I asked Martin if he might be willing to put together a guest post related to institutional responses to the protests, and he graciously agreed. This is a smart, thoughtful take, and I am better for having read it. Read it for yourself and see what you think! And then maybe we can have a conversation.
The Country Was in a Mood For Protest
by Martin
If you watch any retrospective on the Vietnam War protest movement, it’ll probably offer up a line like that, as if the protest were gas filling up a space just waiting for a spark to ignite it – that is, the essence of the protest existed before the war did. I worked as an administrator in various roles for nearly 30 years where Muslim/pro-Palestinian vs Jewish/pro-Israeli interactions were a common occcurance. And while I’m now retired and not in a position to interact with students as I previous was, I think some of our previous lessons learned apply well here.
I never had primary responsibility for managing these interactions, but I did provide some of the input on how we would respond, and I did work closely with the students on many occasions. Over that period of time, the interactions would ebb and flow, increasing and decreasing in size and intensity, and in terms of the focus. Sometimes we had encampments, and sometimes not.
Setting some context, the Muslim/Pro-Palestine groups were always characterized as ‘protests’. The Jewish/Pro-Israeli groups were ‘rallies’. Sometimes one group set up first and the other countered, and sometimes the reverse. Sometimes they turned out together. The terminology was a combination of self-selection by the students but also by the press, other students, and so on. If both groups were present it was always a Pro-Palestine protest. There was always a clear ‘these oppose the status quo, and these defend it’ framing even though the actual things being discussed were effectively identical – some combination of how they get treated in the US (not great for either group) and what life is like in Israel/Palestine due to the presence of the other (also not great for either group).
I think the most charitable explanaion for the difference in perception is that Israel is a formally recognized nation and Palestine isn’t and therefore one is more ‘valid’ than the other. But this interaction started not that long after 9/11 so there was an unquestionable bias against the Muslim students at least in the beginning and that may have just stuck.
The ask was straightforward – the Jewish/Pro-Israel students wanted an end to suicide bombings or rocket attacks (whatever the prevailing hostitlity at the time was), and the Muslim/Pro-Palestine students wanted an end to settlements, to checkpoints, (also the prevailing hostility) but also a larger structural ask – a 1 state solution or a 2 state solution, and a smaller structural ask – divestiture. The geopolitical ask is what would get the press or community attention, and the divestiture ask was directed at the administration. Purely local asks don’t get much attention from the press. This is effectively how things looked to the outside, and you can probably recognize all of these elements to some degree in the various events in the news now.
But things are not this simple. There are times when the activities are ‘on’, when they are most performative, and when they are ‘off’, when things are quiet. The quiet times are the more important. Students talk about the events, they plan, but they also talk about other stuff. Increases in student fees, a change in policy, parking availability, all kinds of stuff. This is usually where you find the essence of the demonstration that existed before the spark. This is the grievance that allows the anger about the thing on the banner to surface so quickly and passionately. The emotional tank is full and doesn’t take much to spill over. I’m not the first to observe this:
On my campus this has meant the abrupt shuttering of offices that helped minority students, faculty and staff adjust to university life. Military veterans and first-generation students can still get targeted support, but not African-American students from Houston or Latinx students from the Rio Grande Valley or transgender students from Dallas. In early April, more than 40 staff members who had worked on diversity, mostly from minority backgrounds, were fired.
At the same time, new staff were hired by the conservative centers. They continue to provide comfortable and highly-valued spaces for their students. This dynamic has clearly whitened the University of Texas at Austin, as evidenced by immediate difficulties recruiting and retaining faculty and students of color.
This context is crucial for understanding recent protests on my campus, and others around the country. Many students, staff and faculty, especially those from minority backgrounds, feel that they have suffered setback after setback at the hands of hostile politicians and deferential administrators. They feel that they have less influence over their universities than at any time in recent decades, and they are largely correct.
This is what we learned in the early years of our student demonstrations, after many mistakes. Focusing on the ask, focusing on the performative part doesn’t get you very far – among other reasons, you’re not equipped to address them. We can’t solve the middle east conflict any better than anyone else. But we can work on identifying the other factors that filled up that emotional tank and drain those. Increasing staffing in Financial Aid so students can get help faster. Opening more study space. Addressing dorm crowding. Lowering parking fees. These are all things well in our power to address when you hear them coming up as recurring concerns during that off time, and they do contribute to the intensity and scale of the demonstrations.
Students wanted to be heard, and taken seriously, and you can do that independently of the ask. And it builds trust in the adminsitration so that if you do need to go to the demonstrators about a safety concern, they are more likely to believe that you have an actual safety concern. Instead of asking them to take an encampment down, can we move you over here where you’re still visible but aren’t blocking an evacuation route. We didn’t like the encampment, but the whole point of the encampment was that we didn’t like it. Not asking them to take it down is a soft way of saying ‘we respect your decision’. Trust has to be earned, and re-earned with every generation of students.
The other thing we learned to do was to channel that energy into something academic and trying to get the students to educate each other rather than yell over top of each other. This is a slow process, so it’s hard to do in a situation like this, but universities could have started in those initial demonstrations in October in the event things played out this long. Sending a message that ‘this viewpoint is worth discussing’ helps build that trust. You give them a space they can work which is prominent to student traffic and they can put up photos and written testimonials and pretty much whatever they want (that’s what worked for us – there are lots of ways to do this). You invite them to educate other students to their position – for all of the groups, which channels their energy, focuses their message, but most importantly, keeps them from being cleaved off from the rest of the university community.
It allows the adminsitration to keep pointing the students toward each other in a non-antagstonistic way. It’s talking instead of yelling, teaching instead of berating. It doesn’t help you when emotions have boiled over, but it helps keep them from boiling over, and it builds a culture of respect between the opposing groups because you put these spaces right next to each other. They always read each others’ stuff.
You’re trying to move their perspective from seeing the other student as someone like the Israeli settler who killed my relative or a Hamas fighter who launched a rocket into my uncles house to a fellow student studying economics that has their own trauma and merely disagrees on how to resolve this.
Sometimes they actually agree on how to resolve this, but are angry that various leaders are refusing that path. You’ve done your job when they both decide that the real problem is that its too hard to get parking and they start yelling at you about that – you’ve taken the emotion out of the disagreement and into something constructive. That’s the win. Thats’s something we can actually work on. It doesn’t make the demonstration go away – the students do still care about this thing – but it keeps it constructive.
The difficult thing for the administration is to draw the energy toward them. That’s counterintuitive. They think it makes the university look bad (as if letting things escalate to the point you need to roll the cops looks better) but disagreements on spending or whatever are absolutely normal things and when the university takes the time to listen to the students, more often than not either the university agrees completely with the students (none of us liked the fee increases either – they weren’t our call) or the students had a point the administration never considered, or maybe the students just wanted to be consulted and be part of the decision and not treated as if they had nothing to contribute despite the fact that they’re the customer and the one paying.
The point is, when the energy is directed at the administration and not other students, it’s actionable – you can get somewhere. When it’s all on Israel and Gaza, and lines get drawn up, you have no pressure valve to open there, and emotions are too high to discover the ones that you can open. Basically, you blew it, hope to hell you can avoid rolling the cops.
The final component of this is the interaction between the campus and the community. Universities have a ton of tools to handle student disciplinary problems with a focus on limting long-term damage to the student. Some of this is based in liberal ideas of reform and education and some of it is based on class protection.
It’s one thing to shield a student from a misdemeanor possession charge when they light up in the dorm, it’s another thing altogether to shield a student from a rape charge. (This is a whole other discussion.) But the point is that you have to say out loud to everyone, regularly, that those tools only work for students. There are different tools for faculty and adminstrators – normal employment stuff. And for the general public there is only the police.
The act of last resort for student behavior is the act of first resort for the public. You have to remind people of this constantly because they forget. You tell the students ‘hey, if you have someone from outside the community here and there’s a problem – we have to call the cops, campus policy doesn’t apply to them, so if you don’t want the cops, ask them to leave or tell us you have someone you don’t want and we’ll have them removed’. I, not a cop, could (at times) discipline students. But I’m just an employee to the public.
You have to remind administrators of this as well – if you don’t let the staff work this problem (basically, pay to have enough staff to work this problem) and trust the staff to work this problem, then it will get ignored until it grows to a police matter. This is an easier problem on some campuses than others. Ours was pretty easy and a lot of our success simply may not have been possible on more urban campuses (or at least with our approach).
When we had demonstrations – which was very often – we had staff observing, and the staff directed the cops, who were more often than not there. Over time the students came to understand the dynamic – the cops weren’t there because the adminsitration didn’t trust them, they were there to remove outsiders and allow the students to do their thing. I’m not sure the cops every fully internalized that dynamic, but they did respect the staff decisions. The goal was to make sure there was never a student/cop interaction without staff there and in charge – and that was very rare, and the goal was to keep it very rare.
The takeaway here is that the student demonstrations are about Israel/Gaza, but not just about that. The student community is in a mood for protest. We’ve been throwing a lot of oil soaked rags into this box since 2015 kind of hoping it wouldn’t ignite, and now it has. The instinct of the media is to frame this alongside the geopolitical conflict as Americans understand it, which is of a Muslim/Jewish clash – not a Palestine/Israel clash – and not a grassroots vs institutional power clash. Basically all student demonstration movements are grassroots vs institutional power clashes, and as a result they will reliably align on the grassroots side as they perceive it. It’s anyone’s guess why conservatives always shit on students.
I’ve been talking about USC in the comments as an example here, so I’ll do so again. 3 weeks ago USC had, best as I can tell, no active student demonstrations on the middle east conflict. But their administrative process has them choose a valedictorian before commencement, that student gets to give a speech and 3 weeks ago that happened. And the administration immediately cancelled the student speech citing safety concerns before the student even had a chance to pick a topic – presumably because the student (born in California) was Muslim, possibly of Palestinian ancestry, and minored in Resistance to Genocide, an academic program that USC offers, mind you, and had said some spicy but not over the line things on social media. Immediately, the campus got pro-Palestine demonstrations. Were those actually pro-Palestine demonstrations? Yes, but they were just as much student solidarity demonstrations – at least, the cancellation of the speech is what really filled up the emotional tank for the students because the administration unilaterally cancelled the students’ own speaker.
