God help me, I wrote about the campus protests
And in German, too, which is where the trouble started...
[Reader’s note: I have been following the events on campuses across the country of the last few weeks with great interest and have spoken or exchanged emails with a great number of colleagues at a large number of institutions. I still have only been to two protest camps, the one set up in White Plaza at Stanford, and the one set up at UC Berkeley — so my take on these protests and their likely impact will likely continue to evolve. What is unlikely to evolve is my sense that the compulsive need to project weird shit onto college campuses that has been a mainstay of US politics over the last 70 years (basically since William F. Buckley) is continuing to be highly counterproductive. I don’t see how it becomes suddenly productive here.
The text below is a reflection on that weird projection. It also became entangled in it. On Wednesday two weeks ago, I was asked to write a piece about the protests for a major German newspaper. What is below is (with some tweaks, expansions, and stylistic updates) a rough translation of what I wrote. On Friday that week I was told that their editorial board (!) had decided that the text could not appear in the paper (they also, I would note, didn’t ask for any edits) – since I had unduly de-emphasized the raging antisemitism in the encampments. Which I don’t think is true, but whatever. More interestingly: this editorial board sits in Munich. So confident were they in their sense of what was happening on dozens of campuses that they’d never been to and knew no one at (on Friday I had to explain to a German interviewer where Emory University was), that they’d rather not print my article than ask a few clarifying questions. They knew THE CAMPUS, they knew what was there. Any local knowledge would have only unduly detracted from the visionary clarity of the image they had of US universities. Last Friday for In Bed with the Right I spoke with Samuel Catlin and Moira Donegan about “the campus” as a site of projection — I think this text sharpens some of the points I made on the podcast, and I think the story of its genesis provides a neat allegory of the problem.
I sent the text to a second national newspaper, which had asked me for a text as well, and for which I have written upwards of fifty articles. I never heard back. Finally on Monday (yesterday) it finally appeared in a third newspaper, Der Freitag, which was kind enough to accept it pretty much as written.]
The images are certainly disturbing. The NYPD escorting more than 100 students from the South Lawn of Columbia University. Colleagues arrested and hauled off while shouting for their department to be informed. Texas State Troopers in full riot gear, in formation at UT Austin. Tear gas over Gould Plaza in front of the NYU Business School. Violent altercations around the encampment at UCLA.They are shocking partly because they seem to arise from a kind of repetition compulsion. Militarized campus policing has a long and troubled history in the United States. So does the evident glee on the part of a large segment of the national and international public at seeing boots and batons on campus.
It's striking: for years we've been hearing that freedom of expression is being trampled on American university campuses and that woke orthodoxy has instituting some kind of “thought police”. Even the greatest campus triviality was almost instinctively described with police metaphors. Now the literal police are at the door and are hauling away students and professors who, according even to the police, were only expressing their opinions. And those who just a few weeks ago wanted to explain to the same students exactly what kind of “disfavored” or “triggering” opinions they should have to “endure” or “grapple with” on campus, in order to be less “coddled”, are silent or even applaud the interventions.
How many stories about students who were unfairly “indicted” for racism or sexism and then “thrown in cancel jail” or threatened with expulsion have you read in the press in the last decade? How many references to “policing” of speech? In the overwhelming majority of these cases, of course, nothing actually happened to these students and professors. Now there is a veritable deluge of suspensions, reprimands, evictions and arrests, and they are frighteningly literal. The New York Civil Liberties Union is protesting, the American Association of University Professors is concerned. But this is not their hour: it is the hour of university administrators, like Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who called the NYPD in the first place. It is the hour of big conservative donors, and of the politicians in Washington who seem to feel a certain glee tormenting in-over-their-head university administrators. Whether this is actually what this is: this certainly feels like the counter-revolution to a revolution that never happened.
Certainly: Neither the camp nor the harsh police response are unprecedented. In 1985, students at Columbia attempted a similar campaign to force a boycott of South Africa, keeping the university in suspense for three weeks. In 1968, students occupied several buildings. Occupy Wall Street had an offshoot in Berkeley in November 2011, roughly where the Palestine encampment sits now. Of course, the harsh crackdown by security forces also brings back memories of the Black Lives Matter protests from 2014. At that time, however, universities hardly took any action against their students and calling the police was a comparative rarity. But, as columnist Jamele Bouie notes, they are now doing what they might have liked to do back then but did not dare. The sureness with which the public fury attaches itself to scholars and administrators of color, the way “DEI” and postcolonial studies get looped into the attack (even as the same people insist that the protestors aren’t students at all, but rather “outside agitators) suggests that Bouie is right — again, whether this is all this is, I don’t know. But it’s clearly being pursued as revenge for a — very, very tentative — few steps towards a racial reckoning on college campuses.
