First, our open letter to the President and Provost has appeared in the Maroon; click the headline below to read:
Kudos to Dorian Abbot for doing the lion’s share of work on the letter. I would be chuffed if it had any role in making the University decide to end the Encampment, but we’ll never know. But we had to speak up; we could do no other.
This afternoon’s doings: The President’s announcement that the Encampment is on its deathbed seems to have riled up the Encampers, who were shouting and chanting at the top of their lungs, heedless of the “no-noise” regulations. There are now more than 120 tents in the Encampment, which seems to have expanded overnight (many of the tents are the green-and-white jobs that suggest a common origin.)
I showed the encampment to a friend, but was driven out with chants and requests to leave, so, rather than cause a provocation, we did, as we were really there because UChicago Maroons for Israel were having a picnic across the quad and I was invited. A friend and I had a big nosh on fantastic hummus, falafel, pita, tomato-and-cucumber salad, cookies and, of course challah.
At some point we were joined at the picnic by a group I didn’t know: large male students carrying American flags, with some dressed in colonial costumes. I sensed that they were spoiling for a fight with the chanting protestors, and was peeved that they were also gobbling down hummus as if it was beer.
At any rate, I started wending my way back to my office when all of a sudden the frat-boy group rushed west towards the encampment. There was a clash, and although I didn’t see any violence, I was told that people were hitting each other with sticks. This made me extremely upset, as we just don’t need that.
A bunch of University cops showed up in riot gear and separated the two sides: good for the cops! You can see a picture of the separation in this Maroon article. I have my own video and photos that I’ll put up tomorrow.
The two sides facing each other drove the protestors into a chanting frenzy, and around the perimeter of the encampment they linked arms; some of the linkers were faculty members. I did talk to one student who got hurt: the protestors now are equipped with wooden shields in preparation for a police assault, and this student got hit in the nose with a shield (he was okey).
In the middle of the encampment the protestors were practicing defending the area from the inevitable police takedown. As one of my colleagues wrote:
“Participants of the encampment are conducting another training on using wooden shields in the middle of the encampment between the two wooden signs. A large group is echoing training leaders’ shouts of “Advance,” “Halt,” and “Back.””
I was also told that the Quad is now surrounded by University of Chicago Police while the University itself is encircled by Chicago Police. That is hearsay as I left before it was reported.
One thing is absolutely sure: the protestors are in high dudgeon, they know they’ve lost this battle, which makes them even angrier, and when the inevitable happens and the tents are taken down, the protestors will not go gentle. There will be violence.
What kind of faculty resorts to fisticuffs and physical confrontation in an argument of ideas? Where does such behavior of students come from? I am flabbergasted.
I am sorry to learn of how this will end in a very disorderly way, with likely more injuries and students (and faculty?) facing the necessary consequences. That it has gotten this far is likely the result of delaying.
I wonder if someone from the Classics Department is teaching them how to use shields? It’s unclear what school this is from, but here is a protestor with a shield made from a cut up plastic garbage can charging police. Seriously, though, you don’t equip yourself like that for peaceful protest.
The shields don’t seem to have been particularly effective. If the police had perceived them as weapons, the police could have shot them, I hope they realize.
Bicycle helmets in urban combat just seem so wrong. Too dorky for words.
The Free Press today reproduced training information (including the garbage-can shields) making the rounds on social media, reminiscent of that contained in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, although his had instructions for making pipe bombs, too.
https://www.thefp.com/p/student-protest-guides-violence-micro-intafada
The thing that scares me about this is that it’s like military commanders telling impressionable but totally clueless young people that their magic spells will protect them from enemy bullets. And they get slaughtered.
I took out a subscription to The Free Press. That was a good article. Really scary advice.
Stupidity often has dire consequences. And nobody is obliged to protect you from your own stupidity when you are of age. In fact, most protections are removed after you turn 3.
Agreed this is very dangerous behaviour by amateurs.
Yes, the post below the video requesting that the Benny Hill theme tune (Yakety Sax?) accompany the footage was about right!
Charging armed police officers like that strikes me as extremely foolish, too.
