond its most extreme moments and seeing the University in a wider context. This is daunting and can inspire defeatism but through imperfect moments of revolutionary pedagogy aimed at undoing the crime of occupation, Palestinians and their allies show we must look to the past to see our conditions in context and not as immutable characteristics of education and we must take lessons from those working to use education for liberation in the bleakest of circumstances.

Notes:

Refaat Alareer and I both attended UCL but he was killed on December 6th by an Israeli airstrike for daring to write against the genocide of his people. It is not enough to talk about free speech when our government is funding a genocide and Columbia arresting students who dare to oppose it.

One disadvantage of the Foucaulldian a-historical perspective is that the institutions its describes as apparently timeless are in fact recent. The required trainings, the controls of movement, the intensive surveillance, the ridiculous formalities of discipline supposedly embodied in "educational" activity, have all arrived in this deteriorating university within the last fraction of my decades-long life here. Once they are correctly observed as innovations, there is indeed a crisis, and the only issue is the cadence of its occurrence.

Exams, to be sure, have a longer history, and your analysis retains its value in discrediting them. But I haven't given exams in decades, which plainly indicates that whatever the power structure is that embeds them, it is itself rather puny, (You might wonder, indeed, why Duncan Kennedy didn't stop doing so himself in the course of a long and distinguished teaching career at that other law school....)

Perhaps it would not be an improvement to interfere with the purity of this analysis, therefore, by intruding the problem of historical development, or the reality of practical academic freedom resulting from the privileges and immunities of tenure. But if freedom begins in knowing that another future is possible, it might be worth at least a couple of sentences to point out that even the present is contingent, and that sometimes waving a wand is enough to change it, if you know even a little wizardry, which we do.

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