Vestiges of political upheavals

From Denver’s Auraria Campus to Columbia University, students around the country are parking themselves on college campuses to protest. Academia has always been a thoroughly conservative industry and universities have rarely been hotbeds of radicalism, particularly in the global north. But since the rise of the neoliberal university in the 1980s, higher education has become highly commodified and universities have been turned into “edu-factories”, run by professional administrators on the basis of market principles.

The tumult on the New York City campus, on the other hand, is more than just a political spectacle, though. It has become a microcosm of the intractable challenges facing higher education in the 21st century — from managing political interference to balancing freedom of speech with a need to keep students and staff safe. It’s not a shock Columbia has become a focal point for campus strife. The school is based in the largest US city, with the second-biggest Jewish population in the world after Tel Aviv. About a fifth of the country’s Muslim population is in New York City, too. The campus is easily accessible and open, a vestige of the political upheaval caused by students during the Vietnam War. Columbia has taken flak for years from progressives who view its growth into West Harlem as an example of gentrification, and conservatives who see it as a bastion of liberalism. All those factors have influenced the level of outrage on and around campus in recent weeks.

As similar protests crop up at other universities, the demonstrations at Columbia – and the choices its leaders are making – are having a butterfly effect on schools nationwide. Dr Michael English, Peace, Conflict and Security Programme Director at CU Boulder has been quoted as saying: “We haven’t seen protests of this magnitude in the US around a war since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.” Colleges and universities have long been hotbeds for activism, playing an important role in shaping public sentiment on controversial issues. At Columbia, campus activism has a particularly contentious history. So, what is the noise about this time?

Colleges and universities in the United States are witnessing debates and heightened disagreements around student protests, with the Israel-Hamas conflict at its centre. Student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza continue to spread across the US, following recent week’s arrest of more than 100 demonstrators at Columbia University. There have been nearly 550 protest-related arrests in the past week at major US universities, according to a tally by Reuters.

The students want universities to cut ties with companies helping Israel’s war in Gaza and, in some cases, with Israel itself. Some universities have called in police to end the demonstrations, resulting in clashes and arrests, while others appear to be biding their time as the academic semester enters its final days.

The University of Southern California cancelled its main graduation ceremony, set for 10 May, after the arrests of 93 people at the Los Angeles campus in recent weeks. At Boston’s Emerson College, 108 people were arrested overnight with video showing students linking arms to resist officers, who then moved forcefully through the crowd, throwing some students to the ground.

In 1968, massive student demonstrations threw the campus into violence and chaos. Anger over the university’s ties to the Vietnam War, and its plans to build what would effectively have been a segregated school gym on public land, led to hundreds of arrests. In the end, administrators ended the school’s relationship with a war-connected think tank. Construction on the gym was halted. The 1968 protests altered administrators’ attitudes about Columbia’s relationship with the city, creating an impulse that persists today to make the campus feel open to the broader community. It took Columbia decades to recover its reputation and its endowment. The fallout from the upheaval sent the university into a financial tailspin, souring relationships with rich donors. Some New Yorkers still remember the episode.

Outside a school gate, a 70-year-old Columbia alum who identified herself by her first name, Daphne, held a sign that read: “50 years ago I was here to end the Vietnam War… Today I am here to say FREE PALESTINE!” She declined to give her full name.

English observed that student protests surrounding everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War and Occupy Wall Street have filled college campuses for decades. Students are active, they’re educated, and if they feel their opinion is being ignored, English said, they’re willing to push back on big issues. He has been quoted as saying: “I think if you look back at the 1960s, there are certainly a lot of parallels in terms of the frustration young people are feeling at the slow pace of change.” But many Americans haven’t always supported students exercising their constitutional rights.

While Americans like to celebrate the right to free speech, English said they’re not always supportive of those practising it. “I think that America has a short memory in some ways when it comes to protest,” English was quoted. “We’re really good at celebrating people like Dr King and thinking about how easy it was — apparently it was — to get women’s rights or civil rights in this country, but when we have to face up to the changes that were necessary to make those happen in the decades of struggle that it took for those to come about, we just get uncomfortable because it shows how much energy and suffering went into those different movements.”

While protests have evolved over the decades, shifting away from students taking over buildings and holding large-scale sit-ins, the way universities and police respond has changed, too. In the 1980s and ’90s, English said, police traded riot gear for their uniforms, engaging with protesters. That changed after 9/11, with a remilitarisation of police, English said. And arrests at protests have grown common. “I think for a lot of people who remember the 1960s and ’70s, what they tell me is that the sight of police on college campuses in riot gear is very reminiscent of that time,” English said.

“And so we seem to have lost a little bit of the knowledge we gained from the 1960s and ’70s that perhaps a policing first response isn’t the most appropriate way to deal with peaceful protest.” English said while an institution’s response can inflame tensions or reduce them, protesters have proven over the decades that utilising this constitutional right can help spark a dialogue, even change. “And this history of protest is part of our democratic system,” English said.

At Emory University’s Atlanta campus, 28 people were detained and the local branch of activist group Jewish Voice For Peace said police used tear gas and tasers on protesters. Police there admitted using “chemical irritants” but denied using rubber bullets. Cheryl Elliott, Emory’s vice president for public safety, said the aim was to clear the area of a “disruptive encampment while holding individuals accountable to the law’ but human rights groups questioned the “apparent use of excessive force” against free speech. Charges were dropped, meanwhile, against 46 of the 60 people detained by police at the University of Texas. At Indiana University Bloomington, police with shields and batons shoved into a line of protesters, arresting 33 people.

At City College of New York, police officers retreated from protests to cheers from the hundreds of students gathered on the lawn on the Harlem campus. At California State Polytechnic University in Humboldt, students have been barricaded in a campus building since Monday, with staff trying to negotiate. At the University of Connecticut, one protester was arrested and tents torn down, while protests continued at Stanford University and the New Jersey campus of Princeton University.

Harvard University is among those that have not taken action against protesters who have set up tents. At New York’s Columbia University, where the protest movement began, university officials remain locked in a stalemate with students while some universities — including Berkeley, Northwestern and Brown — have managed to avoid confrontations between the police and students.

Some of the universities, however, have seen counter-protests from Israel supporters. Violent clashes erupted recently on the campus of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) between pro-Palestinian protesters and a group of counter-demonstrators, according to live video coverage provided by a US broadcaster.

The UCLA student newspaper ‘Daily Bruin’ said supporters of Israel had tried to tear down a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on the campus. The far right has portrayed universities as “hotbeds of terrorist sympathisers” and “wokeness” that threaten core “American values” like freedom of speech.

In far-right propaganda, universities are the dystopian future of the whole country, where women, non-whites and LGBTQ+ people oppress “real Americans”, i.e. white, Christian conservatives. There is an urgent need to thus launch a separate campaign to work on the public image of universities in the US that is not in great shape, understandably.

Views expressed are personal