Each college had a choice; in most places, they chose to escalate.
At Indiana University, a police sniper was stationed on the roof of a building; at the University of Virginia, they dispersed protesters with pepper spray; at U.C.L.A., it was with rubber bullets; and at the University of Texas in Austin they arrested dozens of students on pretexts so flimsy that the local district attorney threw out all the charges within 48 hours, and then they returned for a second round of arrests a week later.
The two mass arrests at Columbia bookended the rapid escalation: When New York City police officers swarmed the green on April 18, there were hardly any similar encampments anywhere else in the country, and it would have been reasonable to think that campus unrest had peaked back in the fall; but by April 30, when the nation’s largest police force entered occupied Hamilton Hall, something like a national protest movement had sprung up over the course of just two weeks. By May 2, according to The Appeal, a nonprofit criminal-justice news site, there were at least 100 encampments in nearly 40 states, and more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested. In proudly defending the mass arrests in New York, Mayor Eric Adams did not focus on trespassing or the disruption to campus life. What he emphasized instead was the urgent need to literally police an ideological threat. “These are our children,” he said, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized.”
Almost as soon as the horrifying news of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks reached the United States, the country, and especially its media, treated college campuses as a significant front of the brutal war they initiated. This attitude is several kinds of narcissistic, but in its way it is also only natural: Campus conflicts are both more proximate and more personal than the war itself for many Americans; the initial Hamas attack was gruesome, and the Israeli response has been extreme, intensifying the always-fraught domestic politics of the United States’ relationship with Israel; and the spectacle of college protests, which inevitably mix political fervor with adolescent grandiosity and hints of potential generational change, seems almost designed to generate discourse about “kids these days.”
But what has transpired in the aftermath of the first crackdowns on campuses — as protests and counterprotests have grown more intense, with some universities seeking to negotiate with increasingly militant student leaders but most calling the cops instead — is also not just a story about the war in Gaza or a new generational divide. It is also a case study in the dynamics of escalation, and I’d like to emphasize three stories, each related, that may help explain the pattern.
The first is the militarization of American police forces and the rise of what Radley Balko has called the “warrior cop,” especially after Sept. 11 — a period in which, it is important to remember, the United States has gotten vastly safer, but during which law enforcement has nevertheless gotten far more martial, in their weaponry and gear, their tactics and training, and indeed their outward-facing “thin blue line” rhetoric, as well.
The second is the recent turn against all forms of protest, by law enforcement and the public, in the aftermath of the mass climate change marches of 2019 and the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Over the last five years, significant legal restrictions on protest have been turned into law globally. Nearly half of American states have also imposed limits; several states have even passed bills granting immunity to drivers who run over protesters, and New York Democrats have proposed a law that would define road-blocking protests as “domestic terrorism.”
But we also hear more and more from critics who believe that any protest that simply inconveniences others has crossed a line to become counterproductive or offensive. Last week, President Biden scolded college students for pitching tents on their quads, warning that “dissent must never lead to disorder” and asserting that “order must prevail.” The House had just passed a bill that could restrict criticism of the state of Israel by labeling it as antisemitic, Nancy Pelosi previously called on the F.B.I. to investigate protesters, and there are some hints that such investigations are ongoing.
And the third is the breaking apart of the ideological alliance, which held relatively firm for about a decade and a half, between the liberal-establishment values of the country’s institutional elite and the progressive values of the country’s social-justice voices. This strange and unstable coalition of left-of-center groups and institutions held for more than a decade and a half, first under Barack Obama — who seemed to many to embody a new kind of “radical establishment” — and then under Donald Trump — who inspired a desperate alliance of big-tent resistance liberalism. The alliance always seemed a bit hypocritical to some skeptics on the left and many critics on the right, but it also represented the basic grammar of liberal power through the long 2010s. If, in 2013 or 2019, you were in charge of, say, Harvard, or Facebook, or the Creative Artists Agency, even Pershing Square Capital Management or The New York Times, it was tempting to believe that you were not just acting as a force for self-advancement and elite reproduction but also delivering social justice in your work and affirming, even advancing, the progressive arc of history.