I’m sure the demonstrators were genuinely supportive of Palestine, but they were also backing up the valedictorian’s position for Palestine – not leaving her out there to hang alone, and also responding to the thing that USC signaled they were afraid of (for whatever reason) – that pro-Palestinian message.
Whatever message that student might have put out in her commencement address (again, she hadn’t yet chosen a topic) they were going to get out even louder now. So USC cancels all speakers for commencement, citing safety, and the demonstrations grow in size and intensity. So USC cancels the commencement (reminder: almost none of these students has a high school commencement 4 years before due to Covid) and now USC has an encampment, and in the last week roughly 100 people were arrested when the cops were called in. So much for avoiding the safety issues.
None of these escalations were related to events in the middle east.
All of these escalations were in response to actions by the administration. The flag may say Palestine on it, but these demonstrations are as much if not more about how USC students are treated by the USC administration.
Brown University is a different example. Similar to the other Ivies, there is a demonstration movement there, including a pro-Palestine encampment. Recently the students reached an agreement that the fauclty would vote on whether to divest from investments in Israeli companies and some defense manufacturers, and the camp came down. Did the students get what they wanted? Per the media narrative, no – the conflict in the middle east continues. Per the more nuanced narrative of the divestment, again, no. The students could have waited until the vote had taken place and then only disbanded the camp if the faculty voted to divest and continued their pressure if they didn’t. All the students actually got was a promise for a vote, with no assurance of the outcome. What they got was the administration listening to them, and taking their concerns seriously. Turns out that was enough – a vote. Costs nothing. It’s the only university I’ve see so far offer even that much.
Sometimes things enter a different phase. In 1970 four students demonstrating against the expansion of the war into Cambodia were shot and killed at Kent State. Almost immediately millions of students around the country turned out in demonstrations. They were still called anti-war demonstrations, even though they were clearly about the rights of students to express unpopular positions without getting killed by their own government. It was still a local issue (whether my university would protect me from the National Guard) but it was driven by national events.
That’s the phase we’re entering now. That’s why encampments all over the country have sprouted up just in the last few days even on previously quiet campuses. The response has been predictably poor, even at my institution which has been losing the plot for a while now.
Every campus is a community with its own unique issues. The student makeup varies wildly. Campus culture varies wildly. The relationship with the community varies. The tools available to deal with issues vary. How each campus manages this will need to differ – by a lot. But even if there’s an overarching theme to the demonstrations, there are always local issues under the surface that drive this and give it the shape it has. Those issues are what sets the mood, and usually we can’t see them from here. Keep these things in mind when consuming stories about the demonstrations, about what narrative is being told, and about whose voices we get to hear. Give thought to whether the narrative makes sense given the actual precipitating actions.
NA
Thank you for this post
Tony Jay
Always a pleasure reading your thoughts, Martin. Especially on this issue.
Cacti
They’re spreading globally. Now in South America, Europe, and Australia also.
Martin
So just in the last 24 hours, protests broken up by police at UCLA (which I live-blogged a bit last night), University of New Hampshire, UT Dallas, and Portland State. Faculty at GW are acting as a barrier between police and students.
Last nights UCLA actions were about as gentle as police interventions get, but just the fact that it happened will continue to ramp up activity at other campuses. They were at least smart to let the students outside the encampment be. They had a very specific charge there.
Geminid
@Martin: I’m wondering about the UCLA students who did not take part in the protests. Do you have a sense of how they regard the protests and the police action this morning?
Omnes Omnibus
This is probably a good place to post this open letter from a professor at IU to the protestors his university. I think it works as a companion piece to what Martin wrote.
Martin
Also, in addition to Brown, Northwestern has made an agreement with students. Some visiting professor positions for Palestinian faculty, a handful of scholarship and reinstating a program where students had an opportunity to provide input on institutional investments. Again, the university didn’t really provide a lot to the students toward their demands.
Cacti
@Omnes Omnibus: Do you also tone police the IDF war criminals, or just the ones protesting their activities?
God you’re a boot licking toad.
WaterGirl
@Cacti: Your comment to another person last night referencing their sister and a sexual reference is putting you in a time out until Cole can make a decision.
Feel free to send me an email message if there is some sort of explanation.
edit: Cole has given you a 3-day timeout for that comment.
Cacti
@WaterGirl: What a surprise. Keep toeing that Zionist line.
TO CACTI from WG
@Cacti: I don’t think you have crossed a line in your I-P comments since you Cole talked, so this isn’t about that.
Why the hell would you make a sexual comment toward another commenters sister? No more rape comments, oblique or otherwise, directed at other people.
Zzyzx
While I don’t care that much about rhetoric, the one thing that these protests have done that has to be stopped is that they’ve claimed parts of campus as their own personal property where they get to decide who can cross it and who (almost always Jews who aren’t their designated “good Jews”) can’t. That crosses a line that really bothers me, especially in UCLA where they were blocking the path to the library.
HinTN
Pie has been applied. I simply cannot understand that level of anger. Disagree? Yes! Insult? No!
dnfree
@WaterGirl: Cacti certainly seems prickly.
JaySinWA
Did you mean to type “now retired”?
An interesting perspective as always. Thank you and Watergirl for front paging it.
DEBG
@Martin: Very interesting. I was at Northwestern in the early 80s when students wanted South African divestment. I don’t remember the admin doing anything to lower the temperature–they seemed to keep ratcheting things up. But I could well be mis-remembering and I wasn’t involved in the protests.
Thanks for your thoughtful piece.
Martin
@Geminid: It appears that 5%-10% of the students at UCLA are participating, which indicates a pretty high degree of support at the campus. Generally the students have a better sense of those underlying grievances because they are present and share them. So they are understanding of students wanting to demonstrate, and so on. They may object to specifics – disrupting classes, the spray paint of Royce Hall, etc. but they generally don’t oppose the overall effort (this includes their views toward the counterprotestors). Students tend to have a lot of solidarity with each other.
As this grows into more of a ‘Biden/the University don’t care what young people think’ kind of movement, that solidarity grows because it’s less about the thing on the flags and more about who gets to have a say. This is why it’s growing across campuses – it’s becoming less about the Middle East conflict and more about broader generational and institutional power within the US.
Biden’s messaging here is awful. This is the space where Kamala is a much more effective communicator. I didn’t mention Biden above because this hadn’t really turned into a movement that required much White House input. But that’s changed in the last day.
Martin
@JaySinWA: Yes, now retired.
Omnes Omnibus
@DEBG: At the risk of being a couple of olds reminiscing about the good old days, the anti-apartheid protests at my alma mater were trouble free. In large part because no one in the administration took any steps to try to stop them. Our university president actual came out and talked to the protesters about the university’s stance. We were treated as adults who were members of the community and deserved to be taken seriously. IOW, very much what Martin was talking about.
WaterGirl
@dnfree: Ha!
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: @Martin: Totally my fault! I caught it, asked Martin, we agreed I would fix it, and then crickets from me.
WaterGirl
@Zzyzx: Yes, threatening other students isn’t part of the protest handbook.
Albatrossity
Thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Needs to be shared widely.
Thanks for this. and thanks to WaterGirl for inviting and encouraging this excellent assessment.
theturtlemoves
The Portland State thing I kind of lost all sympathy for the students when they talked about it on the local news down here in Eugene last night. They read off all the things PSU had agreed to as part of the negotiations and it took a couple minutes to get through it. It included amnesty for all the protestors and just a laundry list of progressive concessions and…. it was turned down. So, if you can’t take yes for an answer, then I guess the PPB gets called in so that other people can use the freaking library.
Omnes Omnibus
@Zzyzx: Welcome fellow bootlicking toad.
Martin
@Zzyzx: Claiming part of the campus is the whole point of the effort – to reclaim their place as peers in the institution – and if the institution won’t give that to them in speech or votes or other kinds of influence, they will take it in land for now.
My understanding is that the library was always accessible, the students made a point to not block that, but that’s a different thing than feeling comfortable accessing it – and surely there were students that felt they couldn’t go there. It’s understandable that the administration felt the need to take the encampment down for just these reasons – this is too in the way for the functioning of the university. I don’t know if the administration made efforts in offering up a better place for the encampment (we had done that pretty successfully) or if they had if the students rejected it. These things are now moving so fast that if the administration isn’t on it and working the situation hard, it reaches a point that parties can’t work with each other any more. After Tuesday night, there was no trust left.
JWR
Thanks for this, Martin. Very helpful for me, and I hope for others. But there was a discussion yesterday about use of the term “anti-Semitism”, and so I thought that maybe this would fit here.
Also, I thought Biden’s speech this morning was not helpful. It was too strident. He should have left it to Harris and her speech writing team.
Quiltingfool
Thank you, Martin. Your essay emphasizes the necessity of administration providing opportunities for student input to help solve problems that are important to students.
As a former teacher in a public school, asking students what works for them is very useful. 8th graders can come up with crazy things, but there are some good ideas, too. And when one of their ideas is implemented, the buy-in is there. All of us like to feel acknowledged and respected; very empowering.
schrodingers_cat
@Zzyzx: That’s troubling.
Martin
@WaterGirl: Correct. That’s where you want to draw that energy toward the administration. I see a lot of places resisting doing that, and I see a lot of situation where you probably can’t do that fast enough even if you’re doing everything you can.
Yutsano
U$C had one job: to vet the valedictorian BUT STILL GIVE HER AN OPPORTUNITY TO SPEAK!!!! Her speech would have been reviewed before it was allowed because every college does that. Now U$C looks like a bunch of frightened ninnies who also decided to cancel all the other commencement speeches because reasons*. Now it’s a global movement and the colleges are going to have a lot of trouble getting control back. I’m proud of the kids here/..
