In the current national debates over the Israel-Hamas war, many colleges and universities, like U.C. Berkeley, got student protestors to leave their encampments by promising to review their investments or involvement with Israel, which gives them wiggle room to put it under review and make a decision in less-heated times. The agreements have varied from school to school.
Some of it is comical. Al Jazeera reports that at U.C. Riverside, “Students also want the university to ban the sale of Sabra Hummus, a packaged hummus brand owned by PepsiCo and the Israel-based Strauss Group, from campus. The university said it would review the demand.” University negotiators can discuss such terms in good faith, just probably not with a straight face.
But some schools went further than promising to review investments and refreshments. Northwestern University agreed to cover education at the university for five Palestinian undergraduate students. Rutgers University said, “Hold my beer” and promised to support 10 Palestinian students, as well as create an Arab cultural center and hire staff and instructors. Will there be an ideological, religious, or racial test for those who are hired? Will donor money be diverted to this new center instead of for its intended use?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the president of Sonoma State was on administrative leave “after unilaterally announcing terms of an agreement with pro-Palestinian student protesters this week that promised to terminate academic exchanges or research collaborations with Israel.” Sonoma’s president soon quit. The Chronicle notes that San Francisco State and Sacramento State also came to terms with their protesters, but neither promised to boycott Israel academically.
There’s reason to caution schools about caving in to demands, because precedents matter.
At San Francisco State University, protesters kept the pressure on even after getting concessions from the institution. “Organizers said they will be reaching out to other protest groups at other colleges to meet en masse at a CSU board of trustees meeting to try to get the same concessions systemwide,” reported NBC Bay Area’s Robert Handa.
Beyond protesting
During a recent heated exchange I witnessed in San Francisco over the encampments and takeovers of administrative buildings and other campus upheaval, one person shouted, “They have a right to protest!” Which, of course, they do; their opponents might grumble, but I haven’t heard anyone seriously or realistically suggest protesting was to be made illegal. The pushback is against the threats to people on the other side, the destruction of school (or other public) property, the closing of bridges and major roadways. And now, it might be added, the diversion of common property and monies to satisfy the demands of a radical group of protesters.
And along those lines, a number of polls have shown broad support among college students for the right of pro-Palestinian groups to protest, but an early May poll by Generation Lab found that it’s not anywhere near their top concerns, and 81 percent of the students surveyed “support holding protesters accountable, agreeing with the notion that those who destroyed property or vandalized or illegally occupied buildings should be held responsible by their university.” Which, if the poll is sound, means the students generally are more level-headed than their school administrators (or their faculty, the more radical of whom have joined the protest actions); in many cases, schools are agreeing to drop charges or other punishments against the students.
The poll suggests the students generally are more level-headed than their school administrators.
University leaders who cave in to student protester demands can’t defend themselves as just trying to be neutral leaders. Imagine now that protesters with the opposite demands took over campus buildings and set up encampments on the quad. Would administration negotiators share the same belief if those protesters were pro-life demonstrators? Would they spend huge amounts of money setting up and staffing anti-abortion centers? What if they confronted Proud Boy marchers? Would the university leaders do a 180 turn and cave in to them, too? Or were the demands of the anti-Israel crowd easier to digest because the groundwork for them has been laid by decades of left-wing anti-Israeli propaganda in many institutions of higher learning?
And if those campus leaders were merely trying to buy peace by ditching their histories of academic freedom, it backfired quickly. At the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Jewish student groups issued a tough statement condemning their chancellor: “Chancellor [Mark] Mone gave protesters who fueled hate and violated school policies at UWM a seat at the table and even invited them to nominate individuals and faculty to serve on key university committees and working groups,” the statement says. “The chancellor’s decision to grant immunity to individuals who mocked and broke school rules and the law sets a dangerous precedent for future incidents on campus.”
Ah, precedents. If you reward people for using violence or the threat of violence to get their way outside of the established pathways (officials elected by voters, university boards elected by voters or appointed by officials elected by voters, and so on.), you’re laying the groundwork for rule by the loudest and most bullying.
Remember the Free Speech Movement? That wasn’t about free speech for everyone; it was about free speech for radicals on the left, as former Free Speech Movement activist Sol Stern noted in the Dallas Morning News. And you can draw a direct line from that movement to radical right-wing speakers coming to campuses, often at the behest of the local College Republicans (who have degenerated quite far since I was in college and they were really quite boring). Now the far right is using the left’s language (and policies) against it, bringing radical right wingers like Milo Yiannopolis or Ann Coulter and then getting their dander up when the left predictably throws a snit.
Worst of all, the universities are betraying the very foundations of the liberal education tradition, in which students and faculty engage in sifting and winnowing of diverse ideas.
Let them protest; let others protest the protesters. Don’t let any of them take over buildings; don’t let them damage things; don’t let them cut off others’ free speech. And don’t let them set the agenda for everyone else.
