Today we’re having a short warm-up protest at Chicago in preparation for the Big Encampment that’s supposed to start on May 1. I’ll try to document today’s event later with photos and videos. (I’m betting that the students will be masked.) And the demonstrators still seem to think that this kind of protest will make the University divest.
As for the continuing encampment and “liberated zone” at Columbia, I have two things to say. First, Columbia President Namat “Minouche” Shafik didn’t enforce last night’s midnight deadline for protestors to leave. Instead, she’s continuing to “negotiate” with them, which worries me. What is there to negotiate? Is she negotiating over the pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ demand that Columbia divest from Israel? If she gives in on even part of that, it will hearten demonstrators everywhere and spur on more disruption. I think it’s more likely that she’s negotiating when and how they can dismantle the encampment, as implied in this NYT article.
Not even 12 hours after Columbia’s predawn assertion of progress in its negotiations with the demonstrators, a protest leader all but dismissed some of the university’s claims.
To extend talks, according to the university, the protesters agreed to remove a significant number of the tents erected on the lawn. Columbia also said the protesters had pledged that non-students would leave the encampment, and that they would bar discriminatory or harassing language among the demonstrators.
But on Wednesday morning, an organizer announced to other students at the encampment that they would not be “doing the university’s job of removing people from this camp for them,” insisting that demonstrators would not become “cops to each other.” And the organizer declared that the protesters were “committed to staying here and having people stay here.”
Second, the biggest of Shafik’s problems is that she’s caught between Republican lawmakers, who are watching her closely and will haul her back before Congress if she allows demonstrations—and their attendant anti-Semitism—to continue, and on the other side the Columbia faculty, which is largely against Shafik for calling the cops on a “peaceful protest”. I think the faculty are mistaken because they misunderstand what “free speech” is. In my view the protestors can speak freely and even call for the death of Jews, but they should not be allowed to violate campus rules by camping on the quad and harassing other students. (The harassment is documented in nearly all the articles below.) The demonstration, at least inside Columbia’s gates, may be “peaceful,” but “peaceful” doesn’t equate to “legal” on most campuses. There are, as the courts have ruled, “time, place, and manner” regulations that can apply on campus.
At any rate, it now looks as though the Columbia Faculty Senate won’t even attempt to censure Shafik, but instead will try to pass a more tepid measure that won’t lead to her removal: a resolution “expressing displeasure with a series of her decisions, including summoning the police last week to arrest protesting students on campus.” Right now I’m not sure what should happen to her, but am willing to wait to see what she does. If the students continue to insist on camping on the quad and harassing both visitors and those who are “visibly Jewish,” I think Shafik should call the cops again. The demonstrators cannot be talked out of their views, although one article below says that constructive dialogue is needed. I would argue that in this case such dialogue is not possible, and will give some evidence why.
At any rate, I’ve found four articles worth reading on the Columbia crisis, which has prompted lookalike encampments across America. I do this because I think these protests are in many ways as portentous as the protests by students of the Sixties against the Vietnam War, which did help end the war. The difference is that the current protestors are no longer calling for a ceasefire: they’re calling for the extermination of Israel and, in some cases, killing Jews. They’re also implying that the intifada should be “globalized,” in other words, extend Islamism throughout the world. Further, because I put the tragic deaths of Palestinian citizens at the door of Hamas, not Israel, I don’t agree with the main tenor of the protests. Why aren’t the protestors, for example, calling for Hamas to rectify one of its many war crimes and release the hostages?
But I digress. Below are four articles and a brief excerpt from each. The first two are from The Atlantic and the second two from the Free Press. Although these are largely paywalled, if you click on the headlines you should be able to access the archived links. You should read them all if you have time: they’re not long.
First, from The Atlantic. I start with this one because the optimistic author believes that since the Sixties colleges have failed as liberal institutions, no longer encouraging discourse. At the end, Packer suggests that the disruptions of the last eighty years could have been prevented had students been prompted and trained to “talk with one another”.
An excerpt:
But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.