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Omnes Omnibus: this! we had an anti-apartheid “bantustan” mock village on campus when I was in school in the 80’s. The admin did nothing about it, the people in the camp had lots of info about what was going on in South Africa at the time (the world wide web just linked high-energy physics documents in those days!), everyone was encouraged to hang out there and learn about South Africa’s policies, and after graduation the school took advantage of a moment when the place was empty to throw everything away.
BTW in those days Marvel published a comic in which Doctor Doom, as a temporary Emperor of the World, ends apartheid in South Africa. After the Marvel heroes defeat him, we see South Africans throwing Black people out of schools and businesses and asking each other, “What were we thinking? how did we let that happen?”
pretty sure that particular comic is not going to be in the MCU anytime soon….
eclare
@WaterGirl:
Thank you. That was shocking.
Baud
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Holy crap.
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus:
Same. I remember a shanty town on a lawn at UT, but it was very small, and it did not block anyone’s path. Best I remember the admin just ignored it.
different-church-lady
Thank you a thousand times for the most thoughtful and clear take I’ve seen on this.
Gretchen
Thank you, Martin. This will be worth coming back to in the coming days.
eclare
Great essay, thank you Martin.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
This was an excellent post – thanks Martin!
Omnes Omnibus
@eclare: Yes, the schools that are having problems are having those problems because the administration has chosen that path.
Martin
@JWR: I won’t quibble with Congress’ effort here except to note that whatever definition they vote to adopt, the GOP will absolutely abuse it, because it’s what they do for everything, and they know they’ll never be held accountable there.
Having an agreed definition is also not particularly helpful, not really. You can’t write policy that would navigate the Stanford Mein Kampf controversy. I had a course in college on taboo writing – the whole point of which was to teach students how to navigate writing for realism, which might include hate speech and other taboo words and topics, in a way that is not harmful to the audience. You can’t teach that course without violating the speech rules. Everything in education requires context, which is the very first thing everyone seeks to strip away if for no other reason than it takes time and energy to establish context. And definitions kind of invite people to be creative in how they express hate speech because that bright line cuts both ways – I can’t say it, but you also can’t punish me for saying the thing right next to it. I’m allowed to dogwhistle my ass off.
Will note here Congress made no such effort to define other forms of hate speech. Their concerns are quite narrow. Those concerns will be noted by the students.
Yutsano
@Martin: Let me get my thanks as well here Martin.
H.E.Wolf
Thank you Martin. Very illuminating, and much appreciated.
Zzyzx
@Martin: Yeah but my question is if at any point the desires of the 300 occupying a part of Columbia get outweighed by the other 30,000+ students.
A rally or a protest I can understand but a semi permanent land grab feels different to me.
But obviously, I’m not in favor of what the cops are doing either so it’s me just musing more than having answers.
Baud
Yes, thanks Martin.
Zzyzx
@theturtlemoves:
My “favorite” one was the University of British Columbia that not only didn’t have demands, but one of their core principles was that they would not negotiate with the administration at all. What are you supposed to do with that and how does it help out Gaza?
JML
I actually have this Graphic Novel, it’s called “Emperor Doom” and in order to take over the world like this it requires Doom to use some epic-level mind control (via the Purple Man, who was the Big Bad (but not purple) in season 1 of Jessica Jones). It’s pretty good Avengers stuff, actually, by David Michelinie and Bob Hall.
Very good commentary from Martin and explanation. We’ve only had one protest on my campus; it was relatively small. No police, student run with student participants. It sparked some conversation and kinda faded away. Student Affairs staff were highly present and were clearly calling the shots with campus security. Almost no faculty participation.
But we’re also not located in or adjacent to a large urban area (city we’re in is only about 50K) so it’s more inconvenient for people to join.
Zzyzx
@Martin: I think the House was engaged in bullshit, using a feigned concern for antisemitism to let them score rhetorical points against people they dislike.
The flip is that I spent most of last night explaining to people that Congress didn’t outlaw criticizing Israel.
The Thin Black Duke
Thank you, Martin.
WaterGirl
@eclare: We should also thank the commenter who brought it to my attention.
We can’t fix what we don’t know about.
Martin
@theturtlemoves: Again, hard to say what the local issues are. For all we know the underlying grievance was something the university did 2 months ago that they should know students are upset about and weren’t willing to address. There’s a whole category of relationship issues where one partner is annoyed that they do x, y, and z for their partner and don’t get the thing in return they want, when the partner never asked for x, y, and z. They wanted q, and q is never even acknowledged or attempted.
Maybe the students are just being assholes on this one – it certainly happens. But like I’ve mentioned in comments elsewhere, until Cal Poly Humbolt address their student housing problem, they can make all kinds off offers including a personal delegation to the Knesset with their demands and get nowhere. Everyone knows housing is the real problem there. Even if the students don’t ask for it, the university has to offer it because that would show they listened when it mattered.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus:
Was “admonition” an autocorrect? If so, I can fix it.
different-church-lady
To me it feels like all we have now is obstinance versus obstinance. The principles behind the protests have been forgotten and it’s now just a war of who yields first. Incredibly stupid from both sides.
WaterGirl
@Zzyzx: The question itself is the answer. As you are no doubt aware.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Yes please.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
So completely fitting given the underlying subject.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: what messaging has Biden been doing that’s crummy, and what would be more effective?
I’d like to see him get some great advisory help on this.
Are you in a position to help him with it, or influence folks who could? That would be a useful goal.
I want to help him win the next term in the White House. If his usual pr and spin dr team aren’t cutting it, I sure hope something happens to help him adjust, and improve his messaging. This election is important. (I sound so calm)
MinuteMan
@Zzyzx:
How would they know that a given person was a Jew of any sort let alone a “good” Jew?
different-church-lady
@Baud: Yes, it’s like they’re creating a scale model of the I/P conflict.
Suzanne
This was really insightful. Thanks, Martin.
eclare
@WaterGirl:
I will keep that in mind for the future.
different-church-lady
@MinuteMan: You just know. /s
Yutsano
OT: California has some good watershed news. For once.
Omnes Omnibus
@MinuteMan: Wearing a kippeh and/or Star of David. Hillel sweatshirt. Things like that.
Martin
@Yutsano: Yep. I ran the commencement speaker selection and prep program out of my office. Not only did we never have a problem with the content of a speech, we never had a student that wanted the speech to be a problem. They knew it was supposed to be a happy event for the students and their families. It’s supposed to be uplifting. That’s all they ever wanted it to be.
sab
I am underwhelmed by Biden’s response.
I am a generation later. High school in the late 1970s. My high school had a lot of Jewish kids, a lot of Greek kids and a lot of Arabic kids. The latter two came over from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Arab kids pretty much kept their heads down and their mouths shut for fear of the Jewish kids, which twenty years after the holocaust was understandable.
We are no longer twenty years after the holocaust.
sab
@sab: The Jewish kids I knew in high school wouldn’t stand for this and they haven’t. But the MSM scrolls through its tiny contact list.
geg6
The University of Pittsburgh did exactly the same thing as Brown. The whole thing ended quietly and peacefully. The students, the administration and the University Police and Pittsburgh Police (called in when an outside actor caused a problem) all spent days talking and negotiating. There was one small dust up, when some of the demonstrators tried to move the student’s tent city from the lawn of the Student Union building across the street to the Cathedral of Learning, which would have impeded students from going to class. Two people were arrested, one a student and one not a student. That was it. It looked very much like the tent city we had when I was a student there and we also had a protest (that lasted months and months) against South African apartheid, Ronald Fucking Reagan and demanding divestment from South African investments. I slept on that lawn several nights while a student and joined in between classes. The biggest difference is that no one in university administration had two words to say to us students. Looks like someone at Pitt actually may have learned a lesson from the past.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: I am not really sure what point you are making here.
JustRuss
I think part of the issue at universities is the “run it like a business” mentality that seems to be taking over. I’ve talked to a number of people at the U I work at who are pretty high on the food chain but they’re treated like crap, and they’ve had enough. And they used to love their jobs. But more and more it seems like the top dogs view consensus and soliciting feedback as weakness, so we get top-down, poorly thought out directives. And when students act up their first instinct is to show them who’s boss.
Yutsano
@Martin: It really irritates me that we don’t get to hear her perspective. Every interview I heard with her has her being uplifting and positive.
I had a third sentence I was going to write there but it was definitely too broad of a brush of a statement.
EDIT: so close…
Martin
@eclare: You don’t want to ignore it either, but you kind of want to give that impression. We’d go out and talk to the students and uncover other issues. I said in a previous comment it was a good opportunity to identify homeless students and intervene to find them housing. We’d make sure they were eating and taking care of themselves, weren’t struggling in the cold or rain. All very low key. It’s important to maintain good relationships with students. I couldn’t possibly know all of them but there were usually ~1000 who knew me pretty well – ‘that’s the guy who helped me with x, he’s okay’. But in the last few years the space for me to do that was getting closed off, which was a contributing factor to my retirement. It’s why I said that my institution was losing the plot. I’m trying to see if I can get all of that idea into words for another guest post.
HumboldtBlue
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s excellent. Thank you.
sab
@sab: Just saying the Jewish kids I knew in high school are very much NOT on board with what ADL is doing to gin up support. What Israel is doing in Gaza is appalling. To support it is to label yourself and your supporters monsters.
sab
@sab: See me at 64 and 71.
eclare
@Martin:
That all makes sense. I wasn’t involved in the apartheid protests, so maybe things went on that I was not privy to. And also, the shanty town was on a huge lawn and didn’t block anyone. Maybe if it had been on a more central area the admin would have moved, I don’t know.
https://volopedia.lib.utk.edu/entries/shantytown-at-the-humanities-building-1989/
I googled, and this is the summary that I found. Fellow students come off bad. I did not remember that, but it doesn’t surprise me.
