Campus Protests and College Tours, Some Thoughts on Protests, Permawar and Elections
Last weekend, we were out visiting colleges in Boston. At Smith and then Tufts, we were told we might run into a campus protest or two. I asked the administrators how they handled the issues. At Smith, they started dialogue groups immediately after October 7th, to open up conversation, they told me. Each school made a point of highlighting the complicated stories the students were trying to understand, recognizing protest as an inherent right for each student, for all of us. After all, we would not have the eight-hour work day, labor, queer, or civil rights, if we did not have protesters. Still, administrators seemed to warn us we might run into a few, touring each campus. I don't know why students speaking out is seen as such a threat. At their best, such moments open spaces for dialogue, conversation and reconning. Visiting the encampment in Boston, students were mostly talking, holding banners, a few chants. Nothing that different from New York. And no one was trying to stop the process.
In between it all, I’ve been working on a draft of my new book on friendship and conflict in social movements. Amidst it all, my friend activist and epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalvez posted a note that seemed to address both the conflict at hand and the larger questions of reconciliation and dialogue. His view of the conflict felt in sinc with what I have been thinking:
“...I've known many people on Facebook for longer than there has been Facebook,” wrote Gonsalvez. “They are old friends. I've met many more too here on this site. In general, my world has been enriched by knowing you. Over the past few months, I’ve seen friendships disintegrate, enmity rise between people who have known each other for years. Almost all of this about what is happening in the Middle East. Let us honor the dead from October 7th, those held hostage and the tens of thousands of dead now in Gaza. They deserve our collective grief, our ongoing concern. If you want to suggest anyone “got what was coming to them,” are mere collateral damage in a just war from your perspective (and this can come from either side), I ask what has allowed you to reduce real men, women and children into symbols that are fodder for your rage.
From the terrible events on October 7th onwards I have been unable to simply “take sides,” which some have considered a moral abdication, but which reflects my deep conviction that this conflict cannot be decomposed neatly into the good and the bad, the righteous and the wrong. The bloodthirstiness of the leaders of Hamas and the Netanyahu government are equally despicable to me. The lives of both Palestinians and Israelis are precious.
Where I find hope is among those who are trying to bridge divides, see the solution not in conflict but in its resolution. This isn’t a “kumbaya” version of peacemaking or a naïve idealism. It’s a realization that the future is in coexistence, not annihilation. Here at Yale, people like Naftali Kaminski and Hani Mowafi, Kaveh Khoshnood and Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, have been remarkable. Over the course of the past six months they have worked through their pain and anguish to bring people together, to talk about ways to help those suffering. Yesterday’s vigil was the latest event that is co-organized by Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews here in New Haven. It is the only place I feel at home.”
I’ve felt the same way. I’ve also been frustrated with Israeli leadership, which seems to be on the wrong side of history, pointing fingers instead of brokerring deals or creating sustainable solutions. Only 15% of Istraelis support Benjamin Netanyahu - once the conflict ends, leaving him with little incentive to push for a quick solution. Yet, the US is different position. Biden has an election coming up. And without peace, he may lose in November. One would think this leaves him a great incentive to create peace, not permawar. Yet, Bibi seems fine with permawar, a thirty year conflict that goes on and on and on. And seems to be sticking his thumb up to Biden in favor of a Trump re emergence. Yet, there is room for a post war solution, a multi-ethnic democracy where everyone has rights. There is room for a solution. I can certainly understand the horror people feel watching kids bombed and starved, kidnapped and raped. What a horror. And why not peace, I wonder thinking about Camp David and Oslow, the assasinations of Anwar Sadat October 6, 1981 in Cairo, Egypt and Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 at the hands of “Yigal Amir, a law student and right-wing extremist who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords,” that thwarted peace efforts, opening the doors for more killing. Even South Africa, Rowanda and Ireland have found peace since then. But not Israel. I’m still on Team Peace. And wanted, still hope for Biden to force peace instead of funding g permanent war. He could have seen this, we certainly saw this coming last October, an extended war with US tax dollars funding a horror show, another in a long series of chapters in the questionable history of US foreign policy. Biden came of age watching Vietnam sink Humphry and the Democrats in 1968. Now people are making similar analogies to his run, unless something changes drastically.
With multiple points of view vying for position in my head, I watched and welcomed the conversation taking place all over New York, among activists and family members, at Seder dinners, on college campuses. My friends and I talked it out, looking for common ground, condemnation of the violence, of the killing.
My father in law told me about his anti war protests that spread from campuses across the country in the 1960’s and sadness to see Israel doing what it was doing, especially after what happened to his family in the 1940s in Europe.
