The Carnage Is the Point
On the matter of student protests, universities, and a myriad assortment of outside agitators.
At the start of a essay that ends up caricaturing how modern U.S. colleges functions,1 the Atlantic’s George Packer provides a decent precis of why universities are such fertile ground for effective protests:
The structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption….
A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance.
This means that if there is an issue that mobilizes a sufficient number of students, the chances are decent that a university administrator will screw things up and manage to escalate the situation. Which also warrant scrutiny of the motives of outside officials calling for coercion to be used against protestors.
One straightforward response is that the current protestors are themselves violent in nature. This is the rationale that Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro offered when speaking to Politico’s Kierra Frazier:
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Wednesday denounced universities for failing to guarantee the safety of students as some protests over the Israel-Hamas war have turned confrontational and led to antisemitic incidents.
“What we’re seeing at Columbia and what we’re seeing in some campuses across America, where universities can’t guarantee the safety and security of their students, it’s absolutely unacceptable,” Shapiro said in exclusive comments to POLITICO reporters.
“If the universities in accordance with their policies can’t guarantee the safety and security and well-being of the students, then I think it is incumbent upon a local mayor or local governor or local town councilor, whoever is the local leadership there, to step in and enforce the law,” he added.
No doubt, there are multiple examples of explicitly pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist signage. Other protestors have shouted anti-Semitic slogans. That is all disturbing.2
What it is not, however, is violent. Indeed, the evidence of actual violence from student protestors seems pretty weak. While some university-affiliated officials have advised Jews to stay home to stay safe, this is based far more on perception than a real threat of violence. There are isolated reports of violence, but a recent Times of Israel roundup failed to provide much more in the way of real rather than perceived security threats. The NYPD Chief of Patrol described the protestors that they arrested last weekend as “peaceful.”
The absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, so maybe there are unreported incidents. But what has been reported seems like small potatoes — unless, of course, one wants to interpret words as an act of violence. But my understanding is that free speech advocates frown on that kind of interpretation.
So there has been a lot of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests on college campuses. A fraction of those protests have bled over into anti-Semitism, which is deplorable. But the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer is correct to note, “in the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters.”
In many cases, however, the protestors have faced disciplinary actions that seem disproportionate to the infraction of holding unsanctioned protests. According to the New York Times’ Troy Closson and Anna Betts:
Many of the more than 100 Columbia University and Barnard College students who were arrested after refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus on Thursday woke up to a chilly new reality this week: Columbia said that their IDs would soon stop working, and some of them would not be able to finish the semester.
The students who were arrested were released with summonses. The university said all of the 100 or so students involved in the protest had been informed that they were suspended.
For some of those students, that means they must vacate their student housing, with just weeks before the semester ends.
Universities like Columbia have handled this poorly, although their response pales in comparison to how some elected officials want them to respond. An awful lot of politicians have been calling on the use of force against protestors. Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley have called for the National Guard to be deployed in Columbia, as has Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Earlier this week Texas governor Greg Abbott enthusiastically sent Texas state troopers to conduct mass arrests, breaking up an unsanctioned but nonviolent demonstration at the University of Texas at Austin.3
Cotton, Hawley, Johnson, and Abbott are a lot of things, but stupid they are not. Why would they call for coercion when they must be fully aware that such an approach would further fan the flames of protest?
I was going to wrote a long explanation for this but Serwer beat me to the punch by making the same point at the end of his last column:
The most likely outcome based on past precedent would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.
As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.
This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.
And gosh, let’s look at what has happened just in the past 24 hours. The Boston Globe reported that, “Boston police in riot gear forcibly removed a pro-Palestinian tent encampment from a public walkway next to Emerson College overnight, arresting more than 100 protesters in a chaotic scene.” The Guardian reported that, “Police have carried out multiple violent arrests at Emory University in Decatur, Georgia, in what appears to be the first campus crackdown in recent days to involve rubber bullets and teargas after students set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestine and against Cop City.”4
Again, these moves are likely to be counterproductive in quelling the protests, as political scientist Ryan Enos points out in the Harvard Crimson:
Just because university administrators can shut down these protests doesn’t mean they should. History shows quite plainly that using coercive force to close encampments won’t eliminate protests — it could very well strengthen them.
People in power, whether administrators at universities, teachers in the classroom, police on the street, prosecutors in the courtroom, or members of Congress, often have a range of powers legally available to them that they can use in any situation, but prudence says they should not.
To repeat a theme, I would make a lousy college administrator. But if I were advising any of them this week, I would urge them to distrust heavy-handed tactics and to be wary of outside politicians with their own political agendas — agendas designed to make things worse on college campuses.
Pro tip: anyone who writes that, “The students of the ’68 revolt became professors…. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today,” has not spent any substantive time in a university classroom since they were an undergraduate. They also flunk math: profs who were students in 1968 are now emeritus.
It is also worth asking whether these more egregious protestor actions are coming from actual students. A lot of the worst incidents reported at Columbia and elsewhere appear to have occurred off-campus.
These sort of calls for a militarized response are a good reminder that, in Don Moynihan’s words, “Universities can be slow and bureaucratic. They can fall prey to excesses. But I trust them far more to police and correct those excesses than I trust those who are attacking them now.”
To repeat a theme, disapproving of breaking up protests is not the same thing as agreeing with the stated beliefs of the protestors. The quotes of what the Emory protestors are saying are, to put it gently, rather simplistic and yet a further data point that the rest of the world would be better off if they ignored the political musings of college students.
I feel like there's been a loss of institutional knowledge among campus police departments, or at least that's the most charitable interpretation. When I was at college in the 90s the way protests like these were dealt with was very straightforward -- cordon off the protesters, let people out but not in, and wait for it to burn itself out in a week or so. But that sort of patient approach seems to be alien to today's college police forces.
(Alternatively it could be that today's campus police have less patience and more raw lust to do harm than those of the past, possibly due to the incentives of media scrutiny.)
The hardworking staff at Drezner's world seem to have lost the plot. Yes, there are bad faith actors on both sides. However, there is a ready distinction between shooting jaywalkers (bad!) and failing to enforce any traffic law (also bad!). College administrators also need to prevent violence, not just respond to it. So clearing demonstrators where there is a potential / foreseeable violent confrontation (good!) while not limiting free speech (also good!) is the goal. Demonstrations which force college to be done remotely seems like the kind of campus disruption that the rest of the students should not have to tolerate. This is entirely separate from the specific speech involved.
At Yale, the protesters were violating various established college rules (e.g. no overnight camping / structures without prior permission on university property). And visibly Jewish students were blocked from walking across public spaces. Yale's approach (clear warning ahead of time both in person and by the President via email) followed by non-violent arrests seems like a middle path.