After Covid, and Biden’s election, and the arrival of an “anti-woke” backlash among a certain class of American elites, that ideological coalition began to splinter, and it is now much harder to pretend that those two sets of values are natural complements, or even two halves of a liberal cultural hegemony. This challenge was confronted by the country’s elite universities late last year, when criticism about how campus administrators had handled anti-Israel protests grew into a larger debate about diversity, equity and inclusion and the structure of the self-styled meritocracy: Would the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard and M.I.T. choose to conduct themselves as avowedly elite institutions, concerned primarily with elevating their own status and the privileged standing of their students, or instead as a democratic force, devoted to reshaping the American leadership class toward criteria other than who performed best on the S.A.T.?
For a time, these goals hadn’t appeared to be in such obvious tension, at least according to the people committed to balancing them, who offered visions of a diversified but meritocratic elite as though they were postcards from an inevitable-seeming virtuous future. But in recent years it has come to seem less workable to have it both ways, and now two of the three college presidents who testified before Congress in December have since been forced to resign under the pressure of that tension. Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, testified last month and may soon be on her way out, as well, unable to bridge the gap between the school’s protest-friendly faculty and its apparently horrified donors, or to inoculate the school and its administration against criticism from the likes of Mike Johnson and Elise Stefanik, who just a few years ago would have seemed completely irrelevant figures in any such campus saga.
This is not just a story about college students and universities, elite or otherwise, especially given that many school administrators have effectively de-escalated protests with negotiation. The same pattern has unfolded in the corporate world, with what was near-universal commitment to environmental, social and governance principles, producing in relatively short order a widespread backlash and walk-back, similar to the recent turn against D.E.I. initiatives. There is a growing rift between the Democratic establishment and activist factions, social media companies have retreated from their efforts to shape and define the public square, and legacy media organizations have tried to recalibrate their ideological positioning after going too far, especially in 2020. The “diploma divide” hasn’t stopped growing, with well-educated Americans voting for Democrats by huge margins, but the ideological content of those elite commitments has begun to shift. The war on woke may be fizzling out, but it has already left its mark.
It’s not yet clear what this might mean for the country’s electoral politics. To trust the polls, few Americans seem to care all that deeply about the war in Gaza, despite wall-to-wall coverage of the war itself and the protests about it, and in surveys more people say the response by colleges to those protests has been “not harsh enough” than say it has been “too harsh.” As November pulls closer into view, the old desperate anti-Trump coalition may temporarily solidify again, despite warnings from the left that Biden’s support for Israel’s war might yield mass abstention among young voters. What follows the election is in many ways unsure, but neither outcome seems all that likely to revitalize that resistance coalition, which already looks less like a postcard of the future and more like a prepandemic time capsule.
Beyond elections, cultural politics matter, too, of course, as do the shape and orientation of institutions, and while America’s elite universities are not exactly tilting right, their pretense toward progressivism has been dropped with remarkable speed. Just six years ago, Columbia devoted a semester-long program and a three-day conference to honoring the school’s mythic 1968 protests, and its then-president, Lee Bollinger, called the decision to call in the police to break up that student occupation “a serious breach of the ethos of the university.” Perhaps it is a sign of simple institutional hypocrisy that Bollinger’s successor, one presidential term later, seems so much less ambivalent about deploying actual force against the school’s students, however outrageous or unruly. But it’s also a sign of the times, and how they’ve changed.
Further Reading
New York Magazine turns an entire issue over to the staff of the Columbia Spectator to cover the protests and crackdown. (The Spectator editors also weigh in here.)
Abdallah Fayyad writes in Vox about those colleges which tried to de-escalate (and why more made the other choice).
David Pozen of Columbia Law on what has been revealed about American universities by their response to campus dissent.
Lois Beckett of the Guardian speaks with Annelise Orleck, the former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies department, about her own violent arrest.
Branko Milanovic, an economist from CUNY’s Graduate Center, on “universities as factories.”
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, N.Y.U. historian Thomas Sugrue writes about “college presidents behaving badly.”
Columbia’s Adam Tooze reflects, in his Chartbook newsletter, on the “state as blunt force” and his “impressions of the Columbia campus clearance.”
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