. . . Along, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
. . . The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”
Here’s Packer’s well-intended but misguided call for dialogue. But perhaps he thinks it’s too late for that, and if that’s the case, he’s right:
Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.
A second piece from The Atlantic; click to read:
The dynamics of the “zone” are well known by now: the poking of flagpoles into the eyes of Jews, the prevention of “outsiders” from discussing things with the Tenters, the elimination of “Zionists” from the area, and so on. I’ll highlight a few indications that dissenting speech is demonized and the speakers expelled from Tent City:
“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”
Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.
There is a “leader” who must be consulted if you want to enter Camp Hamas, much less talk to its inhabitants.
As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.
Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”
. . . Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.
This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”
I for one have never claimed that the protests were violent; they aren’t except for sporadic and rare instances of pushing or physical coercion. Yes, in that sense they are “peaceful”. But should they be permitted because they are instances of “free speech”? My answer is “no, because they aren’t.” They violate campus rules for time, place, and manner of speech, and I’d have the same objection if pro-Israeli students were doing the same thing.
This one’s from the Free Press, and since its boss, Bari Weiss, is Jewish (and wrote a book on anti-Semitism), you’re not going to expect much sympathy for the demonstrators in that venue. There are actually three short articles here: one by Bari, one by Jonathan Lederer, and one from Sahar Tartak, the woman who was poked in the eye with a flagpole at Yale University. (Links are archived.).
From Lederer:
On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.
For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.
Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
One keffiyeh-masked protester came up to my friends and I and held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward us that read: “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas.
The latter is, of course a veiled threat, and may be a violation of free speech. But clearly there’s antisemitism afoot.
Another Free Press article. I like the title:
I said I’d give evidence that the protestors aren’t willing to discuss things. It’s anecdotal, of course, but that’s how it must be (there must be at least one protestor in America open to debate). First, here at Chicago a Jewish group apparently reached out to Students for Justice in Palestine to host a joint event, one that had financial support. The Jewish group never got a response.
Further, the end of the article above shows the complete disdain for debate held by both the inhabitants and the Chairman of Columbia’s Tent City. There’s also evidence of well-funded outside groups contributing to the welfare of Tent City. Of course they don’t care if Hamas and Hezbollah are dancing with delight at their antics.
And it doesn’t seem to occur to these young people—supposedly the best and brightest in the nation—that the leaders of Hamas are using them. As Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said during an interview with an Arab TV station in January: “Palestine [is free] from the river to the sea. That is the slogan of the American students.”
. . . . At NYU’s protest, The Free Press watched one activist carry a generator stamped with the words People’s Forum, a radical NYC-based organization funded by a multimillionaire Marxist with ties to the Chinese government.
. . .A retired law enforcement official who has helped advise the federal government on issues of national security told The Free Press that groups egging on this movement “root themselves by and large on college campuses, because their greatest and most impressionable audience is the students.” And their organizing powers can be seen in the encampments—which have matching tents, identical chants, and shared tactics and guidelines at universities across the U.S.
“You can clearly see it in the uniformity and the sophistication and the appearance of the protest,” he added. “There’s an organizational character to it that we’ve seen many times before.”
Finally, the futile attempt of one student to engage the protestors:
On Tuesday afternoon, Isidore Karten, a 23-year-old recent Columbia graduate, walked into the camp holding an Israeli flag, hoping he might be able to change some of the protesters’ minds through conversation. He says anytime someone tried to talk to him, a “safety-trained” volunteer in a yellow vest quickly intervened.
“Whenever we start to get common ground, the organizers will come over and be like, ‘No, you can’t talk to them,’ ” says Karten, who tells me Hamas murdered his uncle in 1996. “It’s as if they can’t have their own opinion and they have to just blindly follow.”
To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran, “If they won’t debate, just leave the hate.”