Since they have cut up their garbage cans, how are they going to collect their trash? (This assumes they care about cleaning up their mess and don’t presume that someone else will do that for them.)
They’re following the playbook of their Hamas masters: Initiate violence, provoke a response, then cry and claim victimhood.
Reducing what is happening to “they are following the playbook of their Hamas masters”….
If I may say so, this is not a serious analysis.
These protestors are not intellectually serious. Chanting “From the river to the sea” and “Intifada!” show them to be ill-informed at best and actively anti-semitic at worst. They are doing exactly what Hamas wants.
“From the river to the sea”
My folks are rich so look at me!
I wonder how many will stick with their… fight?.. if the teargas and rubber bullets come out. I can state authoritatively the neither is pleasant, and you really need to give a damn to stick to your guns in the face of either.
And the cavity search is no picnic, either.
I’m not sure what your objection is. Patrick is pointing out that the tactics are similar. If you’re objecting to the term “Hamas masters,” the protesters are certainly pro-Hamas, and there is evidence that they are being funded by pro-Hamas agitators.
Of course this is not a serious analysis, just a statement of an obvious fact.
In fact, these rich, educated and supposedly intelligent American Hamas supporters disgust me far more than Palestinian Hamas supporters, because the latter have at least grown up trapped in an already existing conflict, and have been indoctrinated from cradle.
Unlike them, the American “cool kids” have chosen to support pure evil for no obvious reason.
You are so right about this. The claims of victimhood I find so repulsive and so cowardly.
Indeed – an excellent example of DARVO.
“Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”. A new one for me.
Mark, thanks for explaining that one; you saved me the effort of a web search.
+1
The last thing anyone needs now is more hopped up provocation from a third party of dude bros.
I hope the larger fraction of protestors are asking themselves “why are we doing this again?”. Some of the videos around suggest they are only half in it.
From what I hear about this classic pastime (yes I’m heretofore largely a chicken) – real life comes back sooner or later and some just say “I’m tired of this.”
Hunger — not enough gluten-free bread–, not drinking enough fluids (because peeing is inconvenient), no sex, sleep deprivation, constant purposeless (and unaccustomed) activity, the incessant chanting that interrupts concentration and rest, the hypervigilance from the threat of being trapped at any moment in violence you can’t control, or raped by a “community” infiltrator, and whose consequences now look grim, social pressure not to just slip away, trapped in a doomed cause that their parents are going to be furious about if it leads to expulsion from an elite college they worked so hard and spent so much money to get into. Hell, even bad breath from wearing masks all day gets you down.
It’s almost as if the protesters are carrying out psy-war against one another. Or is it Revolutionary Communist Party boot camp for something more? “We’re looking for a few good people who identify as penis-havers.”
Don’t you mean “-wavers”?
Yikes! Not in public, surely! :-O
“Hunger […] not drinking enough fluids […] sleep deprivation, constant purposeless (and unaccustomed) activity, the incessant chanting that interrupts […] social pressure […] bad breath from wearing masks all day gets you down.”
Hmmm, what might those be part of, that we already know about? Hmmm, couldn’t be, oh, IDK, trauma bonding, could it? Wouldn’t be a good background for, oh, IDK thought reform (R. J. Lifton, 1961)? A way to find loyalty?
Nahhh, couldn’t be, that’d be crazy! Nobody actually does that. The protest is about Palestine vs. Israel – full stop. They said so. That other stuff is just all made up nonsense and would never happen.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism
No sex? At UChi, the protesters have stocked up on Plan B and HIV tests.
Ah. The tents. I forgot. I didn’t think Gen Z had sex. Silly me.
This is following exactly the progression that occurred at UCLA.
1. A pro-Palestinian takes over a public space and makes a laundry list of demands and refuses to leave until they are all met. (Note, this is NOT what “freedom of speech” (FoS) is meant to be.) They are obnoxious and loud, but generally non-violent and not physically confrontational.
2. The administration hems and haws for some time; hoping that people get tired of living in a camp and go home. They don’t.
