Fifty-six years to the day after police in riot gear first invaded the Columbia University campus to clear buildings occupied by protesters, hundreds of officers stormed into Hamilton Hall and ended the war-related occupation in Gaza. . Of the 109 people arrested this time, most were students; although Mayor Eric Adams claimed others were “outside agitators” who he said were “dangerously radicalizing our children,” a characterization that fell awkwardly between forgiveness and condescension.
Protests on behalf of the marginalized tend to land on the right side of history, even if the particular cause or grievance may be poorly understood in the present. A Gallup poll conducted in 1963, for example, found that 60 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of the March on Washington, believing it would lead to violence and achieve nothing. Two years later, a plurality of Americans believed that so-called outside agitators – in this case communists – were behind the civil rights movement.
Yet even with this kind of perspective and understanding, it’s natural to want to create a dashboard amid the smoke and fire of the moment. If we view attention as a predominant measure of success, then the Colombia protests, which inspired so many others and made headlines around the world, were triumphant. Yet at the same time, protesters have seen their demands go unheeded – Columbia is not divesting from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation – the campus has been closed to most people, classes and final exams have been closed. were transferred remotely and students were threatened. with expulsion. Beyond that, anyone who chooses to stay at Morningside Heights over the next few weeks will not be relieved of police, as university administrators, who oversee a $14 billion endowment, have asked the police department to stay on campus until mid-May, at taxpayers’ expense.
There comes a point in any movement where publicity can begin to obscure the purpose. “I see very little discussion this week about what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza,” Peter Staley, the famous AIDS activist, told me. He recalled a large ACT UP demonstration in December 1989 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that is still the subject of debate among participants. The idea was to disrupt a mass offered by Cardinal John O’Connor to condemn the Church’s position on condoms. Hundreds of demonstrators invaded the church. In what became one of the most criticized gestures, angering leaders across the political continuum, someone went up to receive communion, crumbled the eucharist and told the cardinal that “opposing sex without risk is murder.” Mr. Staley has long considered the extremism of the whole affair to be a mistake.
“The tactics start to become a story and crowd out the problem, and then the movement needs to look at what it’s doing and not look back,” he said. “As soon as I saw a student hammering windows in Hamilton Hall at the top of the news, I knew the game was up. »
Taken together, the protests on campuses across the country suggest some institutional failures, long in the making — the difficulties that colleges and universities have had in both modeling and instilling values meant to be fundamental to their mission . If one of the primary goals of the elite undergraduate experience is to acquire the ability to persuade brilliantly, to develop strong, complex arguments based on evidence and rigorous investigation, then protests offer another advantage on how the higher education project failed. The protesters’ demands may seem vague, the broader implications of divestment not particularly thought through, the ideas about Israel’s future unclear.
There are echoes in today’s Occupy Wall Street movement, which was driven by the same sense that there was something terribly wrong in the world – an injustice at the heart of capitalism – but without a clear sense of what it was. what needed to be done to remedy it. Observing the current protests while a student at Brown, Cecilia Barron wrote in Point, a journal of political and cultural criticism: “At times the camp seemed united by the thinnest thread of meaning. But maybe that was the point. As a friend told her: “‘The problem is we don’t know anything.’ Or, he corrected: “We don’t know anything except: bad.” The wickedness of the world seemed to sustain the group for the night.
In fact, the outcome at Brown contrasted sharply with that at Columbia, where a small group of university leaders met with student representatives for several days, to no avail. On April 29, the university’s embattled president, Nemat Shafik, wrote a letter to the community explaining that the university would not disengage from Israel but had instead “proposed to develop an accelerated timetable for review of new student proposals by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investment. Before police swept the campus, Stacy Lynch, chief of staff to Gov. Kathy Hochul, and the Rev. Mark Thompson, an activist and minister, came to try to resolve the issues.
“There was an opening to avoid the raid,” Mr. Thompson told me. But it was too late. “We weren’t there at the eleventh hour; we were there in the 59th minute.
While the tents were forcibly dismantled at Columbia, at Brown they were removed by students with whom the administration had successfully engaged in debate and collaboration. On Tuesday, the university agreed to let them formally make their case, presenting their case for divestment before trustees later this month, after which a vote on whether the university would sever its financial ties with Israeli interests would take place next fall. There are many reasons to doubt that the corporation, the school’s highest governing body, actually votes the way activists want. At the very least, students will have every opportunity to present their strongest arguments.