A post I retweeted:
It's not peace they want, but more war. And yes, this is the Hezbollah flag: https://t.co/YhVQ1GEpgn https://t.co/82BXWGHAjN
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 26, 2024
. . . and a 3.5-minute video from Columbia, NYU, and Yale by Tom Gross. Yes, they chant, “We love Hamas and their rockets, too!”; and no student interviewed think that Hamas should release the hostages.
Nice roundup. It’s almost as if the value of Islam’s fundamentals aren’t clear enough on their own, it needs college students to help spread the gospel.
Hitchens said something like the religious will not be happy unless you believe in their religion too.
Not immune from the protest fad, my alma mater, Northern Arizona University, had a small protest march of about 30 students. One and done. Back to the books, it’s finals week.
I’m here today at NAU for the Undergraduate Research Symposium where students present research they’ve been conducting this year. There are projects on epidemiology, using LIDAR on drones to map faults, cube sat construction, mapping comet orbits by micro meteor detection, sagebrush migration in the high desert and more. Very inspiring projects by students passionate about their subjects. Sadly, the media will ignore this annual event because it just shows students bettering themselves and society.
I’ll also be awarding the 2024 recipients of our Family Scholarship for women in chemistry.
A breath of reality. Thank you.
Great, succinct thread on who is funding all of this………..organic these events are not:
https://twitter.com/jaypgreene/status/1783856153304183284
I have so much trouble identifying with these student protestors, and the energy they are putting into a very specific regional conflict far way from them in the Middle East. When I went to university (over two decades ago) at a solid US public university in the midwest, I had much more pressing things to do! Things such as attend class, study, internships, train (I was involved in athletics), and even work (I needed income to cover living expenses). Whatever time was leftover was spent socializing with friends. Nobody I knew was heavily involved in demonstrating or protesting against this or that issue, or would have considered it a good use of time.
I would think at elite schools, the sheer rigor of the academics would soak up enough time such that very few students would have the ability to engage in this level of….extracurriculars.
Perhaps these kids just don’t have enough meaningful work to do at these schools, and are on what is essentially a very expensive 4-5 year vacation?
This “very specific regional conflict far war from them in the Middle East” is being funded with US tax dollars. To claim that the protest is akin to a hobby is either 1) misleading or 2) made in bad faith.
It’s also great that you didn’t feel the need to protest during your time in college– however, there were doubtless many US actions in the 90s that would have been worth your while to militate against.
Perhaps these “kids” don’t want their tuition dollars going towards entities that violate international law? The request to disclose and divest is an excellent form of non-violent protest.
It doesn’t look like the “kids” you admire have any beef with Hamas’s or Hezbollah’s violations of international law, ALSO FUNDED WITH U.S. TAX DOLLARS. You know, of course, that the U.S. gives money not only to Hamas through the U.N., and now through a big appropriation to Gaza, which will also help Hamas.
Israel has not as a state violated any international law. Besides, even if she had, that is a legal finding, enforceable by military action, not a political opinion. Wanting a country to lose through financial starvation is fine, if that’s how you feel about civilization. Don’t invent legal arguments.
Protesting to divest is certainly a valid focus of protest. But the university need not honour it just because students say so. And the students must obey both the law and the university’s contract rules in any protest they undertake….or face the consequences.
What I think everyone commenting on protests on college campuses needs to get a grip about is that nobody outside academia cares what college students think about anything, and they never have, except about the useful subjects they are studying so bridges don’t collapse and surgical operations don’t go sour. It is nostalgic narcissism to the nth degree to claim that college demonstrations by draft deferees (and violence associated with same), however well-intended, ended the Vietnam war or could have made a difference in American policy anywhere else in the world later. Lyndon Johnson threw in the towel when Walter Cronkite said the war was unwinnable and all those families in Middle America and poor parts of cities whose sons actually did go to fight turned against the President. So to criticize people for not spending time protesting instead of studying on a heavy course load is grossly unfair. It gives professional protestors a bad smell, too.
Spot on Leslie as always.
