The date of May 4 is important in the history of student activism, as it was on this day in 1919  that over 3000 students from a dozen universities in Beijing marched to Tiananmen in the center of the capital. The students were gathered to protest the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ceded territories in Shandong that had been previously held by Germany to Japan. Students were outraged by the weak Chinese government that had negotiated these humiliating terms that effectively traded one colonial power for another, and allowed the further expansion of Japanese political and economics interests to other northeast territories. Although the protest began peacefully, as Benjamin I. Schwartz writes, “the demonstrators eventually beat a pro-Japanese official and burned a cabinet minister’s residence,” which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of “hundreds of students.” The demonstrations consequently became more intense and widespread, and over the next month, protests sprang up “in at least 200 other localities,” shops were shuttered in Shanghai, and workers went on strike “in some 40 factories.” As Schwartz goes on to state, “A student movement was born in which women participated, broad public opinion was enlisted, and the sanction of saving China was invoked to achieve an unprecedented degree of student organization and activism.” The government eventually gave in, and over a thousand students “marched victoriously out of jail.”[2] This moment—the May Fourth Incident (wusi shijian 五四事件)—marked the beginnings of what would be called the May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong 五四運動), the cultural and political movement that has often been characterized as the birth of Chinese national consciousness, if not of Chinese modernity.

The conventional narrative of the May Fourth Movement obscures what is perhaps most significant about both the incident and the political and cultural discourses that this moment made possible. Here, I turn to Fabio Lanza, who has argued that we cannot speak of May 4, 1919 as simply a political student protest without understanding how the very idea of student was being constituted at the moment when the university was being created in distinction from the state. What Lanza argues is that the modern student, the student as political activist, was a new formation that challenged the prior figure of the scholar-official (shi 士), which had served as the basic reproductive unit of the imperial state. He writes:

…before the first instance of modern student activism on May 4, 1919, “students” did not come into being as a stable and circumscribed position to be occupied but were instead produced both because of and through the practices and the struggles of those years. Only after and as a consequence of the events of 1919 could “students” become fixed inside a (new) tradition and become connected to specific places (Beijing University, Tiananmen). To put it simply, while there had always been people who studied (sociological “students”), the political category of “students” emerged only as the result of a specific political struggle that was located precisely around the definition of “student.”[3]

Lanza goes on to invoke Alain Badiou’s work Metapolitics in which Badiou insists on the necessity of distance from the state in order to preserve the possibility of true politics.[4] To put it another way, this distancing of the state is for Badiou the rupture through which the state’s insistence on consensus is suspended and deferred, so that other ways of thinking and imagining may take place.

Another deployment of Badiou would be to invoke the concept of event (l’événement), which breaches the state of what has come before—the situation (la situation), as Badiou terms it—thereby exposing the incompleteness of the ruling state’s insistence on a unified field of being (what Badiou calls un compte-pour-un or count-for-one). The event calls into question the oneness of the mathematical set and of the sovereign state, opening up and making visible the true multiple nature of beings, as well as revealing the indeterminacy (what he calls l’indécidable or undecidability) of the event itself.[5] Or, as he has noted in an interview: “an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable.”[6] It is worth noting that while Badiou has famously championed the Cultural Revolution as an emblematic event of the twentieth century, the May Fourth Movement was precisely a evental moment in which the hypothesis of the student was being proposed at the same time when the university was being imagined.[7] 

Indeed, this evental rupture is precisely what Lanza seizes upon: how a distance was created between the state on the one hand, and the new potentialities of “student” and “university” on the other, and how the classificatory order imposed from the state was in suspension, allowing for the emergence of these new potentialities. Badiou’s language of event may be overly metaphysical, but he is nonetheless addressing how politics comes to be, how the possibility of a community formed through a particular way of thinking might emerge or fail, how the everydayness of how we do our business is not the way that it always must be. And here, let me note just how hard it is to imagine such a rupture, which calls to mind the theoretical commonplace, “It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” attributed variously to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, and quoted by Mark Fisher (and sometimes attributed to him as well).[8]

I offer here that the key difference between May 4, 1919 and May 4, 2024 was the role of the university in the protests. For the May 4, 1919 student protesters, the university—particularly Beijing University—was in a parallel state of emergent potentiality, and important leaders and professors at the university, including the university chancellor and self-identified anarchist Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), helped support and advise the students. The university could be the site of an event in 1919, but by 2024, it is a seemingly calcified situation, one that seems impossible to reimagine, despite the very brief historical timeline of the modern university structure. Therefore, to understand what was at stake on May 4, 2024 at the University of Virginia—and of course at other North American universities where student protests were met with militarized police suppression—one must ask what is and what should be the university for in 2024.

