American university leaders have declared war on protest. Egged on by conservatives in Congress and militant pro-Israel groups, they have called in police to dismantle protest encampments and arrest students, or have leveled threats to frighten students into compliance.
I witnessed this firsthand Thursday at Rutgers, when the administration issued an ultimatum and deadline (noon, then 3 p.m, then 4) to shut down the four-day-long Palestine justice encampment.
Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway’s rationale — like that of many administrators — is that these protests, which grow from a long history of campus activism, is disruptive to order.
Morning exams were canceled on the College Avenue campus, ostensibly because of a morning rally on Voorhees Mall, a large open lawn surrounded by academic buildings. This rally, Holloway and New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway said in a letter to students and faculty, “disrupted 28 scheduled exams, impacting more than 1,000 students.”
They have ordered protesters to leave, and will bring in police to force them out if need be — which would mean adding to the more than a thousand protesters had been arrested as of May 1 (https://apnews.com/live/college-protests-palestine-updates).
These crackdowns have turned college campuses into militarized zones, with college presidents and local mayors relyin on the kind of rhetoric common among southern segregationists during the Civil Rights movement. We are hearing, once again, words like unaffiliated, professional protesters, and outside agitators to describe what has obviously been a grassroots movement.
This is part of a larger bipartisan narrative that dismisses students as naive and easily manipulated — a narrative that has a long history. Student movements are always met with a mix of anger, repression, and dismissal, whether they call to end Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War, investment in South Africa, or excessive student loan debt. Today’s students have been working up to the current takeovers since Israel responded to the the murderous Hamas incursion into Southern Israel (a war crime, to be sure) by unleashing an assault that can only be described as ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Students and others have marched in the streets, held rallies, made public statements. They have consistently shown their commitment to the cause of ending the current war, liberating Palestinians and Palestine, and disengaging the United States from the corrupt and violent Israeli government.
The encampments are only the latest iteration of these protests, which have been spreading rapidly from campus to campus even as those in authority seek to tamp them down and to end them. The pretext, as I’ve written elsewhere, is antisemitism — which has reared its ugliness alongside anti-Islamic and anti-Palestinian attacks. This sudden concern for Jewish safety, however, is as disingenuous as it is overstated. The focus is control and maintenance of order for the sake of order, with the ultimate goal being not to disturb a status quo that is in desperate need of being disturbed.
Politicians at the local and national level, university presidents, donors, much of the media have been speaking with a single voice, demeaning students, engaging in hyperbole, and crafting a conspiracy narrative that plays well to mainstream TV and Fox News viewers. Holloway, for instance, wrote that some of the protesters were “individuals not from our community.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams was even more blunt. He (https://apnews.com/live/college-protests-Palestine-updates#0000018f-3427-d21c-a1df-7f7f5cb10000) described the protesters who took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 30 as being “led by individuals who were not affiliated with the university,” who are part of a “movement to radicalize young people.”
Adams is a Democrat. But this kind of condemnation and dismissal of students has been bipartisan. We’ve heard versions of these arguments from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who in a speech at Columbia (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/politics/johnson-columbia-university-president-protests.html?smid=url-share) told protesters to “Go back to class, and stop the nonsense.”
Anti-Defamation League CEO and Director Jonathan Greenblatt has engaged in among the most histrionic and reality-bending of rhetoric, describing Columbia’s protests in a CNN op-ed (https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/opinions/columbia-university-protests-greenblatt/index.html) as “a preview of a future where persecution has been normalized.” This is pure hyperbole and undermines the fight against real antisemitism.
As for the conspiracy theories, The NY Post and (https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-news/george-soros-maoist-fund-columbias-anti-israel-tent-city/) is “reporting” that “George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.”
https://x.com/mattrooneynj/status/1785506118778692063?s=46&t=DjSeiRfiqOhEKzWgfHc3uQ
The accusations, as Philip Bump writes in The Washington Post, are both dishonest and ironic. Soros is “a Holocaust survivor who is a favorite boogeyman of the right thanks to his hefty donations to leftist groups,” Bump writes. Soros has been central to antisemitic rightwing conspiracies in recent years, with “Claims about Soros being the engine behind political or social movements” being "intertwined with antisemitism or explicitly antisemitic, given historical tropes about wealthy Jewish people controlling the world.”
Holloway, Adams, Johnson, ADL — and many others — are refusing to take student protesters seriously. These leaders saycsomevofvthecrightvthings, but the words are hollow. Students, in their world view, lack the capacity to think for themselves and make up their minds about politics and morality. They can only be led, which makes it easy to ignore what they have to say.
But students, as I said, have long been active — and right about so many of these issues. We need to listen.