The News: Up in the Atmosphere

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I’m going to work today and tomorrow’s columns as a two-front address to campus protests this week.

Let’s talk about all of this in terms of the actions of most campus administrations (thank you, Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, for being better than your peers) and the people pressuring them into strong crackdowns on their own students. For the most part, the people bringing that pressure are going wholly undiscussed in the national news coverage. Let’s talk also about how the whole thing is being framed by the national media—for example, with constant invocations of “chaos” that are causally credited to student protesters themselves when it’s almost entirely the administrative response that is causing chaos. If I were a university president right now, I’d be calling for Minouche Shafik to resign because she almost single-handedly caused encampments to spread everywhere in her desperate and foredoomed attempt to win the favor of powerful donors, Republican politicians, and Mayor Eric Adams.

Here’s what needs to be understood, and in many cases, changed in how this is being framed.

ONE. If you want to say there is antisemitic speech that is a characteristic, repeated element in the protests, quote it. Say not just this is what was heard but say this is how we learned of it. You have to use specific quantities not weasel words like “many”—since if you’re talking “many”, there are “many” people who feel equally targeted by discrimination and threat aimed at Palestinians or pro-Palestinian allies.

All of this is how we could know, really know, if antisemitism is a structural feature of the protests. Almost none of the national media coverage is specifying anything on this point. There are almost no eyewitness accounts from reporters, and almost no administration is providing anything specific, accountable, verifiable. My strong suspicion on this point is that this lack of specificity is covering that there is a very deliberate and ideological semantic sleight-of-hand going on where phrases with contested meanings are being (cynically) defined as intrinsically, unarguably antisemitic: from the river to the sea, globalize the intifada, and so on. I’ve made this point before. You don’t get to offer that interpretation without having to argue the case.

This is not a double standard for me and many other people objecting to this strategy, either. Some years ago, a colleague of mine and I both complained that our dining services had unilaterally decided they couldn’t have a “picnic bar” any longer because “picnic” was a racist reference to lynchings. We both pointed out that this was simply false. Some students tried to say “well, if someone thinks it’s true, then it is hurtful”. We didn’t accept that: it’s not true and the institution shouldn’t have been making a change just to make someone feel better because they believed otherwise. Audiences do construct meanings, but not infinitely or arbitrarily. You don’t get to decide privately on meaning and then insist on your private interpretation must be encoded as truth by an institution.

The other reason you have to specify is that it is always possible that there is a misunderstanding or an exaggeration that is not deliberate. More than two decades ago, I went to a meeting about perceived racial microaggressions and a Latino student was testifying about how outraged he was about being mistaken for another student by a professor, which he took to be an example of “they all look alike”. That’s a real issue, but in this case, it turned out that he had been mistaken for his brother, who was a year older, a student here, majoring in the same subject. Which is not “they all look alike”, it’s “you look like a man you are closely related to who is the same height, almost the same age, and doing the same things you are doing.” Another instance: Black students discussing what they took to be offensive comments from professors in an online forum included a report that a humanities professor working with a film major who wanted to break into the film industry said, “Well, get ready to wait tables in the meantime”, which the student believed was a racial slight—apparently not knowing that it’s a common sentiment about anybody trying to make it in Hollywood.

So there’s a value in specifying what was said beyond having to make the argument for something being offensive that goes beyond “because I found it offensive”: sometimes there’s a genuine misunderstanding.

TWO. If you want to claim there are outside agitators on campus, prove it. Especially prove it if a bunch of people on your campus got arrested and you want to claim that half or more were not students, alumni, or anyone else who has a relationship to the institution. That’s not a private personnel matter, it’s not FERPA-violating, it’s none of the things that universities and colleges hide behind when they want to assert that their claims or interpretations are valid but also insist that they can’t provide evidence that confirms the validity.

If you won’t provide proof on this point, you should shut up about it, since “outside agitators” is literally the claim that every institution and government makes when facing dissent from its own constituents, usually as a cynical strategy to invalidate that dissent pre-emptively, without having to deal with its specific content. And journalists should not credulously repeat the “outside agitators” trope without independently investigating it themselves. There are people lurking around the edges of some of these protests who are deliberately stirring up shit, and they’ve been spotted in a few cases—and it’s not entirely clear that they are actually sympathizers in any way with the protests. “Outside agitators” works both ways, as anybody who has ever been part of a protest movement knows. There are people who like to “heighten the contradictions” who are not clearly left or right, but instead are basically online trolls in the flesh. But I also think that at the heart of the encampments and other protests, almost everybody is a student, an alum, or a faculty member. I’ll also point out that administrations should be able to prove this accusation in other ways than arrest records. Most of them have built huge surveillance apparatuses on their campuses, and most of them have other on-the-ground ways of keeping track of who’s who. It’s a funny thing about surveillance: it gets shared out without hesitation in legal proceedings when you’ve got the goods on someone committing a crime, but then is quite notably withheld if it doesn’t easily confirm something you want to claim about events or actions.