2.  “Time, Place, and Manner”

The phrase “time, place, and manner,” frequently invoked in recent North American university communications, is one is used to justify limitations on the exercise of free speech, ensuring a balance between the right to speech and the interests of public safety. Not surprisingly, this is the phrase that President Jim Ryan invoked to explain the decision to end the May 4 UVA student protest. Where does this locution come from? An early use of the phrase as it pertains to the United States First Amendment (the constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech) can be found in the 1941 case Cox v. New Hampshire, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the decision by the town of Manchester, New Hampshire to arrest sixty-eight Jehovah’s Witnesses marching in single file down a busy sidewalk without a parade license was not a violation of their First Amendment rights because of reasonable limitations on civic rights occasioned by the needs of public order. What the ruling makes clear is that the court is not interested in the content of the Jehovah Witnesses’ “parade” (that is, the ruling has nothing to do with religious liberty), but only in the conditions under which the action took place. Moreover, when Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes delivered the ruling, he went on to make the following point:

Civil liberties, as guaranteed by the Constitution, imply the existence of an organized society maintaining public order without which liberty itself would be lost in the excesses of unrestrained abuses. The authority of a municipality to impose regulations in order to assure the safety and convenience of the people in the use of public highways has never been regarded as inconsistent with civil liberties but rather as one of the means of safeguarding the good order upon which they ultimately depend. (§11)[9] 

In other words, at the heart of time, place, and manner restrictions on speech is the claim of the public order, characterized variously as “public safety” and “good order,” but indicative of a broader and vaguer conception of the public good that is meant to govern and control expressive rights.

The question, then, is what is this public order? And on whose behalf is it being invoked? There are three components that are identified in this statement: individuals and groups (call these subjects, the multiple) who are invested with civil liberties; the organized society (call this the state, the count-as-one) to which the individuals and groups belong; and the public or “good” order that is maintained by the organized society and guarantees these civil liberties. The public order would then seem to be a virtual assemblage and site in which the heterogeneous multiple are constituted as part of the homogeneous unity, or how individual subjects are governed and regulated by the state, even when the state does not directly intervene or make itself visible. Of course, it should be said that the public order is simultaneously embodied in a more concrete and visible manner through the law, the courts, and the police, and other control mechanisms of the state, but what Chief Justice Hughes emphasizes is the implicature of civil liberties, the metonymic inference of the state and the public order.

Regulation of time, place, and manner is meant to protect the interests of the public order, and by extension, the interests of the political subjects who may wish to exercise their civil liberties to disrupt and challenge the public order. Let me leave aside the question of the state for the moment and turn back to that of the university, which deploys this same rhetoric of time, space, and manner, and implicitly, the virtuality of public order. Universities tend not to make official policies about “time, place, and manner,” even as they invoke this phrase as justification. For the University of Virginia, the clearest statement is found under the FAQs section of its Department of Safety and Security. Here we find the following statement:

Under First Amendment law, the University may regulate speech in ways that do not relate to its message. For instance, universities may set parameters for crowd capacity, volume levels, or use of amplified sound. Such parameters are sometimes called “time-place-manner regulations,” because they regulate features like the time, place, or manner of speech, rather than its content.

The passage goes on to argue that “reasonable time-place-manner regulations” do not conflict with the First Amendment because such regulations “exist to ensure that speech activities are compatible with each other and with all the other activities taking place in a community,” citing the hypothetical of a city having a policy for reserving park space for expressive activities so that there are not groups engaging in competing events that might “drown each other out,” or time policies that would govern the level of noise in regard to neighboring residences or businesses. Such regulations for the university thus “exist to ensure that speaking events are compatible with regular University operations, including classroom instruction, other scheduled events and activities, research, patient care, student residential life, employee work routines, and the physical integrity of University facilities and property,” and “to protect the physical safety of all community members.” The statement closes by reserving the right to “take appropriate action” when it “identifies a serious threat of imminent physical harm,” though “it is the safety risk, not a speaker’s message, that is the basis for a decision to act.”[10]

