Jacqueline Stevens (Political Science, Northwestern University)

Saying NO to Military Power in a University

Jacqueline Stevens hosted a special EmergentC21 lecture, drawing on information and experiences at Northwestern University and elsewhere to document how military corporations, finance firms, banks, and other corporations are shaping our universities, as well as the impact of these networks on U.S. states and cities.

Her lecture also addressed the secret role U.S. universities play in the instigation of ongoing wars and civil wars—through arrangements called “defense trade offsets”—and the importance of using scholarly intelligence to expose and challenge these practices.

Recorded video (Mediasite, with slides)

Background Reading: Jacqueline Stevens, States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia University Press); and “Forensic Intelligence and the Deportation Research Clinic: Toward a New Paradigm, Perspective on Politics 13, no. 3 (September 2015): 722-38 (PDF)

Jacqueline Stevens conducts research on political theories and practices of membership since antiquity. Her current studies of deportation law enforcement engage European fantasies of conquest in the 12th to 17th centuries as well as the quotidian of government documents revealing contemporary illegalities, including practices resulting in the unlawful deportation of United States citizens from the United States. Her research on deportations has been the basis of successful lawsuits challenging government misconduct. She is the author of States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (2009) and Reproducing the State (1999).

In spring 2016, Stevens spearheaded a faculty campaign to reject the administration’s appointment of retired Army general Karl Eikenberry as head of Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies. By summer, she was banned from campus and forbidden to contact students after a disagreement arose between her and her department’s associate chair. This fall, Northwestern lifted the ban, and she is now allowed again to teach and contact students.

How does a tenured full professor, a recent recipient of a Guggenheim grant, and a widely recognized scholar of immigration and politics get banned from campus and be forbidden to communicate with students? Why would Northwestern University, one of the premier institutions of higher learning in the United States, attempt to circumvent due process and deliberately alienate one of its star professors?