That was true before K-12 children were ideologically remolded with critical pedagogy by graduates of captured teaching colleges from about 1996 as estimated in :
The Critical Turn in Education – From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race
Isaac Gottesman
Routledge
2016
… see Henry Giroux too, a Canadian critical educator. So now, much of the adult population is critically conscious for Marxist revolution and praxis. It should work better this time. The Social Emotional Learning New Age religious doctrine (Fetzer Institute, ~1994) doesn’t hurt either.
Have a nice day!
I’m wondering why they’re not attending classes? (Maybe the term is nearly over, if so wouldn’t final exams be coming up?
I would not had no much spare time when I was a student.
Massive plagiarism discovered in Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik major published work….
“Nemat Shafik – @Columbia
Prez only has 1 well-cited publication in her life, in Oxford Econ Papers 1994.
This paper is lifted almost entirely from a 1992 report coauthored with consultant not credited in the publication.
This is wholesale intellectual theft, not subtle plagiarism”
https://twitter.com/mushfiq_econ/status/1783713751809527912
This one is not necessarily “massive plagiarism”, though it could be. A working paper was authored by Shafik plus a co-author. A similar published version then had Shafik as sole author. Whether this is ok depends a lot on what the co-author had contributed to the earlier paper, and we can’t deduce that from the information so far.
I feel jealous that our protests do not generate the same level of interest as those in Columbia:
https://voicesagainstantisemitism.substack.com/p/newsletter-april-26-2024
Jerry, are only covering the Ivys?
Liked your linked post to your substack, Anna.
And yes, (forgive me boss but..) there’s WAY too much attention paid to those elite schools in my opinion. MOST students don’t attend them. And the students aren’t a great deal better than other selective schools.
D.A.
NYC
(University of Melbourne, Australia, Georgetown U., St. John’s Law School, NYC)
ps BIG fan of your work, talks and mission. Cpacibo! Best, D.A.
Yes! I am really tired of hearing about “elite” schools. There are many good universities and colleges and community colleges throughout the US. I doubt your school makes a big difference until graduate school or post-doc.
I subscribed, too. I didn’t know you had a Substack, Anna.
Subscribed to your Substack.
Is this who Columbia is negotiating with? I’m not surprised if the negotiations are going nowhere.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13352323/Cackling-non-binary-Columbia-palestine-zionist-israel-gaza.html
If the Daily Mail is a bit too piquant for American readers, this one from Newsweek closer to home is another:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/who-is-khymani-james-columbia-protest-organizer-s-remarks-spark-fury/ar-AA1nHYp0?
This dude is a piece of work. What on earth is he doing at Columbia?
HAHAH! Yes, Leslie. I saw that guy (gal?) on twitter. Quite the specimen.
The creme de la enema of what passes for Ivy students in these times.
D.A.
NYC
I suppose the answer to my question is, “The same thing Mark Rudd and the other leaders of the 1968 protest at Columbia were doing: Getting ready to be Columbia professors.” (From Anna’s link to the Atlantic.)
That individual is one of the most odious creatures I have ever come across.
Apparently he thinks he should be in Congress one day. Really?
He is an absolute advocate for unlicensed mayhem and murder all in the name of peace Those two sides of the equation are not equal.
This idiot has no single idea about what is required to fight and kill, he/it would not even last five minutes as a Taliban thug, moron is an understatement.
And apparently this was not in person because they were in vacation in Greece.
Yes, typical.
On the drive home from work, I chose to play NPR on the radio. It was mainly a kind of editorialized news (and I emphasize editorialized) about the widening protests on campuses. The voice described the demonstrations at Columbia as peaceful, and that the violence and intimidation against visibly Jewish people was all from various outsider groups who were not part of the campus. I am skeptical of that (as one should be for all un-cited claims), although I am willing to believe that a considerable majority of the demonstrators want this to be peaceful. They presumably don’t fully understand the real meaning behind this cause.
Being NPR, I’m sure the report also mentioned how terribly it impacted POC and marginalized peoples.