HumboldtBlue
Chip Daniels
This is a very thoughtful and insightful commentary. The central post, that there is an underlying sense of grievance and frustration seems apt to me.
The level of passion about Gaza (as opposed to say, Ukraine), its breadth and intensity has surprised me.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
This post prompted me to actually look at what’s happening here.
There’s an encampment on the Auraria campus downtown, entering 2nd week. A week ago, the riot police were called in, arrested 44 people, half of whom were students. Optics weren’t great given DPD’s very problematic, historic relationship with residents, ie., black and brown folks. Black folks here have lived DPD’s well-deserved reputation for shoot first and warn the target about the shotactions for decades but now that’s it’s college kids, well, the university powers-that-be backtracked.
There’s no public indication that what little communication that’s happened between students and various universities that are represented on the Auraria campus have focused on any of the not-speficially-related-to-the-subject-of-the-protests issues:
https://kdvr.com/news/local/auraria-protestors-clarify-demands-seek-transparency-on-schools-investments/
Gloria DryGarden
Thank you, Martin.
Beautiful writing, clear, covers so much ground. I love your smooth transitions and word choices. (is this kind of clear writing easy for you? Did it take long to edit?)
And the calm clarity about the issues and conflicts on campus, what police are for, was so helpful for me to understand.
So excellent and helpful that I want Everyone to read it. I’d like to see it on Time magazine, or something reputable that one finds at the end cap by the grocery checkout.
Also, your clarity on how colleges could, or have, dealt with these situations and the underlying issues, is a gem. Is there a pan- colleges-admin newsletter where this could get out? Apparently a bunch of colleges could use your calm wisdom, and could consult w you.
Will you query this article over to a few publishers w widespread distribution and/or a huge readership?
As someone above said:
WaterGirl
@Zzyzx: Performative is the word to describe Republican actions in the House.
Martin
@Zzyzx: Oh sure. But that’s why the 300 occupying students don’t really get anything. They get a vote. Or they get funding for a program which benefits the whole community. It’s not like you’re going to buy them a car, you’re going to give all 30,000 something.
I didn’t really like Northwesterns offer, because if I’m a Jewish student I’m like ‘hey, where’s my scholarship’, unless they already have some. That catered too much to the 300.
And oftentimes these things are catalysts for something a bit bigger. I’d argue the cycle is ‘1) administration starts to ignore students, 2) students kick the administration in the nuts, 3) administration screams in pain and starts paying more attention to the students, 4) go back to 1’. So you likely will see some increased effort to engage with students for a while even after this dies down. The students know how this works. The 30,000 know what the 300 is doing here.
John S.
Being a non-religious Jew, it’s very difficult to hear many other Jews speaking about this situation. The way they describe Palestinians as animals or less than human, and posit that the only real solution is total eradication of terrorists (and pretty much all Palestinians are terrorists to them).
If you substituted “Jew” for “Palestinian” in some of their screeds, I’m not sure it would sound any different than Germans talking about the Jews in the 1930s.
That’s a very painful realization to arrive at.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Good I guess, but not clear why that’s progress, since they’ve been talking but not agreeing to anything for a while now.
ETA: I clicked through and the article provides more details. 🤞
Gloria DryGarden
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I didn’t even see this about Denver. Google shows me a few top news things, but not much on this. Jeepers. And I know someone who worked with Eli McLain, and have friends who’ve been profiled here. I’ve been to classes down at auraria. This is way too close to home.
tempted to print martins post and run around campus to different admin offices, pass it out as leaflets in admin offices. Probably violates copyright laws, so I won’t. But they need the advice they could glean from it. I wonder if I know anybody…
@Martin: can I copy paste your excellent post into an email? I don’t want to interfere w you getting paid a bunch of money from a big mag for this.
Martin
@different-church-lady: You’re now getting bigger dynamics. Politics got injected by the GOP, and now governors and the president is talking. That shrinks the space we can operate in because you don’t want to be defying your allies. That’s what I was curious about with the UCLA activities last night – how they might have been shaped by Newsom (for good or bad).
And that also shrinks the space for students because if they felt the administration was starting to listen to them, Biden kind of rolled in here saying ‘well, I’m not’. And if it were Trump they wouldn’t really change their stance because they don’t expect him to, but they do expect Biden too. Again, don’t defy your allies.
Aziz, light!
I am a student, as a senior auditor, at Portland State University. I’ve taken at least one class a term for seven years. The damage to our library is sickening to those of us who use it. For four days the administration tried the non-escalation path, leaving the library occupiers alone with a promise not to impose any punishment whatsoever if they left voluntarily, and with no police action (which finally came this morning). But in Portland, as in the summer of 2020, any protest movement here is highjacked by our local anarchists, whose only goal is to smash stuff, spray paint the hell out of it, loot, and fight the cops when they show. That accounts for the worst of the vandalism in the library, and this mindless property destruction has now predictably spread to other campus locations and to the downtown core and will likely continue all summer. What retailers remain there will soon be boarded up with plywood again. Some of the students in the library tried to stop the non-student vandals, but they didn’t try hard enough and many joined in the fun, as the content of their painted slogans shows. If student protestors cannot find ways to counter the anarchists and police what happens during a campus takeover, the end result is to make the population at large hate both them and their movement. Seems counterproductive. One slogan painted on a wall in very large red letters to demonstrate the peacefulness of the protest: “Property damage is not violence.”
As a college freshman in 1970 at Washington University in St. Louis, I joined an antiwar march that stormed our library and occupied it all night. Any form of vandalism or theft was unthinkable to us, and there was none. Times change.
sab
OT My dad died and we have a hereditary grave plot. Newby at the cemetary didn’t understand this. Yesterdsy I went out to sign off papers. Today I had to do another visit to replant the red flag in Dad’s gravesite that had already been implanted. Didn’t make me do it for Mom. These people are nuts, and as a griever I am angry.
Also too my brother’s company sent us a huge, probably toxic to cats, utterly beautiful and outrageously expensive flower bunch. All I can think is this is toxic to cats. Gorgeous, but only chipmunks will see it.
Put on our patio porch. Hope it lasts a while because it is beyond gorgeous.
Kay
@Yutsano:
They are ninnies. We have a ninny problem. They’re afraid of everything.
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: His expression that the protests don’t change his stance on Israel, in very terse terms. Like, he’s actually quite good at giving nuanced statements around policy, and at the very least he hasn’t done that _yet_ here. He should have opened with it, though. It came off as defiant – as if he didn’t need to answer to his voters, which as I’ve argued above is the real undercurrent to this whole movement that students don’t feel heard.
They don’t need my advice. Harris and Jean-Pierre know what do to. Just let them do it.
Martin
@JustRuss: Yeah, I have thoughts here.
Chris
@Martin:
Honestly, it’s been pretty clear since day one that Biden is a product of the pre-this-war bipartisan consensus, that there’s no such thing as being pro-Israel, there’s especially no such thing as as liberal being pro-Israel, a liberal has to virtue-signal their pro-Israeliness twenty times harder than anyone else, and the pro-Palestine side of the argument doesn’t exist as anything but a punching bag.
Which was excusable up to the first few weeks after 10/7, but at this point it’s been clear for months that things aren’t that simple anymore, and he’s simply refusing to face it.
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: It took a while only because I sometimes struggle to find the central thought. Was easier when I wrote every day. Retirement, and all.
The problem is that universities already know this. At least, there are always staff or faculty that do. The problem it cuts across other priorities at the institution and in time can cut against the very culture of the institution. I’m trying to pull together another post on that.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: ok, good. Sounds like he needed to do the active listening part first, and include his nuanced policy info, rather than simply upholding his stance.
Hope Jean Pierre and Harris help him course correct. Glad you think he’s in good hands there. Maybe he’ll come out with a better speech soon.
Lapassionara
Thank you for taking the time to write this thoughtful essay. When I was in a small managerial role at my workplace, I had the following motto: Treat your employees like they are adults and they will (mostly) act like adults; treat them like children, and they will act like children. Figuring out the way to treat them as adults was not always obvious or easy, but it was important to try.
This is why Biden’s statement was just so off-putting. I don’t know who advised him to take that approach, but it was not good. I am hoping someone gets his attention and changes his focus.
Martin
@John S.: There is plenty of hate speech to go around on these topics. I will also note that when you see these bigger events, almost all of that hate speech will come from non-students. That’s why keeping the students and community separated is important because to someone who wants to engage in hate speech, joining that crowd gives them the cover they need, so outsiders are really, really likely to be bad actors.
theturtlemoves
@Aziz, light!:
Yeah, I kind of assumed it was the local black bloc jackasses that might have been involved with that up there. My daughter starts grad school at PSU this fall, although attending at the Eugene campus, so I have a somewhat personal connection to this one. And to Martin’s point, some of the actual students may have had issues beyond just the I/P conflict but my lord, that list of concessions from the administration was insane. I mean, it was damn near sending someone to the Knesset to lobby on behalf of the students of PSU and they still refused. Which does point to the anarchist dipshits that take over every protest in Portland and turn it into a clusterfuck. Need to just send those folks and the Patriot Prayer folks out to somewhere near Burns and let them fight it out.
Chris
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Doom has got to be one of Marvel’s best villains. Underneath all the posturing and scenery-chewing, he’s basically the person Magneto wants to be when he grows up. A member of an oppressed group who rose to the status of supreme dictator, except his dictatorship’s actually successful and enduring. While Magneto can’t even get his own people to rally around him and is constantly being thwarted by other mutant factions, Doom runs Latveria so well that not only does he have no meaningful domestic opposition, even his foreign opponents are usually loath to undermine him because the alternatives are invariably worse.
Oh, the comics are often way more radical than the movie universes based on them.
It always irritated me that William Stryker, a televangelist that Chris Claremont created in the 1980s to be the Marvel Universe’s stand-in for the religious right, was reinvented for the movies as the much more generic military scientist he’s now known as.
brantl
@WaterGirl: Hpw about getting him/her a brain transplant?