A first point that may seem so obvious as to barely be worth making concerns a first reason not to put too much stock in what American college students are doing one way or the other. American college students have historically not been the architects or origin points politically motivated violence (sexual violence is another story). This is different in other countries, but the American campus – often remote, often insular, often expensive – has traditionally made US students political only within a fairly limited ambit. Students feel this too: In college I lived two years in dorms that student lore insisted had been built to be “riot proof” housing. Their floorplan indeed looked like they had sprung from the fevered mind of a Tetris champion. I imagine this explanation was largely apocryphal — I’ve seen how decisions are made about college buildings, and it’s far too shambolic a process to manage a straight-up anti-insurgency security architecture. Still: what the student story about these buildings suggests is that of frustrated political (student) potential: What Baron Haussmann’s grand avenues did for Paris, their narrative went, cinder blocks and concrete slabs did for their dorms – make them revolution proof.
So traditionally, college students have tended to be not authors but victims of politically motivated violence. Except that this violence usually emanates from the police, the national guard, the highway patrol and other paramilitary forces and is therefore never punished and quickly forgotten. How many Freedom Riders died by the hands of local law enforcement throughout the 60s. In 1968, the Highway Patrol shot at striking students in Organgeburg, North Carolina – 3 of them died. When Ronald Reagan ordered the National Guard onto the Berkeley campus in 1969, the armed officers promptly shot and killed a bystander. A year later, the National Guard opened fire on Kent State’s campus, killing four.
But when politicians or law enforcement deal with the campus and especially the students there, disproportionality is not just the rule, but rather the secret principle of the thing. Because, as a rule, the invasion by law uniformed men (and now women) is usually part a proxy war. It hardly ever seems to be about specific actions by the activists; their unwashed heads are made to be sites for muc broader social pathologies. That seems to be true this time as well: watching the police on campus feels like it’s about many things – war on terror-style security theater, revenge for Black Lives Matter, to name just two --, but it’s hard to see how it’s about antisemitism or the security of Jewish students. It is difficult, for instance, to understand how the wooden fence that NYU wanted to use to keep its own students away from the former site of the solidarity encampment is supposed to protect Jewish students. Jewish students and faculty, regardless of whether they’re participating in the encampments or worried about the encampments, seem at best a secondary concern. The antipathy that rains down on American campuses, and especially on the students there, feels like a a rematch for recent American history. It's once again about "wokeness", it's about America's guilt or innocence, it's about “identity politics”, it's about demographic change. Inconvenient facts, like the fact that there seem to be many Jewish students among the protesters, are brushed aside for the sake of the proxy war that Republicans in Congress and various antiwoke grifters actually want to wage.
The student voices, which mostly seem to chime in to contextualize or explain, are barely audible – New York magazine may hand over parts of their latest issue to their (very important) stories, but I don’t get the impression that their stories make their way to the editorial office of the New York Times, CNN, or (shudder) The Atlantic, to say nothing of the corridors of power in state capitols and Washington, DC. Instead, we get Peggy Noonan sitting on a park bench at Columbia unwittingly reenacting a famous 30 Rock meme:
And let’s be frank: how could these stories break through? After all, for decades now media and politicians have been implicitly teaching the US public that each of them is a better judge of what happens on college campuses than the young people who actually live there. When it comes to “the campus”, things don’t have to literally be true – that’s what we’ve all been taught, one bullshit campus anecdote and one campus-fiction at a time. So when reporters shoot footage from “Columbia University”, but are in fact hanging out on Broadway, and thus outside the campus gates, it probably doesn’t even matter to them. “Eh, close enough” is what we’ve taught ourselves as our unstinting credo when it comes to these young people. The editorial team of the student-run Columbia Spectator saw the crisis noticably differently from those who had parachuted in a few hours prior: the president and her administration, they wrote, should have brought a struggling community together. Instead, she sacrificed them, students and faculty on either side of the various disagreements:
“We have witnessed your capitulation to harmful media representation and opportunistic Republicans whose aim, it seems, is to put the values of a liberal education on trial. We have witnessed House Speaker Mike Johnson threatening intervention from the National Guard from the steps of Low Library and a congressman call for withholding financial aid from protesters in a press conference outside Columbia’s gates.”
Students at NYU pointed out that just a few hours before the violent evacuation of the Gould Plaza the Muslim salāt took place in the camp — and a Seder to mark the beginning of Passover. You may find that an important detail, or you may decry my bringing it up as a deflection, an attempt to relativize (I know you may do that, because a bunch of people in my inbox have already done that.). But I think that, if that’s your opinion, what makes the details that Congressman Ritchie Torres or Speaker Mike Johnson, or Peggy Noonan over at the Wall Street Journal have picked out for you better than those details the students bring up? Why are some facts wrong facts? This is true if we’re dealing with an object that is at least to some extent imaginary — many of us have learned to live with an imaginary, a virtual campus, and we live well with it. And we don’t like it when that virtuality gets disturbed.
