The wheel keeps on turning when it comes to campus protests and the attention of American public culture to campus protests.
There’s a deep structural groove worn into our habits of public conversation for talk about what young people at college do, and much of that groove has been filled with judgmental resentment and comically performative anxiety about the rising generation. That’s been the case back to the late 19th Century when college was something that only a small percentage of the total population experienced. (And arguably well before that, if you’ve read medieval complaints about students.)
The resentment and anxiety hasn’t always been about the politics of college and college students. More often, it’s been concerned with the morality and character of students, whether they seemed to deserve the privileges and advantages that would be offered to them as adults. And frequently, it comes from professors and administrative leaders as much as from a wider public. The way insiders complain about students is tonally and substantively different—closer to the way that doctors complain about patients or lawyers complain about clients—but it often overlaps or echoes the wider public concern. Students are habitually said to be less serious, less studious, less hard-working, less skillful, less virtuous than preceding generations.
Since the 1960s, that kind of kvetching has often turned to evaluating their political activism as well in the same terms: less focused, less substantive, less grounded, less strategic, often from the perspective of older adults who are essentially promoting their own protest or activism in their college years. (Or their own probity in refusing to indulge in activism at that time.) “Kids these days” has also gained a nasty partisan edge in the last thirty years—politically ambitious Ivy Leaguers happy to have had their educations and the social advantages thereof now almost ritualistically signal that they intend to move up as far-right conservatives by almost comically trashing everything about their education and by narrowcasting attacks on every micropolitical shift in day-to-day life of a small subset of elite colleges and universities. A single ill-considered quote in the student newspaper or a single sloganeering banner hung in a campus building can be amplified via a well-oiled resentment machine into a national controversy by pundits.
I say all this as a prologue about why it’s hard to say much of anything about campus activism if you aim to be a responsible and responsive professor. This is a familiar problem for me in my blogging, one that I’ve wrestled with before all the way back to 2003, but it’s only gotten worse as the attention to higher education as a political punching bag has intensified.
To be a good professor, you have to understand your students as people who are trying out ideas they’re encountering and testing who they want to be in an environment that is (or should be) inviting them to experiment with self-making. Your job is to assist in both of those processes, which requires indulgence, acceptance and appreciation in equal measure. The people who imagine that teaching college students, particularly in terms of ethics, values and moral judgment, is about strict control, stern dictates and indoctrination are asking for disastrous malpractice and total failure. (The fact that the far right imagines that professors ‘indoctrinate’ is yet another example of American conservatism fixating on an accusation that is in fact a confession of their own desires.)
But pedagogy does require something else, and that’s feedback. Learning requires someone to say “that was a mistake” or at least the conscious tending of feedback mechanisms that communicate that message. It also requires the prospective learner to be open to learning. All of us can improve from feedback; some of us have elected to close ourselves to its signal in some domains of our lives. In political life, that openness can be abused: it is precisely what a “concern troll” does, abusing the willingness to learn in order to manipulate a target’s political or social thinking.
So to be a source of meaningful feedback to students engaged in activism, a professor has to have some kind of standing with the students. I don’t think that’s necessarily a profession of strong agreement with them. In fact, my top advice for student activists it would be to look warily on professors who seem too eager to echo or amplify everything they say, or who too strongly point them at a target via the dispensing of inside information. You learn more from someone who is willing to say, “Yeah, that’s not a good idea”, in a friendly way.
Or so I hope, because I do see a few things in the current moment of feeling about Gaza, Israel-Palestine, and anti-semitism where that would be my message. Perhaps most importantly, I think students on multiple sides need to think very carefully about the difference between being unsafe, being uncomfortable, and being criticized.
Are there students on campuses who are in some real sense being threatened physically, psychologically or otherwise because of who they are and how they feel about Israel-Palestine? Yes, there are. There have been real acts of violence, though most of them off-campus and not involving other students as assailants, directed at students who are Jewish, students who are Palestinian, Arab or Muslim, students who are defenders of Israeli nationalism or Israeli military action, students who are defenders of Palestinian sovereignty or critics of Israeli policy or the definition of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Students who are critical of Israel or Israeli policy have been put on do-not-hire lists, had their names put on trucks cruising around campuses, and been targeted by online death threats. Jewish students have faced physically or emotionally menacing or threatening reactions both online and offline simply for expressing sympathy for Israel or a desire to see Hamas punished for October 7th.
But I think threat and discomfort are sometimes being conflated, or the borderland between them is being expanded to the size of a capacious territory of its own. That’s not new to this conflict: it’s a consequence of one branch of identity politics and its intersection with institutional power being dramatically inflated and appropriated in all sorts of directions—by conservatives, by what Olufemi Taiwo calls “elite capture”, and by the extremely online and their proclivity to amplify everything for the sake of (sometimes monetized) attention. In many cases, people who claim to be unsafe are actually quite safe where they are. Quite a few observers have pointed out that Israel is not in fact a place of safety for the world’s Jewish populations, and that President Biden needlessly implied that the United States is not committed to the safety of its Jewish citizens and residents, who in fact are as safe here as they are anywhere in the world. The same certainly goes for college campuses, and it applies to Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, and to partisans of many political perspectives. Sometimes students say they feel unsafe and there’s no real grounds for that claim.