How the University of Florida is handling protests
https://x.com/thestustustudio/status/1783702628221792310?s=61&t=f3tfa_dRLrupkxoDqTq45g
The information in the tweet is confirmed by this NPR article https://www.wuft.org/fresh-take-florida/2024-04-26/uf-threatens-student-protesters-with-suspension-banishment-from-campus-for-3-years
Seems reasonable to me.
“We won’t rest until you divest”? Really, thats pretty lame; it doesn’t even scan. Aren’t there any poetry majors on the Slogans Committee? They clearly need some help (of several kinds):
and
‘At the end, Packer suggests that the disruptions of the last eighty years could have been prevented had students been prompted and trained to “talk with one another”.’
At the college level? I should reasonably think that that ought to have been accomplished at the K-5 level. The juvenilization (infantilization?) of college students continues.
Columbia is, I’m sure, under pressure for kicking out the daughter of a certain congressperson. This is likely part of the “negotiations”.
Regarding no one paying attention to students, the politician do. Politics is marketing – how to attract a demographic. The most effective tactic in any marketing is evoking an emotional response, and protests are all about emotion. The key for the D’s is to keep that anti-Israel emotion lasting until November and energize these young progressive voters. The tricky part is to not upset the center left, so it’s a bit of a tightrope for them (“good people on both sides”). The R’s have an easier task – they keep their pro-Israel base energized by showing the idiots in the protests and highlighting the anti-Semitism.
The only way protests change policy is if the politicians think it will help them get votes. They’re not swayed by the logic of the protests, just the likelihood of any of them going to the polls.
Lastly: for a more extensive list of the vile hatred coming from these protesters as well as a list of the encampments at colleges and universities (not just Ivies), go to ADL’s website. Also check out their anti-Semitism report card. Not only did Harvard and MIT receive an “F”, but so did University of Chicago.
Like Jerry, I’m unclear why the president of Columbia is negotiating with the protesters except maybe to save her own job for a week or two. You only negotiate when you can’t simply impose your will on the other side. The police don’t negotiate with you when they stop you for speeding. They give you a ticket, or they don’t. So what is the source of the power that protestor-occupiers have that forces Columbia to negotiate with them in order for the Trustees to get their university back? Does the professors’ support for Hamas undermine the president’s authority? What is Columbia going to have to give up? and Why?
The other point to note is that the protesters are negotiating in bad faith. Agreeing to extrude non-students from the camp and then reneging on the promise in the morning is the classic, “I’ll still respect you in the morning” ruse. That should be a reason for Columbia to break off negotiations and just act.
Whatever, they’d better get cracking. In New York, squatters’ rights kick in after 30 days of occupancy, even if you have no lease, don’t pay rent, and the landlord wants the property occupied by someone else who signed a rental contract. The tents are actually really dangerous legally.
Finally, a provocative piece by Richard Hanania with some good comments:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/too-gay-to-rebel
The student demonstrators’ explicit enthusiasm for Hamas has not yet extended to cheers for the Houthis’ attacks on international shipping, but a related groupuscule has already pioneered in this department. A few months ago, its website posted this clarion call: “”The Democratic Socialists of America demand an immediate and permanent cessation of hostilities by the United States against Yemen and an end to diplomatic and military support of Israel. President Biden widened the existing regional war even further by ordering airstrikes against civilian infrastructure in Yemen in an effort to stop that country’s humanitarian blockade of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. …Socialist internationalism obligates us to act in solidarity with the Palestinian and Yemeni people who have bravely resisted imperial aggression by the US and its partners for decades…”
Thank you for posting archived versions of these articles, Jerry. The George Packer piece from yesterday’s Atlantic is a good one. His suggestion that the two sides just need “to talk” is overly simplistic, but he makes good points about the wins and losses (in pedagogy) of the past and present. What I’m most struck by is the insistence on the part of the protesters of exerting complete control over their environment. It is extremely telling. Rigid, intolerant, lacking in courage, no ambition for challenge…I see the makings of some horrible future leaders. Can you imagine having to work with or be supervised by them? They just don’t appear to have paid any dues. Just as absent is their ability to imagine themselves in others’ shoes. Kids of the same age who aren’t fortunate enough to attend college, in general, seem to be lacking in the bare minimum of creativity required to think on their feet. They appear similarly intent upon following rules to a tee. Not willing to extend themselves enough to exercise any reasonable judgement in situations that stray outside the predicted parameters of a given situation. This is an over generalization on my part. There are good, bright young people out there but they seem few and far between in my experience.
