While universities and academic freedoms are under attack globally in the context of rising populism and shrinking civic and political space, universities retain some freedom to offer “protection”. Protection, in this chapter, is conceptualised along three dimensions: (1) protection as presented in human rights standards, (2) a continuum of protection derived from political science and international relations (research on gender-based violence (GBV) and neoliberal governance), and (3) understandings of the particular role of universities in protection (physical protection of people, protection of values, and protection of diverse forms of knowledge). In this chapter, we develop a multi-layered conceptualisation of universities as sites of protection that both highlight tensions and value clashes and identifies pathways that would allow universities to champion a progressive politics of protection. The chapter showcases two public universities, Makerere University in Uganda and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, to show how protection is both envisaged and enacted by these institutions in relation to GBV. Drawing on these three frameworks and two case studies, the chapter concludes with an overarching, if provisional, theorisation of protection, as a template to analyse the role universities play in relation to protection.