The argument here is that the right to speech is only conditioned by the rights of other members of the university community, which may include others who wish to exercise their rights to speech, but more broadly, also those who are engaged in the everyday activities of the university, such as learning, teaching, research, patient care, and work, as well as the physical integrity of the university itself. These competing needs of the multiple are regulated by “time-place-manner regulations,” which may also justify the imposition of “appropriate action to protect” against “a serious threat of imminent physical harm.” Note here that the language of public order is what underpins the need for these regulations, and while the risks identified are reasonable ones, it is not clear what “public order” would mean for a university, which is not a state or jurisdiction within a state (such as a town or municipality). Certainly, universities are like state jurisdictions—and the statement here makes the clear analogy to the city and its park regulations—with governing structures and even police forces that are parallel to those of the state, but universities (even public ones) are clearly distinct from jurisdictional structures of the state.

Here, then, I would like to ask, what is a university for? Of course, universities are for the work of teaching and learning, and for research and knowledge production, but universities are also spaces that claim the jurisdictional force of political authorities, and thus are for the maintenance of a certain kind of institutionality. On the one hand, this is not surprising, as any organization needs rules by which conduct is regulated, but on the other, the university is not an organization in the same way that, say, a corporation is an organization—or at least, the university does not imagine itself as an organization in this way (even if, in many other ways, it is precisely such an organization).

This (imaginary) distinction is the core of the argument that William Clark has made in describing how the modern research university—inherited from the nineteenth-century Humboldtian German university, with its emphasis on measurable productivity and bureaucratic procedures—nevertheless “spared academic charisma,” which became the nonrational kernel of a rational institution. In this way, the modern research university was founded on a contradiction: on the one hand, academics had “rationalized criteria for appointment” but on the other, “had to acquire fame, be in fashion, and display ‘originality,’ a spark of genius, in writings,” which reinscribed traditional forms of personal authority as the new academic charisma.[11] And so, when we teach our undergraduate and graduate students, we are training them in the ways of academic charisma (whether we make this explicit or not), even as we have inherited the bureaucratic forms and logics of the Humboldtian university. We model inspired readings and interpretations even as we tend to struggle to teach how to perform such readings and interpretations; we teach our undergraduate and graduate students often without having been trained as teachers and expect that our students in turn will become effective teachers themselves; and we claim authority in our disciplines, and often beyond our disciplines, and we transfer this authority to our students because this is what justifies academic charisma as pedagogical practice.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the university that is perpetuated, without acknowledgment or full understanding, only becoming visible when the bureaucratic forms clash with the charismatic ideology. The university is comprised of charismatic faculty but the university as institution is itself not interested in charisma (and to be sure, the cultic individualism of charisma raises its own set of problems). This is because what the university seeks to perpetuate is its own institutionality, a logic that is as content-neutral as the rhetoric of time, place, and manner, precisely because it is a formal interest—an interest primarily in the university’s form and the continuity of this form—which is manifested through the myriad technologies of administration. On this point, Clark contextualizes the invention of the German research university with reference to the early eighteenth invention of the policing state (der Policey-Staat) by Cameralists, philosophers of public administration named after der Kammer (chamber), or royal treasury. Policing here should be distinguished from the police as representatives of the law, referring instead to administrative policing practices that are encapsulated in what Clark and Peter Becker have called the “little tools of knowledge” (reports, tables, questionnaires, dossiers, etc.) that produce institutional authority, responsibility, and objectivity.[12] The purpose of administrative policing was to ensure efficiency of labor, management of resources, and standardization of procedures within institutional structures that then sustained institutionality itself as a logic and ideal. The German research university embraced these practices in the nineteenth century, and this legacy is clearly in force today, with the contemporary university’s interest in equitable and transparent procedures that standardize personnel decisions, accountability in expenditures regardless of amount, and hierarchical reporting lines that identify and distribute decision-making powers.