And then things got messy.
The Columbia President seemed to sell out her students and faculty, testifying in Washington, DC, calling police, with their monopoly on violence, to crack down on a peaceful student encampment on campus.
These are college campuses, not war zones. Protest is as old and American as apple pie. I learned so much in college during conversations about race and institutional racism after the LA Riots broke out. We had rally after rally, speak out after speak out. And everyone got to speak. I sat quietly listening, taking it all in. There were no cops on campus. It was a space for ideas, for dialogue. In my classes, we talk things out, class after class, movement after movement from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, on issues from police brutality to climate, on and on. And we don’t police each other. We listen. Makes me wonder what they are thinking at Columbia. From what I see and hear, the same thing was happening at Columbia, with Jewish and Arab students sharing space and ideas.
"The university is a critical institution or its nothing," says Stuart Hall.
Why the crackdown on peaceful protests?
The ACLU posted a note to remind administrators about freedom of assembly, not just for ideas one approves of. The American Civil Liberties Union posted:
“Today we sent an open letter to college and university presidents across the nation outlining five basic guardrails to ensure freedom of speech and academic freedom while protecting against discriminatory harassment and disruptive conduct:
Schools must not single out particular viewpoints for censorship, discipline, or disproportionate punishment
Schools must protect students from targeted discriminatory harassment and violence, but may not penalize people for taking sides on the war in Gaza, even if expressed in deeply offensive terms
Schools can announce and enforce reasonable content-neutral protest policies, but they must leave ample room for students to express themselves
Schools must recognize that armed police on campus can endanger students and are a measure of last resort
Schools must resist the pressures placed on them by politicians seeking to exploit campus tensions…”
It seems they forgot about the whole, “schools must protect students” point.
Pepper spray and crackdowns followed at Columbia and CCNY last Tuesday, the night before classes were to start again on after spring break.
The Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, posted a statement about the crackdown. “Today is the first day back on campus for many of us after a spring recess that coincided with an escalation of student protest at home and nationwide.
The PSC condemns in the strongest possible terms the militarized policing of campuses that is taking place across the country and in New York City, including at our own City College campus last night. We have heard concerning reports of many injuries that our students and members sustained during the police action last night, and of many dozens of arrests. As we stated last week when the CCNY encampment began, lawful student protests on any CUNY campus should not be met with NYPD arrests. Administration can and must ensure students' safety and prevent harassment on campus without resorting to the forcible removal of peaceful protestors. Last night’s NYPD actions at the campus, even before the announced deadline for students to clear the encampment, were escalatory and disproportionate to any threat that the encampment posed. A militarized police response violates the trust and community that make the shared quest for education possible. As the AAUP said in its recent statement In Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses, crackdowns like the one that just took place at CCNY emerge from the troubling context of “a politically motivated assault on higher education.” Congress has weaponized sincere concerns about actual antisemitism to repress freedoms of speech and the freedom of inquiry necessary for all academic work and central to all academic institutions. College and university administrators have cited restrictions on the time, place, and manner of protests to justify bringing police onto campuses to arrest students. As the AAUP observes, “When university administrators limit when, where, and how free speech may be exercised, and require advanced applications for permission of such expression, they effectively gut the right itself. To insist that harsh discipline and violent repression are necessary to combat hate on a college campus is a pretext to suppress protest and silence speech. It is imperative that space for peaceful student protest be restored at City College, across CUNY, and at universities across the U.S.
Greg Gonsalves posted another note, summarizing some research:
Watching the waves of crackdowns on peaceful protests and public assembly, I kept thinking of the Columbia president, who invited the police onto their campus. Its a colossal failure of the leadership. I wasn’t the only one concerned. The Columbia campus chapter of the AAUP was contemplating a vote of no confidence.
While Columbia professed to support peaceful protests, the Times found time to condemn our friend Lisa Fithian, who has spent a career training others in non-violence, who joined the protests: “In a video captured by The New York Times, the protesters can be seen trying to push their way toward the building as the woman — decades older than the crowd — pleads with two young counter protesters trying to block them from barricading the occupied building. “This is ridiculous,” the woman says, as the men stand with their backs against the doors, apparently trying to keep protesters away from the building. “We’re trying to end a genocide in Gaza.” In the article, the Times seems to chastise Fithian as an outside agitator, an outmoded term if there was one. After all, social movements flow throughout cities, from parks to streets to colleges. People join them, as they always have, students supporting street protests, street protesters joining campus activists, as they always have. Recall MLK’s point about the matter. "…I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. in Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Off to the protests on Mayday, International Workers Day, with people out in the streets from Foley Square to Berlin to Tblisi. “Free free Palestine” says one speaker in Foley Square; “Globalize intifada,” another. Some make more sense than others. My head starts to sprin. “From the river to the sea,” no Zionist state. Its a lot to unpack.