What I think we are really talking about a lot of the time is comfort, welcoming, or in the latest favored language in institutional settings, belonging. Who feels like they belong? And should everyone feel that way in every campus?
Plainly in some sense, no. There are colleges and universities that have very strong kinds of declared exclusivity: they are only for students identifying as women or the adherents of a particular religious doctrine. There are others which have long histories of serving particular communities or groups that give them a slant on “belonging”: HCBUs or institutions like Brandeis. And there are institutions which are so highly selective that they by default achieve a kind of ‘exclusivity’ whether they technically welcome every kind of applicant they can imagine, because they end up excluding “merely” excellent students who have nothing to distinguish themselves from every other such excellent applicant, but still more exclude a great many more who would never think to apply simply because their academic and non-academic credentials aren’t competitive. ‘Belonging’, in this sense, is most expansive at an affordable public university or college that is relatively non-selective—the biggest set of almost-everybody can be there, and in at least some cases, is actually there.
Over time, under pressure from activists, from parents, from legal advisors seeking to limit liability real and perceived, from governmental advice, and from institutional standards, many campuses—however exclusive or open in their understanding of ‘belonging’—have promised not only to be unfailingly safe but also universally comforting. The latest consultative wave talking about ‘belonging’ now advises campus administrators that everyone can belong. But this clashes headlong into an equally advocated doctrine that the entire point of going to university is to encounter discomfort, to feel ill at ease in classes, in dormitories, in everyday life. To deal with the unfamiliar, to have habits of thought and practice disrupted, to challenge oneself and sometimes fail to meet the challenge, to accept and internalize ways of seeing and understanding the world that embrace critique and skepticism.
That clash is one of the spaces that cynical demagogues on the right have punched through to dismaying effect in a way that ought to have been foreseen by leftist social and political thinkers long before we got to this point. The far right understood the politics of grievance arising from being uncomfortable and applied it to their favored constituencies. Surely children shouldn’t be made to be uncomfortable in studying racism? Surely everyone should belong? Isn’t the way to make that happen to put aside everything that creates discomfort?
Our only hope in response is for everyone to embrace a responsibility to be uncomfortable at times, and to resist entreaties to easily conflate discomfort with threat. And right now, that especially means pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. I want to be really clear and blunt here: if there’s anybody threatened right now in a larger sense, it’s them. They’re the ones whose names are being put on lists, whose expulsion is being called for, whose slogans are being capaciously misinterpreted. But they’re also the group least interested in hearing any criticism or pushback of either the tactics of their activism or the substance of their advocacy. Given the stakes of the issue at hand and the intensity of the interests that focus on it, I understand the armoring-up, but it’s a mistake.
Among other things, it’s a mistake because it is allowing some other students to feel their discomfort is closely adjacent to threat. It should be possible on a college campus for a student who is a Zionist to articulate that point-of-view in safety while also accepting the discomfort of being criticized for that advocacy by others. All the more so because outside of higher education, there have been many attempts to argue that to criticize Zionism is the same thing as expressing hatred for Jews, an argument that is wholly pernicious. But this possibility—to argue for Zionism or to argue that retaliation for Hamas’ attack is just or necessary—has to extend equally in all directions. It should be possible for a student to argue for a two-state solution to Israel-Palestine or a one-state solution or to argue that it’s none of our business and to leave it to the people living there. It should be possible for a student to argue that violence in response to any oppression is justified, or that it never is. That’s what we’re here for, and there is never a guarantee that arguments will not cause discomfort or make someone question whether they belong. There has to be reciprocity, and it has to match the intensity of what you say. You want to speak loudly and strongly? Accept with humility that you are now obliged to hear that intensity come back at you with the same strength. You want to be heard sensitively and precisely? Then speak that way out into the public sphere of your campus.
This is the ground that the university presidents stumbled upon but that they were right to tread—just with a surer step and a clearer voice. There’s a big difference between coming up to an individual student and saying, “You should leave, you don’t belong, get out” and saying “If you don’t support the rights of the oppressed, I question whether your values are aligned with this community” or “If you don’t believe in the right of my people to defend themselves, I question whether your values are aligned with common sense, let alone this community”. Those kinds of statements are always on point, whether they’re coming from the heart or the head.
Anybody in a community can feel, often with complete lucidity, that they don’t belong, and sometimes they can be right about that. I have been to places where on paper I am completely welcome and come to the conclusion that I could never come to really feel that way. I have been to places where on paper I’m not really supposed to be there and yet felt welcomed in, not because I demanded it, but because others wanted me there. I would like to make any place I am a part of open to anyone who wants to be a part of it, up to the point where they decide that welcome entitles them to threaten others. But I can’t guarantee to anyone—least of all myself—that belonging precludes being criticized.
This is such a terrific piece. I especially love the distinction between being threatened and being discomforted and the error of conflating the two. Back when I was a campus radical mouthing nonsense every once in a while, a friendly professor or two would say, “that’s not a good idea,” and we’d talk it through. Those are some of my best memories of college.