Open Threads

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.