3. Politics, the Police

On May 4, 2024, what we witnessed can be characterized as the making visible of the contradiction between the traditional vocation of the university as site of academic charisma and the modern forms of bureaucratic institutionality, with the modification that the student protestors had transformed the self-authorizing force of academic charisma into political commitment, in many ways echoing the twentieth-century reconstitution of the student as articulated on May 4, 1919. As with all protests, the fundamental claim, prior to the specific or occasional claim, is the right to speak, and in particular, the right to have a voice that may contravene the institution and its interest in the orderliness of public space. Here, we may return to the question of the public order, because the idealization of public order is precisely what the Policey-Staat holds as its animating fantasy, the reason that justifies its efficient machinery. What political protest then troubles is the privileging of public order above dissensus, particularly above dissensus that might result in any change to the values of the public order. Restrictions of time, place, and manner are meant to police challenges to the policing order, so that protests are effectively contained within the stable situation, forestalling the possibility of a revolutionary event.

The place of the political student, therefore, does not exist within the policing state, or at least, not until the student claims her political identity through a claim to speech. Indeed, the politicization of identity can be understood as the insistence that one has a locus, a site, from which to speak. This is how Jacques Rancière has defined politics (la politique), which he defines as “primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.” That is to say, the stage upon which the political act takes place must be claimed “for the use of an interlocutor who can’t see it and who can’t see it for good reason because it doesn’t exist.” We might understand this as the state’s presumption of unanimous agreement, what Badiou would call the situation and which forecloses the possibility of dissent by rendering inaccessible the occasion for speech itself to those who are not recognized as having the right to speech. This is owing to the implicit, indivisible unity of the state (Badiou’s compte-pour-un or count-as-one), or as Rancière goes on to state, “Parties do not exist prior to the conflict they name and in which they are counted as parties,” indicating that a party to dispute is a partitioning that constitutes the political, a rupture or break from the continuous unity of the situation.[13]

Against this claim to speech, which is the claim to a side, to a party, is the state that represents “good order” through its policing procedures and structures. Rancière invokes the concept of police (la police) in exactly the meaning that the Cameralists understood Policey, which Rancière defines as “essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it” (29). The law, but “generally implicit,” because this law is never represented as such, never stated baldly and thus rendered open to dispute. And it is worth remembering that the police is not to be confused with what he calls the “petty police,” the officers of the law who are merely particular instantiations of “a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community” (28). Policing—and the policing state—is thus “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (29). This is what time, place, and manner determine. And what Rancière means by politics, therefore, is “whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration—that of the part of those who have no part” (29–30). There is a double-contradiction that Rancière is seeking to limn: the contradiction presented by parties who have no place in the order of things, and the contradiction of an order of things that insists on essential unity and yet classifies everything within it.

Although the shock of May 4, 2024 for the University of Virginia was the deployment of state police against unarmed students, this administrative decision can be seen as the logical consequence of the university’s policing logic, how the university views its domain through the perspective of the police, and how it seeks to control who has the right to engage in politics. This is not to diminish the specific intersection here with the university’s history of racialized policing, which can be seen in histories of North American campus police, which were first charged with the protection of students and property against those who did not belong, often racially marked, and became increasingly deployed against students in the 1960s and 1970s as students protested the expansion of university property into surrounding Black neighborhoods and university support for the Vietnam War.[14] Seeing like the police—to adapt the late James C. Scott’s phrase, seeing like a state—is to adopt top-down strategies of control that can only see crises of authority and challenges to the public order when there is a political act that claims the right to be recognized and to speak.[15] This, then, is why ordinances of time, place, and manner must remain vaguely defined and deployed as broad reasons for the limitation and enclosure of student politics, because these ordinances describe the unacknowledgeable ideology of life under the police state.

4. Conclusion: Hospitality and the University

By way of closing, let me invoke the concept of hospitality as a different way of framing the question of politics and the police. Derrida has invoked a hospitality that is not the hospitality of the sovereign host, by which he means a hospitality that is not “on condition that the host…the one who receives or shelters or offers asylum, remain the proprietor, the master of the house.”[16]Rather, he writes of a hospitality of “letting the visitor come, the unexpected arrival, without asking for any account, without demanding his passport,” an absolute hospitality, rather than a conditional hospitality.[17] Derrida’s absolute hospitality (as he is aware) carries with it the risk of exposing the one who claims the position of host (nation, state, master) to the infinite, unforeseeable demands of the one who occupies the position of guest (foreigner, refugee, other), without any juridical process or protection that would institutionalize the relationship between host and guest, and constitute the places of host and guest in the first place.