Burnspbesq
There’s a predetermined narrative around these events, and facts that don’t fit that narrative don’t get reported.
If, for example, you don’t read one highly specialized constitutional law blog (Balkinization), you probably wouldn’t know that there were enough Jewish students in the pro-palestinian encampment at UCLA to hold a seder on the first night of Passover.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
This has probably been answered, but keep in mind that UCLA is pretty big. We’re talking maybe 32,000 undergraduates and a very large non resident student population.
Also, in addition to student views, some professors hung a big banner noting faculty and staff support for the protests.
In the most recent actions local reporters on the scene tried to interview a group that were opposing the pro Palestine students. They specifically asked if these people were students, and got a number of “No comment” responses. I’m not sure what the national coverage of this protest looks like.
AM in NC
@Martin: I am a person who got the academic training but ended up not going the academia route. One thing I miss from that world is the understanding of complexity and nuance – that the world isn’t often easily broken down into black and white.
Doesn’t make for good sound bites, but it’s REALITY.
Thank you for this nuanced essay. Seems to be a lot of truth here, and it is so disappointing to see university administrators foul the bed so often. Come on, smart people!
WaterGirl
@John S.: Yes to everything you wrote. Except that I am not Jewish.
It boggles the mind. Just like kids who are abused often grow up to be abusers. Or women who have been abused are often drawn to men.
It’s not that anyone wants to be hurt, or be abuse, or be sexually abused. The explanation is that they are drawn to familiarity, something that’s familiar to them, without recognizing it or understanding why.
I imagine humans are hard-wired to be drawn to the familiar, surely that instinct is part of what helps keep us safe? Except when it doesn’t.
Mind-boggling to see Israel (as a country) behaving in this way.
We somehow have to separate Jewish people, and the Jewish government, the country of Israel, and Zionism – from each other.
Tony Jay
@Burnspbesq:
Is that the pro-Palestinian encampment that was attacked the night before last by a mob of a few hundred pro-Israel thugs screaming about inflicting a ‘Second Nakba’ on their opponents while campus security stood by watching? The attack that I really haven’t seen even mentioned much anywhere, never mind discussed or condemned?
That silence, frankly, astonishes me. I’d have thought people would have been all over it, but instead, crickets. So much so that I’m half convinced I must have imagined reading about it.
AM in NC
@JustRuss: Well our University System is now run out of our gerrymandered to hell and back state legislature by right wing freaks.
Run UNC like a business, indeed. A rightwing, right-to-work, only purpose is profit business. The attacks have been insane. Half of the GOP legislators couldn’t get into UNC and despise the “elitists in Chapel Hill” because of that fact. And the other half know that science, critical inquiry, and making students broad-minded are the death-knell to conservative politics, so they hate UNC for educating students.
It’s a real problem.
Burnspbesq
@Tony Jay:
The very same.
John S.
@Martin: That makes perfect sense to me. I abhor hate speech in all forms, but even worse is the moral relativism that allows people who should know better engage in hate speech and try to get a free pass for it.
wjca
Perhaps because, if you add up the total students (or faculty) who have Jewish or Arab/Palestinian backgrounds, it’s far larger than the number with Russian and Ukrainian backgrounds. Gaza simply hits close to home for more people.
John S.
@WaterGirl:
I agree, but these things have all become so wrapped up in each other, who would know even where to begin.
It’s the ultimate Gordian knot, but there isn’t a sword sharp enough to cut it.
brantl
@brantl: How, not hpw.
Another Scott
Thanks very much for your thoughtful post on this topic. It’s great to see someone’s deep thoughts about how educational institutions should act and how they should treat students expressions of dissent.
As others have said, the whole point of an educational institution is to think deeply and to allow staff and students to think deeply. Some of those thoughts will challenge the status-quo. Some of those arguments will be heated and uncomfortable. If you don’t let that happen, there cannot be any progress.
People don’t like change, but change is essential.
Cheers,
Scott.
JaneE
As a USC graduate, I was shocked and appalled that the administration would cancel a valedictorians speech without even seeing the topic. I would like to think that the administration when I was there would have done better.
What I heard the administration say is that Muslims are not allowed to speak or hold opinions on the USC campus because that would incite violence. Whether against her or Muslims or Jews was not specified, presumably any or all. I have to find that very unlikely.
Even if she gave a rousing pro-Hamas speech, which is about the worst thing she could have done and not very likely, a commencement is not the place to erupt in violence. Too many family and friends. Boos maybe. Maybe I am out of touch.
Whatever protests violent or peaceful, the administration is the direct cause of them happening at USC. The stupidity of the administration is incompatible with an institution of higher learning. Even for a conservative private institution like USC, that was bad on all counts.
JML
@Martin: one of the other problems is Student Affairs (which is where you have the people who are both close with the students on a day-to-day living perspective and are the ones who deal with conduct, activities, student groups, residential life, etc) is frequently underfunded and understaffed, and one the first areas to get cut during any kind of budget problem.
so when you have protests and so forth like this, you don’t have enough people who have worked with students in these areas, built broader lines of trust and respect, and have the actual training to work through this with them.
WaterGirl
@brantl: I read it as “how” and never even saw the typo.
Martin
@Chris: Biden is definitely a product of the older generational support for Israel when that support was shored up during the Six Day war and Yom Kippur war, which were legitimate existential threats for Israel, and when things like housing discrimination against Jews was openly done. Like I get the argument for Israel. I agree with that argument. I question the method, but not the need. Biden has the additional burden of considering what a nuclear powered Israel would do if they lost US support, because a full scale attack from Iran can be countered either by a conventional response by the US, or a nuclear one by Israel. So we’re going to make some concessions in order to keep those nukes in their homes. And that’s VERY hard to communicate to the public. So I get his position here. I think he could handle it better.
But in this context – there’s a ‘you youngin’s don’t know nuthin yet’. And yeah, maybe – note – I’m not saying any of these students are right or wrong on their actual position wrt the middle east, just that they have the right to have the position (and to be wrong about it). That’s how education works. I had a student that said he majored in fire and minored in mopping – a recognition that a lot of his education was being able to safely fuck up a whole bunch. And Joe could do a better job of listening – not just the ask, but the thing that has been getting ignored – stuff like housing costs, and whatnot. It’s good both for helping to defuse the current situation, but also for helping his campaign.
Trivia Man
Outside agitators is a common trope to justify escalation of force and completely disregarding any message from the protestors. In some aspects this has a kernel of justification. If some third party is using students for a separate hidden and nefarious reason that is bad.
But in many cases it simply means outsiders ate supportive of the same cause or at the least they ate supporting the students rights to object.
i lived in SE Asia when Tien An Men happened and i knew people who had been in china and got involved in the protests at various levels. Even in totalitarian china, at least in 1989, student protests were mostly tolerated. “Kids today – amirite? 🤷🏽♀️“ Specially vocal (or effective) leaders disappeared quietly but otherwise they let them vent.
But then Foreigners joined – students from europe and the US egged them on and helped educate and inspire them with tales of anti-vietnam protests.
Wirse – peasants started supporting the students and even joining protests.
Red. Line. Hard stop.
In sheer numbers students were a ripple. And subject to positive and negative carrots and sticks. They had a relatively soft life and a hopeful future. But peasants and working class? Barely surviving at a subsistence level and no glimmer of change for a hundred years in the future. If THEY started joining in real numbers Communist China leadership is doomed.
Roll tanks… “Fin”
Burnspbesq
The way things played out at UT was entirely predictable. Republicans in positions of power in Texas are neanderthals who hate everything about Austin, including every part of UT except the athletic department. It’s telling that the Travis County Attorney’s office dropped all the charges against the first tranche of arrestees, and will likely do the same for the photographer for the local Fox affiliate who was charged with assaulting a cop.
To Martin’s point, the issue lurking just below the surface at UT is that the administration has used the new law banning DEI to dismantle essential support services for minority students. You’ll hear people talk about the “whitening” of UT, and it’s a thing. If I were a teacher or administrator there, I’d be working all my networks to GTFO.
Martin
@theturtlemoves: Yeah, every campus is unique, and there is no recipe for success. You gotta do the hard work for your circumstances. And some is a lot harder than others.
Warblewarble
@Tony Jay:
I have not seen any questions about who organised and bankrolled the pro Israel thugs from those MaCarthyites who have been so quick to imply that students rejecting the Genocide Industrial Complex, must be bankrolled by Putin or whoever you chose.
@Tony Jay:
Tony Jay
@Burnspbesq:
Huh. I think I’ll just leave that firmly-closed case resting there and point at it silently whenever some tut-tut merchant starts on about how the protestors need to confront and deal with the problem of outside-agitators.
It seems some agitation is perfectly fine; it just depends on who is getting agitated.
Another Scott
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Made me look. Marvel.Fandom.com:
Yay?
It sounds like a good comic. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@JML: Larger class sizes at bigger schools also prevent faculty and students from getting to know each other so faculty stop being helpful agents because they never had a chance to get to know the undergrads.
This won’t apply to every campus, but there is a real problem where an undergraduate gets invited into this space, as though it will be their family, and a year later if they fell off the face of the earth not a single faculty or staff person would even realize because that student never got to be anything more than a name in a spreadsheet. The student never built a personal connection to the institution, nor one back. That creates performance, retention, behavior problems, and it’s getting worse not better.
Elizabelle
Reading this now. Thank you, Martin.
We live in interesting times.
Martin
@Burnspbesq: Yeah, students at UT were really caught in a war between the government and the administration. Administrators really need to put on their big-kid pants and stand in front of these problems – sometimes literally.
VFX Lurker
Thank you for writing this, Martin.
Jay
Thank you, Martin, for writing this and for your comments.
Thank you, Watergirl, for front paging this.
Martin
@Tony Jay: I think UCLA was fucked on this one.
You have to walk this fine line, as I describe above, of making police available to help students keep the riff-raff out, and not having them there as though they’re going to roll on students. Once things escalate to a certain point, it becomes impossible to do both, so the riff-raff get in and the cops are now needed for that broader security role.
