Student Protests are a Rich Tradition
T.S. Eliot said, “April is the cruelest month,” and if the fifteen year period of my life where someone died almost every April is any indicator, he was right. This time of year, as it happens, is also a good time for campus protests. In April of 1968, Columbia University students occupied their campus to demand an end to the Vietnam War causing other campuses around the US to follow suit.
In a week, we approach the anniversary of protests at Kent State University and a few days later Jackson State University where authorities killed peaceful student demonstrators. Kent State has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been thinking too about the video from 2011 in which police officer Lt. John Pike ruthlessly pepper-sprayed seated, peaceful protestors at UC Davis. I was teaching at the Naval Academy at the time and one of my students had posted a photo to his social media with arrows saying, “us” and “them.” Unfortunately, the young man who swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic had the “us” arrow aimed at the agent of the state sent to suppress basic First Amendment rules. That was the first time I realized how much the anti-Establishment attitude of the 90s had given away to authoritarianism even in young people in the post-9/11 America.
With students protesting and being arrested on campuses today, I’m suspiciously optimistic because I think those kids are all right. They’re protesting what they see as unacceptable actions by the government and their University. This is what we ask of engaged citizens. So, why are Universities punishing them for it?
Administrators are not educators
Faculty at Columbia walked off the job and some of them stood in solidarity with their students. After all, as annoyed as we get when high-achieving 20 year olds become completely dumbfounded when asked to follow a syllabus, we don’t actually want anyone to hurt our kids.
What were admins doing while faculty were putting their jobs (since most are non-tenured) and bodies on the line? Mostly, sending in the cops. Power loves power.
Administrators aren’t educators, most are just corporate bureaucrats who make a lot more money than faculty and do more than we do to drive up the cost of attendance. Getting rid of pesky students and faculty is a win-win for them.
Any myth of the liberal-ness of universities as institutions should have been completely dispelled when my alma mater, the nominally progressive University of Massachusetts-Amherst arrested and attempted to punish their peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators back in 2023. This week, police are arresting students at the University of Texas-Austin, Columbia, Emerson in the faux liberal haven of Boston, and USC, among others.
My eleven-year-old was looking over my shoulder as I watched a video of Boston Police attacking students and she said, “oh, you finally figured out how to watch documentaries on your phone!” assuming I was still watching that episode of The Sixties where the police riot at the Democratic National Convention left “pools of blood on Michigan Avenue” as Gloria Steinem said (in a documentary I have not figured out how to watch on my phone).
Naturally, I had her watch The Seventies episode about the Kent State shootings and the hard hat riots—during which the police joined the hard hats in beating and terrorizing peaceful anti-Vietnam war protestors. It’s almost like as paid agents of the state, the cops are more committed to order than constitutional democracy.
Some students feel unsafe
You may be in favor of arresting the protestors. I get it, some people prefer the tidy injustice of order to the messy workings of democracy. But we need to catch a thought bubble and talk about what it means to feel “unsafe” on campuses.
The open letter from the Jewish faculty at Columbia does a great job about explaining the myth of antisemitism underlying these protests and helping to unpack the real safety concern. Freedom to protest is going to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but calling the police to suppress campus speech is actually unsafe.
As an X-ennial, I often say that I think people these days are a little over-validating of their own feelings, because reality does not always align with your emotional response to it. It is important to understand what you are feeling, just as it is important to ask yourself if your feelings match your current situation (see: children’s emotional thermometer). But it is equally important to remember that feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable are not the same things; challenging ideas and differing perspectives are not always existential threats. In short: conflict is not necessarily harm.
Further, why aren’t we talking about the safety of Arab and Muslim students? Both antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise in the US and abroad. Do we not think that Palestinian students might feel unsafe to see university administrators siding with a genocide against their people, and using their tuition money to help fund it? This is the problem with the false flag of antisemitism: it is constantly asymmetrical.
Criticizing any nation on Earth is acceptable, but criticizing Israel is antisemitic. Protesting genocide is antisemitic, but funding that genocide is not Islamophobic. I know consistency is for chumps, but a little of it would go a long way here.
Students are right to protest
Globally, legal scholars and human rights scholars without a conflict of interest have been clear about the rise to authoritarianism and fascism in the US and abroad, and this includes the rise of right wing governments in Israel. Many of these scholars have also noted the steps towards genocide that many countries had taken with exclusionary, identity based, illiberal policies.
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. There are anti-Zionist Jews and there are anti-Semitic Zionists. At its core, Zionism is a political philosophy not a religion. Zionism is to Judaism what Christian Nationalism is to Christianity: a political wing loosely identified with a religion.
Students are right to protest these things. They are right to protest genocide. And they are right to do so from a place that includes Jewish students, faculty, and activists. These students aren’t suggesting a reverse-Uno of Jewish annihilating, and they’re not blaming Jewish people for what the Israeli government does. They aren’t telling governments to stop genocide. Against everyone. That’s a fair deal.
Difficult Conversations
I don’t fault Jewish or Israeli students for having a hard time with this. In 2003, I was horrified that George W. Bush was going to get us into an unnecessary war based on blatant lies. And more horrified how many of my countrymen were rooting for it. It was one of the first times my idealism really came up against reality, and I had to start parsing out all that American Exceptionalism in my head. In 2003 and 2004 when the Abu Ghraib torture of prisoners broke in the news, I felt lost trying to figure out my place in my country’s life and my country’s place in mine. Shaking off the lens of “USA USA USA” I was raised with meant finding a way to be patriotic and love my country even while recognizing that like everyone else on Earth, we’re a member of the League of Ordinary Nations. No superpowers. No God-given covenant. Just a mostly good people trying to do mostly good most of the time, but with a capitalist imperialist government that really likes to get in the way of all that.
Like the US, Israel was built on supremacist, militaristic ideals that were cloaked in the language democracy and religious freedom. And just like the US, the mask has been pulled off. It sucks to be the bad guy. The rise of white supremacy and Christian nationalism in the US is the thrashing response of those who cannot work into their ontological landscape the complicated reality of patriotism.
I believe that Israeli students feel uncomfortable. Some may feel cognitively unsafe, especially if they’ve never had to question the idealized version of their country or their religion. Any crisis of faith is rending no matter what that faith was in. But that’s not the same thing as antisemitism.
This isn’t a time for easy answers, but you can’t have difficult dialogues (#CollegeAdmiBuzzword) when you’re privileging the feelings and safety of some students over others. We need to relearn as a society how to have tough conversations about complex topics, but that needs to start by not arresting people who oppose us.