Over the last 50 years, the campus has become a projection surface (a “phantasm”, as Samuel Catlin writes in a brilliant essay in Parapraxis) through which American society (and, since the 1990s, certain Western European societies) has taken stock of itself. The campus has become increasingly virtual, a simulation that only partially corresponds to lived reality, but which has become an indispensable part of a reactionary movement within American politics. Even just the definite article is wrong: “the” campus. The demonstrations that began in elite Columbia have long since spread to public universities in Texas and Berkeley, to Swarthmore College and Emerson College, as well as to Cal Poly Humboldt - an institution 300 miles north of San Francisco on the remote Pacific coast, where the proportion of Latinx students is 33% and the proportion of Pell Grant recipients (i.e. students from low-income families) is 52%.
The image of “the” American campus and “the” American student that media representatives, members of Congress, and even those colleagues at elite institutions who usually get to talk in the media tend to utilize as though it were definitive and straightforward, is a deliberate distortion of a deeply ambiguous, complicated, contradictory reality. The many journalists who collected quotes from the campus protest on Broadway in New York last week, when Broadway is not even on campus, and who thus very likely just stuck their cameras and microphones in the direction of random New Yorkers, shows the uncomfortable nesting of metaphors and metonymies, through which the “campus” about which we then all shoot our mouths off is constituted in the first place.
The point, mind you, is not that everything is just wonderful about and around these protests. The point also isn’t that there’s nothing wrongheaded, regrettable, dangerous or even punishable said or done during these protests. The point is that what's happening here is dynamic, diverse, and ultimately perhaps just not particularly important to anyone who isn’t on the specific campus in question. And that the nuances that American media discover with great regularity when it comes to not having to call Elon Musk an anti-Semite (and German media whenever an asylum seeker’s home is on fire somewhere) are being deliberately withheld in this case.
The motives and ideas that drive these young people are certainly diverse. And you can't help but suspect that some people are consciously trying not to reflect on these motives too closely. Just to do some math, the young people who camped on the South Lawn were mostly born in the twenty-first century. Which also means: they can no longer remember the horror of September 11th, the global shock caused by the brutal act. But what they can remember very well: the massive restrictions on civil rights and human rights, the racism, the brutal campaigns through which the wounded superpower put itself more and more in the wrong with each passing year.
They remember it simply because they live with these consequences every day. There is not a single day in their young lives that they did not live under the shadow of the mistakes their country made back then. They live with the deadly consequences of American power left unchecked by its citizens. For many students, Israel is making a historic mistake with its actions in Gaza — and the US right alongside it. The echoes of Iraq, the protestors’ sensitivity to the cavalier disposal over Arab lives that is still so common in US foreign policy making: maybe they are not the right lens for looking at the conflict. But what makes us so sure?
Why are neither their activism nor their anger embedded in this context, but rather (and again especially in the European reception) in older language games we are all considerably better at than they are? It’s probably because if we decide they’re simply antisemites, we are magically relieved of having to reflect on our own mistakes. As Samuel Catlin writes in his excellent essay:
“This relocation of the theater of war to the campus refashions the very real violence visited upon Israelis and, in vastly greater numbers, upon Palestinians into an ambient anxiety about American Jewish safety. Are American Jews, the media asks, safe on campus? Do they feel safe on campus?”
We are refashioning a conflict that does (and should) bring up terrible echoes of our own recent history into a campus war, because we don’t really want to engage with it on its own terms. Who knows, perhaps the encampments still turn out somehow dangerous — maybe those Columbia kids were reading Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction for nefarious (albeit also Very Short) purposes. There are plenty of ways for the protests to either fizzle out or to squander the moral high ground. The students at Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, Stanford and elsewhere are in control of their own destinies. They will have to live with the consequences of their protests, and one can only hope that they act accordingly. But long before any of that becomes clear, they will become — what am I saying, they already are — targets. Americans currently staring at the campus won’t stop, because they seem to want to negotiate and/or avoid the disturbing questions raised by the war in Gaza. On the backs of young people.
This is probably exactly the same reason why German newspapers are currently pumping out an article a day about American campuses they’d be hard pressed to pinpoint on a map. To avoid having to stare at Gaza. For on that fictional campus that Samuel Catlin describes, questions still seem solvable and the blame clearly assigned: mostly to the young people who are just entering this world. And not to us, who made that world in the first place
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