Thanks for this.
I’m not a bit bothered by students finding time to cut classes and support something they think is important. I spent all of my high school and undergrad years blowing off classes to organize against the Vietnam War.
But I don’t think abstract virtues like dedication and self-sacrifice have any value: it depends on what you’re sincerely sacrificing yourself for. Supporting Hamas’ October 7 pogrom isn’t really comparable with ending the war in Vietnam.
At their core these demonstrations are antisemitic and pro-Hamas. So I see almost no similarity between that movement and these Hamas supporters (and Hamas attorneys). Of course there were crazies in the 60s and 70s, as there always are. But we did our best to isolate them, and largely succeeded. There isn’t a shred of evidence that the demonstration organizers are trying to isolate anyone. Except Jews and defenders of Israel’s right to defend itself. Oh, sorry, “Zionists.” No, they’ve become more obviously pro-Hamas over time. The organizers of these demonstrations are responsible for the increasingly threatening antisemitic atmosphere around them.
I don’t think any university administration is going to resolve the situation. Hell, they usually can’t resolve ordinary campus problems. But they could do a few things, in principle. Instead of having cops arrest people, why they could, say, help organize a mass march in NY against antisemitism. The fact is that these demonstrations are quite small; out-mobilizing Hamas and it’s attorneys would strike a real blow against them.
What did you “sacrifice”, Gordon, in your organizing days?
From the point of view of the Columbia Trustees, how would organizing a march in Manhattan against antisemitism get them their university back? I don’t think you are imagining that the legion of marchers will swarm onto the campus and sweep the occupiers away, like the Hardhats used to beat up hippie anti-war demonstrators?
The Trustees do need to get those occupiers off the premises so they can operate as a university again. They have a legitimate stake in this that is bigger for them than a vague, impotent expression of disdain for antisemitism. The longer it abets and condones the offences against its property rights, the thinner they get. At some point, if the university calls the cops again, the Chief of the NYPD is going to say, “Look, we’ve been advised by the DA’s office that you’ve allowed those tents to stay there so long it’s no longer clear that they are trespassers anymore. You did let them re-establish themselves immediately after we cleared them. They may have a right to be there now, and there is no longer anything we can arrest them for. It’s now a civil matter that we aren’t going to get involved in.” (This might be why the President is negotiating with the occupiers: she no longer has the police at her beck and call and the occupiers know it.)
To people with fond memories of your protest days, I remind you that you might have thought you had a “right” to protest the way you did back then. But you probably really didn’t. What happened was that your universities and the municipalities indulged you by permitting you to occupy private property and obstruct public streets because they either sympathized with your goals or were afraid of you and didn’t want to provoke riots like Detroit et al., 1967. When you passionately believed in your goals then and are bitterly hostile to the goals of these guys now, it is easy to miss the parallels about the lawful limitations on protest that preserve freedom fromyou as well as for you.
But, hey, it’s New York City. Anything goes there. Bring popcorn.
I couldn’t have skipped many classes and still have hoped to study Physics & Math as an undergraduate. I too lived through that era (b. 1951) but did not get involved in protests. OTOH, I’m in Canada and we didn’t have the Vietnam War: I can certainly understand the Americans who protested that.
That cringy post PZ put up at Pharyngula suggesting the “protests” at Columbia were all “love and peace, maaannn”, and that there was absolutely no extremism or antisemitism on display, has aged like milk in the sun.
His commentators, or “Horde”, were posting that they couldn’t see any examples of antisemitism, and that any accusation of antisemitism was “vague”. This from the silly sods who saw racism and sexism everywhere among progressives, humanists, secularists, and atheists!