This question of hospitality and risk is precisely what should have been at the heart of university responses to student protest and civil disobedience. Students might not be constituted as guests exactly, but when they take positions that dissent from the unacknowledged-yet-ever-present political, legal, and economic commitments of the university, they position themselves as other to the unstated juridical hospitalities of the university and in this way take on risk of excommunication. That is, there is no place in the contemporary university for the student who challenges the situation of the university as an economic corporation with undisclosed investments (c.f., the ubiquitous quip “Harvard is a hedge fund masquerading as a university”). Therefore, when students insist on the right to place, which is the right to speech, the policing order of the university is invoked so as to limit the possibilities of any dissenting political consequences. And there could be no place for the student who rejects all institutional structures, who denies the possibility of the university as a formal order that creates the possibility of education even as it is implicated in problematic economic investments, because the student who denies the university absolutely also denies their identity as student.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the university embodies one juridical, policing structure—even as the university may not always acknowledge its constitution as a policing structure that imposes juridical power upon its students—but the state police as (increasingly militarized) security apparatus represents another sovereign structure, one that does not participate in the ideological imaginaries of the university and yet may be invoked when the regulations of time, place, and manner have been deemed violated. The university may call upon the state police, but the university cannot control the state police. The university’s policies—its internal policing logics—are not the policing logics of the state police, which claims broad discretionary powers in carrying out the force of the law, even when those decisions may violate the law that they are intended to enforce. There is a further question here of who authorizes the police to measure out how much force to apply and to determine who has violated university policies. And a question of what constitutes a student—or any person—when university regulations regarding “time, place, and manner” take priority over the rights to speech, public assembly, and physical integrity. The order of the police—the institution that can only see as the police—forecloses upon politics and enacts the flattened unity of the state as count-as-one.

If much of this essay has focused on the critique of institutionality, let me end by affirming my belief in institutional structures, which, on a formal level, provide the ground and framework through which the disssensus of politics may take place. The constitution of the university can still—even now—be a radical event, one that transforms the possibilties of relation itself, but this radical possibility is one that is always being foreclosed by the policing order of institutionality itself. What, then, would it mean for a university to be guided by the principles of an impossible hospitality, which would be an openness to the event and to politics, rather than being guided by the formal mechanisms of institutional regulation in service of its own end?  This would be a risk, as any open door is a risk, for we do not know who will enter, but it is the risk held by the other, and a commitment to engage with the other, that makes community possible in the first place.

Jack W. Chen is professor of literature at the University of Virginia 

NOTES

^[1] Ryan, “A Message from Jim Ryan,” UVA Today, May 4, 2024, https://news.virginia.edu/content/message-president-ryan.

^[2] Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History—May Fourth and After,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, edited by Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98.

^[3] Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 5.

^[4] Badiou, Metapolitics, translated by Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005).

^[5] Here I summarize freely arguments made in Being and Event , translated by Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 173–211.

^[6] Badiou with Fabien Tarby, Philosophy and the Event, translated by Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 9.

^[7] Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, translated by David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 101­–67.

^[8] The actual quotation from Jameson is: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdowns of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations,” in The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.

^[9] Cox et al. v. State of New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941). Text cited from Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/312/569.

^[10] University of Virginia Department of Safety and Security (2024), Freedom of Speech FAQs, freespeech.virginia.edu/freedom-speech-faqs.

^[11] Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3. Lanza also discusses Clark in Behind the Gates, 73–75. See also Chad Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

^[12] Clark, Academic Charisma, 12–14, 47–58. Also see Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practice, edited by Peter Becker and William Clark (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

^[13] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1999), 26–27. Subsequent quotations from Rancière’s Disagreement are parenthetical. Badiou elaborates his own conception of parts (les parties) in Being and Event, 96–97. Note also that Badiou has a sustained critique of Rancière’s Disagreement in the previously mentioned Metapolitics, 114–23.

^[14] See Katheryn Russell-Brown and Vanessa Miller, “Policing the College Campus: History, Race, and Law,” UF Law Faculty Publications 1199 (2022).

^[15] Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

^[16] Derrida, Hospitality, vol. 1, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, translated by E. S. Burt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 4.

^[17]Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Unforeseeable Freedom,” in For What Tomorrow…, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 60.