3. The Chancellor finally declares the camp is ‘illegal’ and will/should be removed sometime in the near future. The campers dig in.
4. A group of thugs (their affiliations are unclear) soon appears and initiates a brawl. The university admin appears to have been woefully surprised by this turn of events, and cannot intervene quickly to separate the combatants. Thankfully no one is killed or sustains a life-threatening injury.
5. The protesting campers still don’t leave and in fact quite a few more join. They start to arm themselves.
6. The university realizes that the ‘peaceful’ protest may soon be a war zone and people could get killed – so they quickly bring in 1000 cops and clear the place out the following night. For everyone’s ‘safety’. Again, thankfully no one is killed or sustains a life-threatening injury.
None of this would have happened had the admin simply said “No camping allowed” – for any group or cause. And torn down the tents as quickly as they went up. What they allowed for a while instead (and many faculty unfortunately supported) is not FoS. Pro-Palestinian groups are free to march around, chant slogans (even awful ones), set up info booths, pass out literature, and try to convince the audience of the validity of their views. That is FoS. But now… What now if PETA next occupies UCLA with a camp and refuses to leave until all animal research is stopped? What if a conservative student group sets up a camp and won’t leave until undocumented students are expelled and deported? You know, FoS y’all!!! I wonder how many faculty will link arms to prevent these “heroic” FoS advocates from being tossed off campus? Right now there is way too much: FoS = you must do what I want.
I think that FoS=you must do what I want is a very common misconception of what FoS is for a lot of young people, particularly those that want to claim, as an identity, some kind of victim status.
I really liked your rundown of what happened and what can/should be done.
Yup. The administrators allow a small encampment to start up and hope that it will go away on its own. (At this point, the protestors could readily be evicted.) The small encampment grows—like a nest of yellow jackets grows to thousands of stinging wasps if you don’t get rid of it when it consists of only a few individuals. The encampment, now large and starting to attract agitators from outside the campus, becomes intolerable, and considerable force is needed to get rid of it: campus police, city police, state police, … National Guard. Because every large group of protestors—and, by now, counterprotestors—includes a few hotheads, fists are thrown, followed by sticks, rocks, and bottles. This is the natural history of a riot.
“There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”
[…]
“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, […] denunciation is impossible […] and there is no transformation without action.”
-Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
1968 (Spanish, Original)
Ch. 3, p. 87 of 2018 edition (50th ann.)
Remember, since ~1996, K-12 pedagogy has been transformed to critical pedagogy. That is how they think (if it works the way it’s supposed to). Speech IS praxis.
I think you nailed it here:
(and many faculty unfortunately supported)
This produces division in the administration because admin can’t simply ignore faculty views on things. Faculty generally don’t like the way administrators have taken over a community of scholars and made it a customer-satisfaction organization. Some faculty may sincerely (if perversely) support the occupiers’ cause. Others may oppose on principle whatever the administration wants to do, just because that’s what militant unionized faculty are supposed to do. The worst that happens is the President gets fired, but none of them will. Whoopee! Another one bites the dust.
Keen, if dismal insight.
The Jenga game formed by DEI, faculty, administration, etc. seem set up to produce a transformation, just like UNESCO wants.
Agreed. Setting a precedent of camp-occupation of public space as a valid form of speech is a very bad move.
The precedent was set back in the 1960s when the universities recast themselves as being welcoming to having their property taken over for demonstrations to show their commitment to freedom of speech, thus increasing their market share of high-school graduates interested in protesting. Once the draft ended, this became an empty gesture since protests pretty much ended immediately once students lost the incentive to demonstrate. But now it has come back to bite them. Encampments, though far smaller and so far less violent than in the glory days of the draft, are still troublesome because of their occupy-and-intimidate nature and their staying power. I think on the whole the modern university is more sympathetic to the goals of these protests than the old university was, which complicates their response.
You reap what you sow.
(I’m taking this last line from a recent article in The Atlantic about this topic but I came up with the rest of it independently before someone called it to my intention and have not breached the paywall.)
Disappointing that the protests appear to be getting violent.