I think UCLA brought in private security to help the students with that job and pushed the police back. That’s not a bad idea and I think it would have worked if not for the social media post that suggested that the encampment students had beat up a jewish student and left her for dead, and that appeared sufficient to incite a non-student group to attack the encampment – and the private security weren’t there for that. That was a new dynamic across all of these protests and UCLA wasn’t equipped for it.
I have no idea why the police were 2 ½ hours away instead of back at the perimeter of the campus where they could still respond quickly when the security called for help.
HumboldtBlue
As for UCLA, here’s the report from the Daily Bruin.
Burnspbesq
@Martin:
The UT system has a big enough endowment—well over $40 billion—that it could tell Abbott (shockingly, a UT alum) to pound sand and get away with it. Jay Hartzell is absolutely not going to rise to the occasion.
Urza
Coming in late on this but. I’ve been seeing Israel as an abused child that obviously has major trauma and some of their actions towards security are the right thing to do. But then they’re treating the Palestinians in a way they were treated before the state of Israel was founded. I’m pretty sure the Torah would not be ok with that. If a state could look at itself objectively they would not be ok with it, but large groups of people are never fully conscious organisms that learn from mistakes.
Israel and Russia if they truly get their way are opening up endless wars for the world, if a group or state can claim that land they lost before anyone currently alive was there going back hundreds or thousands of years then there is no end to border skirmishes and ethnic strife ever without the total elimination of entire bloodlines. We should really be beyond that as a species in the 2000s.
Gloria DryGarden
@JaneE: now I want to hear her speech, that Muslim valedictorian. Maybe someone will give her a wide platform in a useful way.
the whole fallout at her campus seems crazy, I mean, the result of short sightedness and being unprepared.
Tony Jay
@Martin:
It’s not so much that it did happen – you’ve got to expect bad-actors to flex when they’re given licence to – but that it happened and then… nothing. Crickets. Almost totally ignored.
Given how enormous the story would have been if a mob of pro-Palestinian thugs had attacked a pro-Israel protest in the middle of the night screaming about inflicting a Second Holocaust, I find the almost complete black-out on the attack pretty damned chilling.
A lot of the ‘elite’ reaction to the protests has been about enforcing a pro-Israel narrative and denying the validity of pro-Palestine viewpoints. If we’re getting to the point that the ‘elites’ feel comfortable winking at pro-Israel violence on US soil (I expect the same thing to be winked at in the UK) and everyone just plays along… that’s a WTF moment for me.
Martin
Thank you everyone for the kind words and participating.
lowtechcyclist
@Chip Daniels:
I think it’s mostly that the U.S. government, for the most part (and aside from the gap in funding), has been doing what it should be doing there [in Ukraine].
With Gaza, the U.S. of A. has clearly been on the wrong side of an ongoing mass slaughter, a genocidal war crime. While trying to get some aid to Gaza to stave off mass starvation, it’s still arming Israel as Israel continues to slaughter Gaza Palestinians by the thousands.
You protest against your government when it’s doing bad shit, not when it’s doing what’s right.
Chris
@WaterGirl:
Ehhh…
I’m honestly not a fan of this argument, partly because it seems to anthropomorphize ethnicities and nations and assume that the same psychological principles that apply to individuals apply to large groups of individuals, but even more because I don’t see that that kind of cause-and-effect thing is at all required. Plenty of bigots in the world repeat the same arguments as Israeli Jewish bigots, either about Palestinians or about their own pet hates, without having any of that history of oppression in their ethnicity. Racist assholes simply make up a stupendous amount of any group of humans, unfortunately. If they happen to come from an ethnic group with a lot of oppression in its past, that makes for a nice rhetorical device and self-justification, but most of them would be doing it regardless.
lowtechcyclist
@lowtechcyclist: ‘There’ in the first paragraph being Ukraine. I edited badly.
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist: All fixed. :-)
Writing about something that is upsetting to me means I make grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. Maybe you’re a bit like me in that regard?
Apologies for you being subjected to personal attack from the prickly guy yesterday. That gets him a 3-day timeout for his trouble. Please let me know if something like that happens again. That was way over the line.
VFX Lurker
It’s front page on the Los Angeles Times.
Burnspbesq
@JaneE:
I was appalled but not shocked. I have a lot of Duke alums in my circle of friends, so I was treated to a detailed, colorful, real-time rundown of Folt’s misadventures as chancellor of UNC. I thought it was a bad hire when it was announced, and she hasn’t done much in the intervening five years to change my mind.
Chris
@Tony Jay:
The double standard has been breathtaking from the very start. We had congressional kangaroo court hearings about antisemitism, but absolutely nothing about Islamophobia. College administrators were asked what they were doing to keep their campuses safe and welcoming for Jews, but never asked what they were doing to keep their campuses safe and welcoming for Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims. The media breathless broadcast every instance of anti-Semitic protesters they could find, but none at all of anti-Arab or anti-Muslim threats of violence or simply bigoted statements. The entire narrative for months has been that only one side has violent bigots and only one ethnicity is being targeted.
It did not pass the smell test, at all. This is a country less than a quarter-century out from 9/11, which has spent the last two decades in the grip of escalating Islamophobia, culminating in a president whose literal first act in office was to enact a Muslim Ban and is still currently inciting his protesters to violence every day. The idea that none of this has boiled over into the Israel/Palestine tensions, that not a single innocent Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim has also endured the kind of assault that we’ve seen Jewish people suffering, is simply too ridiculous to comment on. The entire (forgive the hippie word) “establishment” simply decided right from the outset that only one tribe was worth even pretending to get all hot and bothered about, and that the other tribe simply wasn’t worth protecting or caring about.
That encampment being assaulted is the first time I’ve seen a story like this actually break through the media wall at all (not that I’ve seen much about it, I suspect I’d still be unware of it if I didn’t read blogs like this one), but there’s no way in hell things like that haven’t been happening for months, at best on a smaller scale.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@JML:
@Chris: thanks to you both for telling me I’m not crazy for remembering the Dr.Doom comic. Frankly reading that back in 1987 or whenever heartened me more than all the protests, which may be why I remember it, because when I saw that, I thought, if even people who write & read comic books think apartheid should be over, it’ll be over soon. But I also think pre-Disney Marvel was more radical than it’ll ever be in the future in terms of the stories it was willing to tell.
thanks, Martin, for such a good essay. But I can tell you that even though you feel it’s about the students, the students themselves believe that their protests, arrests & issues are helping the cause.
Soprano2
@Martin: Thanks for this post, it was helpful. I wish it could get a much wider audience. I missed all the demonstrating, I was in college from 1979 to 1983.
When I heard about USC cancelling the valedictorian’s speech, I knew there was going to be trouble. That was so incredibly stupid and unnecessary, talk about an own goal!
schrodingers_cat
How is littering UCLA helping Gazans?
Tony Jay
@VFX Lurker:
It was front page in the FTF Guardian too, but after the report… where is the story? I’ve seen the removal of UCLA’s encampment covered, but nothing much at all on the night time attack and no interest at all in who the attackers were and the vile shit they were saying while they rampaged. It’s barely been mentioned here and there’s certainly been no dearth of I/P talk over the last few days.
Like I said up above, if this had been a pro-Israel encampment attacked, how loud would the demands for immediate and forceful action against the attackers and everyone even vaguely associated with pro-Palestinian activism would have been? How swift the bipartisan action in Congress to affirm the country’s determination to stamp out this kind of factional violence?
But there’s none of that. There’s just the NARRATIVE. Cranked up a few more notches to drown out the hissing of the gas-lights.
Tony Jay
@Chris:
All of this. Yes.
Plus, Emperor Doom. Also yes.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
See one comment above yours.
Standard whine, “But they arn’t protesting right!!!!!!!!!”.
LGM, which I visit daily, mostly read Cheryl or the Graves, has a good post up today that ties into Martin’s in a way.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/05/the-kids-are-alright-3
Tony Jay
@Jay:
I don’t even acknowledge that kind of comment. It’s just utterly predictable and a bit desperate. Pretty much indistinguishable from any typical newlabourinc middle-manager’s fixations and biases, just transported a few thousand miles and given a transatlantic gloss.
I’ll read your link in the morning. 👍
VFX Lurker
Still on the front page of the LATimes right now: “Online sleuths rush to identify the men who attacked UCLA encampment”
That said, I live here, I have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, and I check its front page often to scan its headlines.
I do not doubt you have different news sources and a different news experience.
JWR
@VFX Lurker:
It was also shown numerous times on local L.A. TV news. Thing is, the first time they were referred to as a pro-Israeli group, after that, they were simply a group of “counter-protesters”. Maybe someone complained.
schrodingers_cat
@VFX Lurker: How representative is the BJ commentariat of the population in LA? How is all this playing out locally?
VFX Lurker
Right now, I think this comment section is paying closer attention than the locals in my life. Friends and colleagues are aware, but the protests have only been mentioned twice so far.
cain
@Martin:
This reddit comment made sense to me:
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Greatly appreciate your perspective as a university administrator! Great stuff
Sorry to hear about the deterioration in your former institution.
cain
@Aziz, light!:
Yeah, the northwest is teeming with these organized anarchists – and you can bet they are plotting to make sure they are there for every student protest. BLM was enlightening to me that way.
I wish we had a class for how to protest and not let these people come in and take over.
Students should realize that library is their safe space to learn. It’s not for outside agitators to muck it up for them. Students lost today thanks to these assholes.
cain
@wjca:
I’m not sure that’s it. Ukraine is fighting back, as long as they have the resources and man power they can do it – they have proven time and time again that they can outfox the Russians and inflict losses. They are cunning.
The palestinians are being fucked over way way worse. No support in the UN (thanks US), no support from muslims countries and finally they have an adversary that is well connected, way better equipped, and has a lot of resources. The power dynamic is quite wide.