THREE. I’m really surprised that there’s apparently zero concern coming from private university administrations about inviting a regular police presence on their campuses above and beyond their own police or security forces in a fashion that is close to ceding any discretionary or command authority over that presence. That is one of the most extraordinary examples of this is a bad precedent and you are going to regret it later I have ever seen, and it shows how administrations that are often paralyzed by fear of precedent can suddenly drop that point like a hot potato if they’re frightened enough. It also completely invalidates the supposed concern for safety that is being cited as a reason for acting in the first place. Clearing an encampment or using police power to stop a protest is intrinsically risky, even with a police force known for its professionalism in handling protests. (Which, say, the NYPD are not.) Suspending students without providing anywhere for them to go is risky. Closing down classes or transferring them suddenly to Zoom is risky to learning, especially at the end of the semester.

FOUR. I’m equally surprised at how open police and political authorities are being about the fact that it is the content of the protests that they believe is authorizing their presence on campus. Eric Adams said point-blank that if someone is being antisemitic somewhere, he can send in the cops to stop them. Really? Like, he could send the police into a private residence if someone says something discriminatory? He could break up a meeting of the Proud Boys taking place in an apartment if the building owner didn’t like what was being said at the meeting?

FIVE. I’m struck at how institutions that are expressing an almost boundless desire to protect the safety of their students, faculty and staff have expressed zero concern over open threats to their safety and future prospects—significantly from “outside agitators”, no less. Journalistic coverage of the networks that are targeting names of protesters and sympathizers is non-existent, or this is justified on the grounds that these are “public” actions—and yet for the most part, complaints about insecurity that involve accusations of antisemitism don’t have to be public in the same way.

In the end, I think Marc Lynch puts it very well:

Yes, a sign of weakness, of surprise, and fragility. They’re an indicator that a generational turnover in administrative leadership has led to a lack of expertise and professional skill in handling what has been a steady and predictable part of the job since 1970. They also frankly invalidate the desire of campus leadership to show as well as tell their students and faculty to de-escalate, seek mediation, operate in good faith, and privilege open discussion that creates knowledge and understanding. Almost none of them are modeling that right now, and what you refuse to model, you shouldn’t expect in others.

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On the other hand, there is one claim in all of this about feelings of insecurity and danger that really does need to be taken very seriously and should be moving university administrations into action. But it is precisely the kind of issue that police action is antithetical to resolving.

The claim that I think is serious is what is often referred to as a “hostile environment” standard pertaining to discrimination and microaggression. There’s a more constrained version of the standard that applies in legal complaints and a more expansive one that has been used in general discussions of discrimination, harassment, and what has lately been called “belonging”.

The standard legal version I think is an unimpeachably valid way to establish that you have a problem, that someone could quite reasonably fear for their safety or feel subject to unfair treatment without anyone saying anything to them directly. A woman in an all-male office where all the other cubicles have pornographic images pinned up is in a hostile environment, for example.

The more expansive vision of “belonging” is also legitimate, much of the time. It is a positive obligation of people in a community to take seriously anybody’s report of discomfort, to remove or soften signs and practices that create an unwelcoming feeling.

But the expansive version—and maybe even the legal standard—can be stretched to the point of breaking. I don’t have a right to feel completely welcome in all settings. I can’t walk into a colleague’s lab and said, “I have a right to be here and watch you and your students, you can’t tell me I shouldn’t be here”. I don’t have a right to walk into a affinity meeting of lesbian students and say, “Don’t mind me, I’m just here to feel belonging”. But more generally, I can’t say “I feel uncomfortable” in a way that’s so generalized that there’s nothing reasonable anybody can do to counteract that and heighten my sense of belonging. And I can’t protect a political, social or religious affiliation from all possible scrutiny or criticism in a community that is built around learning, knowledge production and diversity of background and experience. If I’m a very conservative Catholic, I can’t protest that I’m uncomfortable with a colleague teaching a class on the Reformation or a student group trying to protect reproductive rights, even though I may in fact be uncomfortable. I can tell people that I do feel that way, and expect them to listen by way of demonstrating that they welcome me, but I can’t expect them to act on my feelings and remove the discomfort.

