It was only a matter of time before the American student movement spread to Britain. In Oxford, tents are pitched on lawns that students are not normally allowed to walk on. The ground outside King's College, Cambridge, resembles Glastonbury, with “emergency toilet” tents set up. Similar camps can be found at UCL and the University of Manchester. There have been no clashes with police, but there is a possibility of more clashes in the future. In Leeds, for example, pro-Palestinian students attempted to storm a university building, leading to bloody clashes with security guards.
When students revolted in the 1960s, many had good reason to fear they would be drafted into combat in Vietnam.
From the Sorbonne to the University of Sydney, the movement spread worldwide. Its ostensible causes cannot be ignored. We may be appalled by both the October 7 attacks and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians. It would be inhumane not to share the widespread horror of what is happening in Gaza. And, of course, antiwar rallies have long been part of the student experience and a hallmark of a free society. (You should know that when I was an undergrad, I went to London to march against the Iraq war.) But when the most privileged young people in the Western world called for a “global intifada,” In some cases, the sight of people clearly expressing their opinions was hardly noticeable. The solidarity with Hamas shows how easily these protests have been co-opted for more radical ends.
The latest escalation began when Minoush Shafik, the politically savvy president of Columbia University in New York, sought to make clear that anti-Semitism has no place on campus. She is a professor of economics, and her CV includes significant roles in government, where she ran the UK Department for International Development as permanent secretary and served as a crossbencher in the House of Lords. .
When called to give evidence to Congress in late April, she said she did not want to repeat the mistakes of her colleagues at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who had failed badly in failing to take a firm stand against anti-Semitism for months. There wasn't. Before they even know they're out of a job. She vowed to steadfastly enforce university rules. But students determined to challenge her authority responded by erecting tents on Columbia University's campus. When Baroness Shafiq fulfilled her oath in Congress and demanded that the New York City Police Department clear the encampment, she launched even larger protests. The copycat camp quickly spread to more than about 50 universities in the United States.
For the most part, protesters have been confined to pitching tents in common spaces on campus and chanting slogans intended to shock and provoke. Many universities have also taken over administrative buildings and prevented classmates from moving around campus or going to the library. In response, a growing number of American university presidents called the police, and more than 2,000 protesters (many of whom turned out to be outside agitators with no ties to the universities) were arrested. Ta.
When students revolted in the 1960s, they embraced many foolish and dangerous causes, from Fidel Castro to the Cultural Revolution. However, their anger proved to be long-lasting. One of the reasons for this was that many of the players participating in the games had skin. They resented public censorship and severe restrictions on their sex lives on university campuses. Most importantly, many had good reason to fear being drafted into America's disastrous Vietnam War.
Today, students are once again horrified by a bloody conflict in a faraway land. Although most protesters do not have such personal connections, this hurt is especially acute for students with ties to the community. Unlike in 1968, they do not have to fear that anyone will be drafted into the conflict. And it is the descendants of the white middle class who are especially susceptible to the most extreme and nihilistic forms of oppositional politics. Major organizations supporting the protests, such as Students for Justice in Palestine, explicitly celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack in the days following October 7th.
At many universities, it is taboo to call the police on protesters, even if it is against the law.
There is another contrast between 1968 and now. At the time, the organizations targeted by students felt a responsibility to maintain order and preserve tradition. Today, many professors and administrators consider themselves the natural successors of the student movement. Many leading universities talk about the events of 1968 with a mix of pride and nostalgia, actively promoting themselves as the best places for political action. For example, New York University's website features his three-part series on how prospective students can learn “what progressive change actually looks like.” Many universities offer scholarships specifically aimed at activists and admit students based on recognition of their high school students' activism. When students arrive on campus, they find that the majority of staff are located far to the left of the average citizen.
This helps explain some of the absurd moments we're seeing. Protesters who occupied a key administrative building at Columbia University held a press conference and demanded that administrators deliver food and drinks. When an astonished journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation to people engaged in blatantly illegal activities, she said they had no moral right to receive “basic humanitarian assistance.” He claimed he had the right. Similar developments were seen at British universities, with student unions handing out free drink vouchers and protesters demanding that the universities they ostensibly defy keep warm and comfortable.
Protesters who had occupied university buildings and hoped that administrators would deliver dinner may have fallen prey to their delusions. But if it is, it is something that the university has been actively cultivating. At Oxford University, for example, nearly 200 dons expressed solidarity with the camp, which they described as a “public global education project.” When powerful constituencies within a university praise students who break rules, it is natural for students to feel betrayed when they are punished or arrested.