Not a surprise. There are a subset of the student protestors who are virulently pro-Hamas fash, and believe in achieving their aims “by any means necessary”.
Makes for more publicity in the news cycle. The puppetmasters get the campers to raise the stakes, and best case for them is that someone gets hurt bad enough for CNN to lead with the story of evil cops / conservatives beating up a poor college kid, with bonus points if it’s an identitarian. Ink’s ink.
Sorry Rich, not the meaning of “fash” you intended, but I can’t resist:
Dedicated Followers
They sieg him here, they sieg him there,
Their chants are loud, their torches flare.
“You will not replace us” if they fight to staunch the flood,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
And when they do their little rounds
‘Round Birmingham and London Town,
Eagerly pursuing pakkis Jews and other BAMEs,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are),
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are).
They strive to be good follow’rs of their leaders,
Who’ll make the country right again by skimming off the scum,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are),
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are).
There’s one thing that they love and that is battery,
One week they are protesters, the next week they are thugs,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
They sieg him here, they sieg him there,
In Birmingham, and Bristol Square.
All around the BNP and SJP march on,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are),
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are).
The world will be remade around their wishes,
These vengeance-seeking individuals always try their best,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are),
Oh yes they are (Oh yes they are).
They fight from foe to foe like seasoned battlers,
In matters of The Cause they are as rabid as can be,
‘Cause they are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
They are dedicated followers of Fasci’m.
They are dedicated, followers, of Fasci’m.
© 2024, free for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
Ohhh! Kinky!
Speaking of fascists, I saw somewhere where MTG was upset that anti-Semitism may become criminalized because that would interfere with Christian teaching (like how Jews killed Jesus). At least I think this is real and not an Onion piece.
Antisemitism is not a matter for the criminal law. Even Canada only makes it illegal to foment antisemitism by denying or minimizing the historicity of the Holocaust. Fomenting antisemitism by saying the Jews killed Jesus is not illegal because it does not involve Holocaust denial.
I don’t know MTG’s exact point since I don’t pay attention to her. But the way you put it, a law against antisemitism would be dangerous because without any further definition and restriction and need for concrete action, you could indeed be charged with antisemitism merely for saying the Jews killed Jesus (or put the Romans up to it) if a prosecutor decided to take his chances on getting a conviction.
So no, antisemitism should be not be illegal, any more than it is illegal to be racist.
Why did you prez let it get to this point? It’s not like there aren’t a lot of lessons already out there of the need to enforce regulations right from the start. The weakness of university presidents is remarkable, and quite distressing. If the rules are not going to be enforced from the start, why have them at all? Your president knows all this, and yet he still decided to not respond until the situation became completely impossible — and now removing the encampment is going to be a much bigger job than it would have been on day 1.
AND — if students are not expelled, then the lesson is that NOTHING is impermissible as long as you are on the side of progressive attitudes. Being expelled is the ONLY thing that students will respect (if they’re arrested, they know the charges will be dropped, and if merely suspended, or less, they consider the discipline a joke).
Abigail Shrier’s column https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-there-are-two-sets :
“The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.”
Her column is spot-on. No need to say more.
Definitely a worthwhile read. Thanks much for that link.
“large male students carrying American flags, with some dressed in colonial costumes.”
Let’s ask : what, precisely, does the United States (and associated imagery) have to do with the antagonism on campuses? What is this? Why should it be there?
It is the dialectical trap set up for the Right, as always, to fall into — face-first. Specifically, to draw the United States iconography (in some way) into the camera eyes to promote dialectical political warfare. I think it is exactly the reaction intended.
If the campus chaos started in blue states, it would let the news percolate through all media, get people riled up. No big turnout from the Right.
This will give the Right in red/swing states some time to ask for time off work, mobilize the 4X4s, get the tailgate party ready to travel.
Next, the timing of campus protest in red states and swing states would allow a maximum effect of this trap. Dartmouth sorta threw a wet blanket on that though, so we shall see.
Illinois might be blue, but it is mid-west ish. Could get better effect than, say, Columbia in NYC.