I worked with a student some years ago who had been raised in a very small religious tradition within the African diaspora that is strongly antisemitic as well as very overtly anti-white. They understood very clearly that they should not share these views with anyone while on campus, but we ended up having a long conversation that began when the student was surprised that I knew what religious movement they were referencing and what its theology was. The student was uncomfortable being here not only because they felt silenced but also because they were beginning to question the views they’d brought with them. I recalled one of my own undergraduate professors meeting regularly with evangelical Christians on campus to help them retain their faith in the face of strong daily challenges to it—not from students attacking them personally but simply from the content of the education they were receiving. But he didn’t tell them to feel aggrieved or to demand institutional protection.

Even a hostile environment standard requires talking out. Because it is about culture, about habitus, about what is taken to be normal. It is about feelings. A student who feels personally threatened by the mere utterance of “from the river to the sea” has to acknowledge that this is because they feel a strong emotional connection to Israel or to Zionism as an ideology. That is fine: they are entitled to feel that way. But not entitled to feel that anything which challenges those feelings establishes a hostile environment, any more than a Chinese student can complain that support for Tibetan or Taiwanese sovereignty is de facto hostile to the presence of Chinese students.

But it’s not that simple either. If “from the river to sea” is spoken by a hundred students with bullhorns walking behind a group of five Jewish students, if hard faces and pointing hands are focused on particular Jewish individuals who aren’t there for confrontation but are merely present in the same space, are merely passing by, are merely living in dorms alongside a hall full of protesters, then yes, this does cross into a different kind of environment and at that moment, yes, it’s on other people to change the way they’re doing things—to be conscious of how they look, how they sound, how they are making people feel.

Here I do think that charges of intimidation and hostile environment are potentially fair, but the thing is, they are not unique to this moment in time. They are a frequent part of any morally charged political mobilization within a community. Every campus movement I can think of has created a counter-discourse about intimidation, and some of those movements have in fact practiced intimidation of peers and professors quite programmatically in some form or another. I’ll be honest: I think the current mobilization around Gaza is substantially less inclined to that than most; if there is intimidation, is a kind of epiphenomenal shadow of the intensity of feeling about the destruction of Gaza (and a mirroring intensity among those for whom October 7th was a profound trauma).

In any close-knit community, if friends and neighbors are telling you no no you can’t feel that way, that’s intrinsically difficult to deal with. The New York Times reporter who described her community’s reaction to a honeybee swarm potentially infesting her house is a good simple example of this. Neighbors told her that she couldn’t possibly kill the bees, exterminators refused to do it because of legal risk, and beekeepers told her that it wasn’t really a swarm yet so they couldn’t help. (E.g., they can only remove a swarm once a queen has taken up residence, and in this case, it was just a scout and some advance bees considering the house as a nesting site.) In the course of this experience, the reporter discovered that honeybees are not actually endangered at the moment, but that almost everybody is convinced that they are. (Though I think the next cut on the issue would reveal to her that native bee species and other pollinators are.) Feeling that you know something that most people disagree with from a position of relative ignorance is always a lonely situation, and it’s worse when you are feeling very judged for your viewpoint. Worse still if you feel you are something that many people disdain or reject. Feeling isolated quickly slides into feeling, with good reason, threatened. This is more or less one of the five basic narratives of modern fiction and theater—the crusader who carries on despite threats, the fringe thinker who descends into madness as they feel cut off from everyday sentiment.

I acknowledge that there are Jewish students, faculty and staff who feel excluded from belonging right now on campuses and feel as a result that there is potential threat. The modern history of Judaism offers special and intense reasons to take those feelings very seriously and to validate their emotional and substantive truth. This structure of feeling does require attention both from administrations and from the general community. But this is precisely the kind of thing you can’t deal with via police power, via strong administrative dictates, by rules and codes. Culture and sentiment are protean, situated in the interstices of everyday life, at the edges of conversations and experiences. Atmosphere is a hard thing to pin down. You can’t legislate attitude, you can’t dictate feeling, you can’t arrest your way out of the problem. You have to do the hard work of getting in there, being in the conversation, and educating with people who grant you standing and legitimacy to do so. You don’t govern culture, you live in it.

What university administrations are doing now is shredding their standing and legitimacy to tiny fragments. Worse, they’re showing how profoundly uninterested they seem to have become in their central mission, in the central strengths of their institutions. When a university leadership not only can’t be bothered to educate but is actively hostile to the work of education, it begs the question of why the university should exist at all, and at the worst possible time.

Image credit: "'Outside agitator from McFarland'" by jumbledpile is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.