All parents know that the best way to enforce rules on children is to be clear and consistent. Children need to know exactly what they can and cannot do. And if they break the rules, there should be consequences.
In recent years, universities have increasingly acted in the shoes of parents, treating students as children who need to be soothed, coddled, and, most of all, soothed. (This indulgence was created by the magazine's student editors. Colombian law review (They can fervently ask schools to cancel exams because they are “irreparably shaken” by police “violence” in clearing encampments.) But especially when it comes to freedom of speech. , the rules set by the university are highly contradictory, and the consequences for breaking them are outrageous. .
If you deviate from your principles in times of peace, you will have nothing to fall back on in times of crisis.
The university claims to follow two rules regarding free speech. To ensure academic freedom, students and faculty are believed to have the right to engage in controversial speech, even if many consider it offensive. Particularly in the United States, which has an absolutist culture of free speech, this has traditionally applied to positions that would be illegal in some European countries, such as Holocaust denial.
The second set of rules is intended to maintain public safety on campus and ensure that students with different opinions can get along. Students do not have the right to prevent their classmates from attending lectures by controversial guest speakers, occupy the president's office as part of a protest, or destroy university property. The free speech tradition did not include the right to veto a heckler.
The problem is that universities on both sides of the pond are not following or enforcing these rules. In particular, it has become far too restrictive when it comes to controversial speech and far too lenient when it comes to punishments for blatant rule violations.
MIT disinvited a speaker who was scheduled to speak about climate change because he opposed affirmative action. Harvard University has allowed a faculty to police instructors who professed to believe in the existence of biological sex. New York University now prints phone numbers on student IDs and encourages community members to call its bias response team in case they hear of a “microaggression.”
The resulting double standards are clear. For example, a few years ago a student at Columbia University went on a stupid rant, drunkenly talking about why “white people are the best thing that ever happened to the world.” He was quickly censured by the university and banned from some parts of campus. Five years later, the university is still allowing hundreds of students to chant slogans glorifying and even calling for violence, such as “Globalize the Intifada.”
At the same time, many universities intend to never seriously discipline students for loudly denouncing classes, occupying campus buildings, or vandalizing statues of controversial historical figures. It is reported that there is no such thing. At many universities, it is completely taboo to call the police on protesters, even when they clearly violate the law. As a result, destructive protests on campuses have steadily increased over the past few decades.
Events with speakers could not be held due to threats or actual violence. Some university presidents allowed students to siege their offices for weeks or months. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, tent encampments appeared on multiple campuses and remained in place for several weeks. Similarly, in the UK, students are finding the courage to break the most basic rules set by their universities. For example, in early March, a group calling itself Palestine Action proudly shared a video of one of its members spraying red paint and slashing a painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, Cambridge.
As the situation became increasingly volatile and in some places violent, university presidents attempted to restore order through negotiation, threats of expulsion, and finally the police. In most cases, long-standing university regulations, and even free speech principles, gave universities the right to take these actions. However, many pro-Palestinian protesters understandably perceived this as high-handed and hypocritical, having long established the norm that students are free to break rules and occupy university buildings. .
One of the many problems that arises from straying from principles in times of peace is that in times of crisis there is nothing to fall back on. Since October 7, the university has accomplished the seemingly impossible: giving both Jewish and pro-Palestinian students a reason to feel that they are being treated unfairly. Over the past few months, Jewish students have felt understandably abandoned as they have had to endure hate speech directed at their group alone without any intervention from the administration. Pro-Palestinian protesters now feel unfairly targeted due to recent violations of precedent and, in some cases, the destruction of their encampments by police.
To avoid similar disasters in the future, universities should publicly commit to defending both free speech and public order. But principles are probably too late to save them from their current problems. For now, they are accused of looking like hypocrites no matter what they do. Because they are hypocrites because of the failures of the past few years.
The protests are likely to grow in size and become even more uncontrollable in the coming days and weeks as Israeli forces advance into Rafah. Still, it seems unlikely that they will last forever. Part of the reason is that university leaders have become surprisingly active in asking police to end illegal camps. But the main reason is that the academic year ends at many universities in a few weeks, and most student activists are canceling exciting trips they had planned or canceling prestigious summer internships. Because I don't want to give up.
There's a good chance there won't be a rebroadcast of 1968 this year. But there may turn out to be one important similarity, at least in the United States. At the end of that tumultuous year, Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election, promising to end the domestic turmoil. By the end of this year, Donald Trump may be able to take a page out of Nixon's playbook and repeat the feat.