With Russia casting dark shadows on Georgia, via a “Kremlin-inspired “foreign influence” legislation, and material support for Hammas, there has been little talk of Ukraine of late. Putin could not be happier with the destabilized situation, his prime opponent potentially thwarted. If Trump is re elected, Putin has his partner back. There have been protests all week in Tblisi, pushing back against Russia’s influence.
Finishing the rallies, I joined my friends at the Magician, chatting about the crazy world, the protests, Christian Nationalism on the rise, Project2025 and the push for purity among Trumpers. “Project 2025 will affect every sector of our society including, but not limited to, labor, gender, immigration, racial equality, climate, media, religious freedom, education, and reproductive health….It would give a GOP president unprecedented “supreme” powers to advance an extremist anti-gender, anti-diversity, anti-democratic agenda – reversing many climate protections, too… The radical right has released an extremist electoral playbook for a soft coup, an 887-page document called Project 2025, backed by 100 conservative groups and Koch family money. It openly calls for the dismantling of the federal government and giving special ‘supreme’ powers to a President – a step toward autocracy, and Christian theocracy. Project 2025 also calls for complete erasure of gender and LGBTQ+ identity from all federal rules and regulations. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” it states. Project 2025 calls for rolling back recent LGTBQ+ gains in civil rights, including gay marriage and protection from discrimination, and gender reform of the military. It criminalizes transgender identity as predatory to children, and on the par with pornography.”
Given the war, Biden has lost the youth vote. Many are not going to vote for him, opening the door for Trump, Putin’s partner in a tight election. Biden is flawed. But Trump is worse. He will be worse for Gaza, worse for many things. There are issues, the climate, immigrants, abortion, civil liberties also in play. People may not vote for Biden, but Trump’s supporters will vote for Trump. With Biden, we live to fight another day. With Trump, its all over. Recall a split left opening the door for the National Socialists in the 1930’s. With Trump under the guise of fighting Anti-Semitism, its a Christian Nationalist takeover. And thats scary.
Connected, interconnected, the reverberations are starting to unfold.
Artist Gary Panter puts it succinctly:
“99.9% of the intelligent, motivated, young people I know, which are very many, as I was a teacher for 20 years, are emotionally and passionately obsessed with the war against the civilian population of Palestine funded by US tax dollars. Many of these young people are jewish. That there are campus protests across the country is no surprise to me. These kids have been following the disgraceful actions of the right wing Zionist government of Netanyahu for many years before the disgusting terrorist attack by Hamas and the misbehavior of half a million fanatical illegal settlers against the Palestinian people for decades. I first became aware of this political situation when I interviewed the science fiction author Phil K Dick in the early 80s when he referred to the Israeli government as 'a Roman occupying army' in their behavior. As in the 60s, the media is siding with government war machine interests and not humanitarian interests. To me it likely that Biden will lose this election in spite of him being a middle of the road competent leader running against a mentally ill tyrant wannabe. It is a sad scene as in the days of the Viet Nam war and everyone is losing. Israel can never have peace trying to steal land based on an ancient self perpetuating promise. The US loses respect killing thousands of women and children by proxy. This is the planet of the apes. Comments about apes will not be welcome.”
Hopefully there is another path.
And then we heard about clashes at UCLA, which seemed more extreme than New York.
According to the LA Times:
”More than 100 students were arrested Thursday morning, according to CHP officials, after police moved into the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, dismantling many of the tents and pushing out most of the protesters. Officers wearing body armor, helmets and face shields methodically pulled apart the barricade as protesters tried to hold together the assemblage of plywood and metal fencing. Flares arced overhead, igniting with piercing blasts, and smoke filled the air from fire extinguishers that demonstrators sprayed at the police.”
Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur represents the area of Los Angeles that includes UCLA. Here is his statement on the violence at UCLA.
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The horrific acts of violence against UCLA students and demonstrators that occurred on campus last night are abhorrent and have no place in Los Angeles or in our democracy. No matter how strongly one may disagree with or be offended by the anti-Israel demonstrators’ messages, tactics, or goals, violence is never acceptable and those responsible must be held accountable.