Sure they have Hamas, which also a liability since they are likely oppressed by them as well.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@VFX Lurker: Pretty much, I’ve heard nothing about this from anyone, except here and everyone knows I’m a UCLA alum.
Soprano2
@JWR: That’s how I heard it on NPR this morning, that they were counter protesters.
db11
Great post Martin. Appreciate both the knowledge and the nuance.
Rare, even here, that a (long) thoughtful post — on such a difficult subject — produces more light than heat, as yours has done.
But somehow you’ve managed it, and in so doing made a valuable contribution — both the the community and to the conversation.
Thanks for that.
TF79
Thanks for sharing this Martin
YY_Sima Qian
@Tony Jay: I feel the same bewilderment, by the lack of discussion even here of the NYPD’s & (university admins’) heavily handed response to the protests & building take overs at Columbia at City College. The NYPD & Columbia admin instituted a movement freeze while they cleared out Hamilton Hall. Students who lived off campus could not leave. The student journalists were threatened w/ arrest if they tried to leave Pulitzer Hall to cover the events. There is now ubiquitous NYPD presence across campus, reminiscent of Beijing during the big annual government meetings.
Students taking over buildings were fairly common during the protests of the late 60s to early 70s, & when I was an undergrad in the 90s those events were largely discussed positively. Instead, some of sentiments expressed re the student protests definitely remind me of how the CPC regime characterized the student protestors of Spring 1989, or how the establishment power characterized the protest movement in Hong Kong in mid-2019. (& those movements were far more disruptive, & in Hong Kong’s case had devolved into violent anarchy by late 2019.)
I admit to feeling disorientated.
WaterGirl
@cain: If you listen to Beau on his podcast, you will hear him saying the same thing.
VFX Lurker
In my case, the two people who mentioned the USC (not UCLA) protests did so only when their personal schedules were affected. They did not discuss the protests themselves.
WaterGirl
@db11: You have perfectly described exactly what I was hoping for when I asked Martin if he would put this together. I was not disappointed!
We’ve had more heat than light, and I was hoping for exactly this.
We have some amazing commenters on Balloon Juice. Very grateful that we do!
schrodingers_cat
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: @VFX Lurker: Thanks for your insights.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@YY_Sima Qian: you’re from East Asia, right?
While I’m reminiscing about the 80’s, I also remember this: after the Tompkins Square riot of 1988, when the NYPD ran around the East Village until dawn, mostly because the party people they were chasing were too thrilled to be part of Something Big to go home and the cops were earning triple overtime (so they had no incentive to go home either), a Chinese editor at Random House (where I later took a job) freaked out so much that he moved from the East Village, where he was living, to New Jersey.
Nobody at Random House could understand why until the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
I think the student protests now are like the Tompkins Square riot of 1988: a lot of news, but nothing is going to happen to these rich white kids.
And now, in retrospect, I’m really glad everyone putting up those South African huts on the campus green in the 1980’s was white. I remember it being embarrassing at the time, but it meant there was no equivalent of today’s claims that the protests are anti-Semitic.
YY_Sima Qian
There is also a layer of underlying causes to student protest movements, at the political-economic level, beyond the perceived national/global injustices that precipitate them & the granular campus issues. The students across the PRC in Spring 1989 were not just (or even really) marching for democracy & freedom of speech, they were also venting against corruption, high inflation due partial dismantling of price controls, deep government/Party interference in people’s lives (where they can work after graduation), lack of respect for people w/ higher education, etc. The students in Hong Kong in 2014 & 2019 were also not just marching for democracy, they were also venting against the sky high housing prices & poor quality of housing (perverse condition created by the territory’s long standing kleptocratic policies on real estate & housing, dating back to the British colonial days), intense competition for jobs from Mainland immigrants (it was those from Western countries during the British colonial days, hence the term “FiLTH”), all which put intense pressure on them as the enter society post-graduation.
Today, I think you people have been the most impacted by the wave of inflation precipitated by the pandemic, the decades long rapid inflation in the cost of education (& the resulting indebtedness), the more recent rapid rise in cost of housing & rent. All of these are in the background creating a negative mood, as well.
db11
@WaterGirl: I was remiss in not thanking you earlier for eliciting this post.
Your unflagging efforts in forging community here are well noted and much appreciated.
YY_Sima Qian
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Well, these is a long history of governments suppressing student protest movements, which then lead to greater turmoil.
There were already national level student protests in 1988, against the same things as in 1989. In spring of ’89 the protests were not destined to escalate, but the hardliners in the CPC regime gained upper had in the internal power struggle at end of Apr., & signaled their hardline to the public. By that time the occupation of Tiananmen Square was already petering out, but the government signal renewed the energy across the country, & brought the mostly sympathetic urbanites to back to the streets in massive numbers, too. The public’s response caused some more vacillation/division on the part of the regime, which only encouraged the protestors even more & gave them false hope that they could force concessions from the government. However, the rural population did not participate, as they had been the primary beneficiary of the 1st decade of the PRC’s economic reforms. As the Chinese population was still 85% rural at the time, & the vast majority of the rank & file of the military came from rural areas, the protest movements never had any chance of success, at least in so far as changing how the PRC was organized politically.
Another Scott
@Martin: I assume you’re referring to Biden’s statement today?
WhiteHouse.gov:
I think it’s a pretty decent statement. Maybe adding a few words about the importance of lively, civil, respectful debate on college campuses (as you outline). But he sort-of covered that.
Maybe the emphasis could be adjusted some, but I think the basic message is correct. I could potentially disagree about “forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations” (which seems to be administrators panicking in many/most/all cases), but I don’t know enough about the details to have an informed opinion – that’s probably the most problematic part for me.
FWIW.
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@YY_Sima Qian: very interesting! But I think the student protests are real, and driven by concerns for stopping genocide. There’s lots of upsetting news, of course, but the students are rich and at rich institutions.
You mentioned FILTH – Failed in London, Try Hong Kong. These are the ones who’ve succeeded, the ones who’ve gotten into the prestigious schools in the US from competitive places like NY. I think they’re sincere.
Carlo Graziani
Martin, oh my, what a fantastic piece. Thank you.
Martin
@Another Scott: My objection is the single word response to the protests. It would have been pretty easy for him to say something more nuanced here without making any particular promise. He could even have simply acknowledged that many members of his administration share the students’ concern for the welfare of Gaza civilians and are working hard to find a resolution of this conflict and get aid to the people of Gaza. That’s not some new policy, but it’s a recognition of the students. That’s what they want. The one word answer just says that whatever the student are doing – it’s not enough. That’s not the sentiment you want to leave them with.
Jay
@Martin:
It’s the same tone deaf speech we have heard, every time,
summed up as “but they ware protesting WRONG!!!!!!!!”.
No mention of blaming some of the Admin’s actions,
No mention of sending the ACAB forces in when they arn’t needed,
No mentions of the protestors being attacked by violent thugs.
It’s all “the students” fault.
Tone deaf.
Carlo Graziani
I have forwarded the link to this post to senior University officials at the eminent private midwestern University with which I have an association, where the cycle of protest has just begun. I sincerely hope that they read it and reflect on it.
Another Scott
@Jay: I don’t see him blaming the students for the violence. He’s saying that nobody (including students, outside agitators, and the police) should be using violence. Singling out a particular group would make things worse.
Yes, it could have been better, especially when it comes to apparently over reacting school admins. But it’s hard to thread the needle…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Martin: The students are only part of the audience here. And he’s said in just about every public statement since October 7 that Israel has to protect Gaza’s civilians. I don’t see how he can say anything other than No to that question.
All of that said, it’s going to be a prickly situation for him and the US until there’s substantial progress on relieving the suffering in Gaza. And he knows it. But the IDF and Hamas and all the rest get a vote…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@Another Scott: I think it is really worthwhile to read the Erik Loomis article at LGM that Jay linked to. I had not appreciated just how idealized, sanitized &, more importantly, sterilized the accounts of the Civil Rights Movement has been in the US in the recent decades. I had an appreciation of how the mainstream accepted framing of the Civil Rights Movement has been weaponized toOtherize & delegitimize the Black Power voices that polite society finds too radical (Malcolm X., anyone?), & by establishment power everywhere against any protest movement that becomes anything but the most docile & nonthreatening, but now I feel my stomach churn for having pontificated in the past that marginalized/suppressed groups would do themselves a favor by staying strictly w/in the peaceful example set by MLK, Jr. BTW, another figure often pointed to by establishment power as example for radicalizing movements to follow, Nelson Mandela, advocated violent resistance to Apartheid.
There are still limits, of course, to what would be sensible & effective activism, & activists still need to accept that politics is the art of the possible & learn to accept half a loaf. However, it was not always clear to me just how the eventual framing of CRM history, like so many things, actually favored the establishment & status quo. One of those huge blind spots of modern liberalism.
At least FDR said “make me”. Obama said the same. Anyone getting the same vibe from Biden on Israel/Palestine?
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: Even the image of MLK that is pap-fed in K-12 schools is a highly sanitized, liberal establishment-friendly narrative that glosses over King’s radicalism, making him into a kind of jovial, non-threatening secular Santa Claus figure, emphasizing his “pacifism” as if it were a trait validating his secular sainthood, rather than a desperate, brilliant tactic that gave power to the disempowered. J Edgar Hoover understood King, and the threat that he represented to the Establishment, far more clearly than any modern school curriculum curator. The FBI’s extreme reaction against him was a perfectly rational (amoral) response to that understanding.
King realized that in our media-dominated age, the willingness of normal people to allow themselves to be brutalized, and even killed, on camera, was a weapon—essentially the only effective weapon—that activists could employ against a state that embodied a racist cultural consensus. The televised images of children, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, etc. passively linking arms and allowing themselves to be beaten up by law-enforcement and National Guard turned the stomachs of millions, who could suddenly imagine their own children, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, etc. being treated similarly, for the sake of a humanistic principle. It allowed those people to transition their views of civil rights protesters from “communists/anarchists” to “victims”. It was the greatest script-flip of all time.
It was also was a deadly threat to the Establishment. And all it required was courage: the courage to allow yourself to get the shit kicked out of you, or worse, by cops, on TV, for the sake of creating an irresistible national teachable moment. No wonder Hoover and Nixon hated King: he was the radical who discovered how truly courageous political action, as opposed to comfortable posturing, can bring about meaningful political change. People like Sakharov, Mandela, and Havel are in his debt.
This version of King is largely overlooked in the anodyne celebrations of his life that prevail here now. But I thought about him a great deal in January 2020, when for a few days it appeared that the nation’s conscience might need to be aroused by people willing to publicly put their lives on the line for a principle. If Trump had, counterfactually, succeeded in rallying Federal law enforcement and securocracy to his cause, only the nonviolent resistance of thousands, guided by King’s strategy, and willing to be brutalized publicly for the cause of democracy, might have saved the Republic by causing the scales to fall from the eyes of millions.
I also sometimes think of that student who barred the way of a tank in Tianamen square. He was one of King’s worthy heirs too.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: My favorite story is how Samuel L Jackson held MLK Sr hostage at Morehouse (he was a trustee) and picked up a felony in the process. To illustrate how forgiving things were then, he was able to later return to Morehouse and finish his degree.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Total agree! I now look back at the high school American History’s portrayal of MLK, Jr. as embarrassing. I knew some of this from reading articles & biographies later in life, but somehow the influence of establishment narrative was never erased, because they flooded the zone.
I am certain the student protest leaders in Tiananmen drew inspiration from MLK, Jr.’s (the radical) example, as well as those of their forebears from the May 4th Movement in 1919, & the millennia old tradition of the intellectual scholar-official forthrightly speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, the CPC regime in 1989 was not nearly as weak & incompetent as the Beiyang government of 1919 (which could not even assert national sovereignty in face of foreign imperialist encroachments, which touched off the May 4th Movement to begin w/).
I do think it is notable that the driver & commander of the lead tank, & presumably the column as well, chose not to employ force in the face of the blatant & brave act of resistance. More than a few PLA & PAP commanders followed the fullest extent of their orders & opened fire on the citizen protestors that refused to give way (trying to protect the student protestors), or lost control of their troops who fired into the windows of the residential buildings that lined the boulevards where people were trying to bear witness, hence the bloodshed along Chang’an Avenue leading to Tiananmen Square.
For the perverse & farcical evolution of MLK, Jr.’s methods, see Chai Ling during the Tiananmen Square protests, & Nathan Law during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. Both openly stated a desire for the CPC regime to crack down w/ overwhelming force, & for massive bloodshed to result, so to precipitate domestic and international backlash against the Hong Kong government & the CPC regime. While provoking the established power to massively overreact is an established strategy for revolutionary insurgents, what set Chai & Law apart was that they fled to the West immediately after urging their fellow protestors to fight to the end, immediately before the crackdowns came. They got their scholarships in Ivy schools & lived in comfort overseas, becoming a fixture on the lecture circuit & Congressional hearings, while the people who heeded their calls shed their blood or lost their personal freedom. MLK, Jr., Mandela, Havel all took the same risks as their followers, & were willing to suffer the consequences. Chai & Law remind me of the leaders of Hamas’ political faction living in Qatar or Türkiye.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: I wrote in a comment a couple of days ago about the take over of Willard Straight Hall in Cornell by Black Power activities in 1968. After white frat brothers tried to retake the hall, the Black Power occupiers got themselves armed w/ firearms. University admin eventually negotiated the end of the take over.
Had the Columbia students who took over Hamilton Hall been similarly armed, I think there certainly would have been blood spilled when the NYPD stormed the building.
Long before the current campus protests escalated, establishment interests (especially in finance & law) have been trying to coerce the universities to self-censor pro-Palestinian (or merely critical of Israel) voices among students by threatening the students’ career prospects, & threatening to withhold donations to the universities. Then cynical politicians piled on by hauling the admins to Congressional hearings.
I am quite dismayed by the fact that a large majority of House Dems voted for the House bill that elevates the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism above all others. Aside from imposing unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech & freedom of academic research by favoring a very specific POV, my understanding is that some of the provisions would make discussion of large parts of Jewish intellectual history impossible. Correct me if I am wrong, but anti-Zionism was part of the mainstream discourse among Jewish intellectuals before the Holocaust, & there remain fringe Jewish ultra-orthodox sects who are committed anti-Zionists.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
MTG and Pedo Gaetz voted against it, on biblical grounds.
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: Strange bedfellows in strange times, MTG & Jerry Nadler voting the same way on this issue.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/he-wrote-a-definition-of-antisemitism-now-he-says-its-being-weaponized-1vhnzn/
Tony Jay
@VFX Lurker:
Late in the day (damn you, time zones) but I just wanted to say that I appreciate the clarification, but it kind of underlines my point. The LA Times will be discussing the attack, be Local Issue, but the wider Media silence and the silence here, that’s what worries me.
Organised groups lunching late night attacks on sleeping campus protestors would be front page news EVERYWHERE and proof of the need for bringing out the National Guard of it had been pro-Palestine thugs doing the attacking.
This veil of unconcern, it’s very bad cess.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: It was part of the discourse at the UN. I knew someone who was a staffer to the UNCCP and she said the committee was committed to the plan but there was always some doubt among the members that they had made a mistake when they started to dig into the bigger problems and saw how intractable some of them would prove to be. (She was quite old and recounting her experience on this to a group of us). When Rabin was assassinated she figured in that moment that at least the process of bringing Israel about was wrong and worried that the project would ultimately fail.
She said something along the lines that Rabin’s assassination demonstrated that there was a significant culture in Israel that felt entitled to all of Palestine – that what Israel could take they should keep, and Israeli leadership had not worked hard enough to contain that culture given they were effectively endorsing it through settlements. That’s how I interpreted her sentiment.
Now, this was someone who was employed by the UN to resolve issues between Israel and Palestine, when Palestinians had wholly rejected the whole idea – so the only thing they had to hold onto was Israel, and the commission formed because a group of Israelis assassinated the former UN envoy. At some point after the commission she took new assignments with the UN and relocated to NY. I happen to be friends with her daughter. She passed away some years ago.
So yeah, even in the UN commissions that were working on the project there were people questioning the creation of Israel. And again, speaking to context, there is questioning whether Jews deserve a state like Israel, and there is questioning whether Israel as constituted is the right idea. It is not terribly controversial to suggest that Israel needs a new constitution, effectively ending Israel (this incarnation) and replacing it with a different incarnation. That is a form of calling for the end of Israel – maybe not what the protesters mean, but certainly running afoul of the definition. It is not even that controversial an idea in Israel.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Thanks for sharing the story!
Tony Jay
@Jay:
Again, late, but I just wanted to underline that I live in a country and am a member of a Party where the very, very, VERY flawed IHRA has been used as a blunt weapon to silence any opposition to the Israeli Government and paint pro-Palestinian opinions of any kind as antisemitic.
This was all done in an astonishingly cynical way, despite very clear warnings about how bad an idea it was, with the full-blooded assistance of the UK News Media and the wider Establishment, all to ensure that a perfectly normal centre-left Government didn’t stand a chance of ousting the Conservative Party.
Quite predictibly, it’s led to some of the guilty parties running face first into the barbed-wire thresher of cognitive dissonance thanks to Israel’s open distain for global opinion and the brutality of its war on Gaza’s civilians.
The US does not want to go through that.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
They are going to go through that, though
It’s already happening in Canada.
Chris
@Carlo Graziani:
The other thing I’d never understood until years after I’d grown up, though, is the extent to which the civil rights movement wasn’t really doing anything different from what it had been doing for the previous hundred years – it’s just that there were now cameras to record it.
When you look at reports from the 1940s, 1930s, 1920s, 1910s, and so forth, and read through the lines of the official reports, it’s perfectly clear what was happening in those eras: black people would show up and protest for their rights, cops and/or racist vigilantes would assault them violently in broad daylight, newspapers would euphemistically report the whole things as “race riots,” and nice respectable whites following that era’s version of NPR would shake their heads about how those crazy blacks are starting trouble again.
Only in the 1950s there was now television beaming reality into the living rooms of all these nice respectable whites and smashing them in the face with the reality that oh, yeah, it’s really not about blacks being violent, both sides being violent, and the poor beleaguered cops trying to control the violence – the black people really are just walking harmlessly and the cops are the ones assaulting them out of nowhere.
Not all (or even most) whites were shocked into better behavior, and they picked themselves up and started rationalizing shit and calling the media “liberal” and “biased” soon enough. But just enough of them were to get things moving, for a while.
Kay
Add Rutgers and the University of Minnesota to the competently-run schools that didn’t completely lose their shit over a protest.
So they join Northwestern and Brown on top, with USC, UCLA and Columbia ranked on the bottom.
brantl
@lowtechcyclist: People are equating doing insufficient right with doing very substantive wrong.
YY_Sima Qian
@Kay: We are including state schools too, right? Add City College NY, UT Austin, UT Dallas, University of South Florida, Emory, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin Madison, Washington University, & Dartmouth to near the bottom of the heap, all from the last few days.
University of Vermont & University of Minnesota at near the top.
YY_Sima Qian
@Tony Jay: You have been railing against the smearing of Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for years. (Although Corbyn’s political sense seems to be particularly obtuse. If the hostile British press were very interested in making him & his perceived controversial views the story, he has a tendency of playing along, even if out of a commitment to his principles.)
Martin
@Kay: I wouldn’t put UCLA on the bottom. The incident Tuesday really upended the schools handling of things. That one sounds like it was a bit more out of their control (we’ll see what the explanation for why police took so long to respond is), for the same reason I wouldn’t put UT Austin on the bottom.
brantl
@Jay:
Nope, summed up as “SOME of them were protesting wrong.”. Learn to read carefully for content.