For days, I have been requesting increased security on campus, after my staff and I witnessed rising tensions between demonstrators and counter-protestors and ourselves felt unsafe on campus. I have pled with the UCLA Administration to take necessary steps to protect students from violence, harassment, and intimidation. Yesterday, my staff witnessed the violent assault of a Jewish student on campus, just one of many antisemitic incidents that have occurred in the last week and in recent months. Hours later, a violent mob attacked protestors at the encampment with fireworks, pepper spray, and blunt objects, reportedly injuring students and reporters. In both instances, University security failed to prevent the assaults or respond in a timely manner, despite Chancellor Block’s assurances of adequate security on campus. While we continue to gather all the facts, one thing is abundantly clear: the UCLA Administration has failed in their most important duty — to protect the safety, wellbeing, and civil rights of all students on campus.”
My kid, a college student who attends UCLA, in Berlin for Junior year, was getting emails and texts from friends at UCLA saying they were attacked, sent to jail for hours and hours, after clashes on campus, possibly with undercover cops or MAGA supporters.
Gene D. Block, the Chancellor at UCLA posted a not to the community.
“Dear Bruin Community,” Block wrote. “Our community is in deep pain. We are reeling from days of violence and division. And we hope with all our hearts that we can return to a place where our students, faculty and staff feel safe and, one day, connected again. Our approach to the encampment that was established on Royce Quad last week has been guided by several equally important principles: the need to support the safety and wellbeing of Bruins, the need to support the free expression rights of our community, and the need to minimize disruption to our teaching and learning mission. The events of the past several days, and especially the terrifying attack on our students, faculty and staff on Tuesday night, have challenged our efforts to live up to these principles and taken an immense toll on our community. We approached the encampment with the goal of maximizing our community members’ ability to make their voices heard on an urgent global issue. We had allowed it to remain in place so long as it did not jeopardize Bruins’ safety or harm our ability to carry out our mission. But while many of the protesters at the encampment remained peaceful, ultimately, the site became a focal point for serious violence as well as a huge disruption to our campus. Several days of violent clashes between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators put too many Bruins in harm’s way and created an environment that was completely unsafe for learning. Demonstrators directly interfered with instruction by blocking students’ pathways to classrooms. Indirectly, violence related to the encampment led to the closure of academic buildings and the cancellation of classes. And frankly, hostilities were only continuing to escalate. In the end, the encampment on Royce Quad was both unlawful and a breach of policy. It led to unsafe conditions on our campus and it damaged our ability to carry out our mission. It needed to come to an end. Over the past several days, we communicated with and made a formal request to meet with demonstration leaders to discuss options for a peaceful and voluntary disbanding of the encampment. Unfortunately, that meeting did not lead to an agreement. To preserve campus safety and the continuity of our mission, early this morning, we made the decision to direct UCPD and outside law enforcement officers to enter and clear the encampment. Officers followed a plan that had been carefully developed to protect the safety of protesters at the site. Those who remained encamped last night were given several warnings and were offered the opportunity to leave peacefully with their belongings before officers entered the area. Ultimately, about 300 protesters voluntarily left, while more than 200 resisted orders to disperse and were arrested. UCLA facilities teams are now in the process of taking down structures and cleaning up the quad, and we ask that students, staff and faculty continue to avoid the area. I want to be clear that we fully support the right of our community members to protest peacefully, and there are longstanding and robust processes in place that allow students, faculty and staff to gather and demonstrate in ways that do not violate the law or our policies. I urge Bruins to take advantage of these many opportunities, which were designed to support advocacy that does not jeopardize community safety or disrupt the functioning of the university. I also want to recognize the significance of the issues behind the demonstrators’ advocacy. The loss of life in Gaza has been truly devastating, and my administration has and will continue to connect with student and faculty leaders advocating for Palestinian rights to engage in discussions that are grounded in listening, learning and mutual respect. Similarly, we will continue to support our Jewish students and employees who are reeling from the trauma of the brutal Oct. 7 attacks and a painful spike in antisemitism worldwide. We will also continue to investigate the violent incidents of the past several days, especially Tuesday night’s horrific attack by a mob of instigators. When physical violence broke out that night, leadership immediately directed our UCPD police chief to call for the support of outside law enforcement, medical teams and the fire department to help us quell the violence. We are carefully examining our security processes that night and I am grateful to President Drake for also calling for an investigation. The past week has been among the most painful periods our UCLA community has ever experienced. It has fractured our sense of togetherness and frayed our bonds of trust, and will surely leave a scar on the campus….I also hope we can support one another through this difficult moment and reaffirm the ties that unite us as a community of learning.”
They called in the cops.
I remember Kent State.
There have already been guns shot at Columbia from the NYPD.
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