First, as to claims of anti-Semitism. The story raises the issue in a few places:
"In November, after some students raised concerns about antisemitism on campus, a Republican congressman from the state, Jim Banks, sent a letter to Dr. Whitten warning that the university could lose federal funding if it was found to condone or tolerate antisemitism." and...
"All the while, some Jewish students said they had felt an alarming shift in the campus atmosphere.
“It is scary here, and this is the first year I have felt like that here,” said Amalya Sykes, a marketing student who is from Jerusalem." and...
"But across the street from the protest at Chabad House, a Jewish student center, Rabbi Levi Cunin called for the university to end the demonstrations immediately. Chabad House has been blaring music, he said, to drown out protest chants that Jewish students found offensive. “What violence has to happen for them to shut it down?” said Rabbi Cunin, who described some of the protesters’ rhetoric as hostile. “They need to shut it down now.”"
But nowhere in the story does it refer to an actual *thing* - anti-Semitic literature or posters or harassment of students. Even the University's hapless administration has not cited anti-Semitism in its attempts to justify bringing heavily armed militarized police to help enforce a policy against tents (yes, that really is it) on a ground that has long been a dedicated space for student protest, and which poses no interference to classes.
And that raises something important, I reckon: the need to distinguish the substance of the protest with the methods used to deal with it. To my mind, it does not make a difference whether the protests are about Israel and Gaza, or the actions of the Chinese government in Xinjiang, or climate change and fossil fuels, or reproductive rights, or Kant's theories of beauty and the sublime: you don't invite that sort of police intervention to deal with a peaceful student protest. What our administration did is not about Israel and Gaza; it is about dissent on campus, and how you cannot claim to support free speech and the right of dissent *and* call in the troops when you are uncomfortable with it.
Today I'm going to argue that students need to shift ground a little precisely to illuminate this point. This started with a reaction to the content of protest, but it's become far more than that. For the "inside agitators" who are demanding a crackdown, it is now about control and power, and not just on campuses.
First, I'm not sure the claim that the intention of the speaker typically controls how speech is policed. With something like "from the river to the sea," the intent may not be antisemitic, but the effect often is. Then the key is consistency. Columbia's antisemitism task force seems to suggest that in previous protests, the interpretation of the audience rather than the speaker controlled (https://president.columbia.edu/content/report-1-task-force-antisemitism). If that's the case, there's a case for Jewish students and community members to feel aggrieved that administrations have one set of rules for speech that offends members of the black, LGBTQ or other communities and another for speech that offends Jewish students. The Columbia report doesn't provide evidence supporting that assertion, but if it's true, we should agree that it's an issue.
Second, I think the outside agitators claim is making the opposite point-- that students by and large are well-meaning and thoughtful, and the unsavory scenes are caused by outside agitators who aren't students. And that largely checks out, I think-- the videos covering social media from Columbia that show truly abhorrent language ("Jews go back to Poland," "Yehudim Yehudim," etc.) are taking place on Broadway, outside the gates of the campus. They're abhorrent, but also constitutionally protected. It's much worse if students are the ones harassing their Jewish classmates than if it's outsiders who aren't part of the community.
And I think the challenge for university presidents is separating the legitimate protests that are occurring from the antisemitic sweltering that's coming from them. Which is largely but not exclusively driven by outsiders. But when, for instance, Students for Justice in Palestine issues a celebratory statement calling October 7 a "historic win" (https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/10/DAY-OF-RESISTANCE-TOOLKIT.pdf), it goes quite a bit beyond making students feel uncomfortable and toward feeling like those groups are, at best, quite indifferent to the lives of Jews.
First point is a good one, and goes along with the thought by some free speech critics that universities have made this mess via enunciating impossibly utopian or incoherently inconsistent standards about who gets to decide whether something is offensive or not. I am gonna say that the people who have been the strongest voices on that point are not necessarily breaking in the direction that you'd expect in this crisis, which is notable. A good example might be the judgment that "all lives matter" is an unbearably offensive riposte to "Black lives matter". It may be ill-formed, maliciously intentioned, etc., but it is like "from the river to the sea"--it cannot be pre-emptively declared to have a particular meaning, nor is it up to the person hearing it to decide autonomously what it meant.
It's definitely much worse if it's people inside rather than outside. Which is why in my more recent entry I say: you have to prove that if you want to claim it. And not with ambiguous phrases but profoundly actionable statements and deeds.
Dependence on external organizations is an old problem for student movements on the left AND right. I feel like a student movement that was entirely local wouldn't have been saying "Oh, Charles Murray is the best" if the AEI weren't serving him up on a freebie platter; I feel like a homegrown Palestinian rights movement might not be just shovelling out SJP slogans. But that is another very complicated zone of discussion--how are we to say, "Read this person, they are interesting" and also say "Think for yourself"? It is a very deep pedagogical problem, but it is also a deep tactical challenge--what is a homegrown movement if it insists strenuously that it has nothing to do with anything happening anywhere else? No movement meets that standard--it contradicts the very idea of a movement.
I think in the example you raise, the first response is education, and the response to that is staking out a position. Commonly speaking, both "All Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter" and "From the River to the Sea" have very specific meanings to a group of people. They're less dog whistles than vuvuzelas. If someone is speaking in good faith, then they would take education about what those things mean to heart and change. So if someone yells "all lives matter" and then a black person explains how the sentiment alienates and marginalizes them, and their response is, "I don't care, I mean something else," I'm not sure their claim professing their good intentions means anything if they don't care to stop-- at that point, they're staking out a position that the views of people they're yelling at don't matter. The proof that you're asking for is in the pudding-- if they don't care enough to change their rhetoric upon being told how it is internalized, they're proving the point of the critique.
Regarding agitators, I think it's agitators in significant part, but not exclusively so (which is why I bring up SJP). The students are nowhere near as bad as the worst images making their way to social media, but their self-proclaimed leaders aren't exactly out there with clean hands. And that's why policing and curating their own movement on an issue like this one is so important-- because it is so easy to veer into dangerous territory. When Ik was at Swarthmore in 2008, there was a lot of justifiable anger at the finance industry and its role in melting down the economy. Among some, that veered unfortunately and predictably into diatribes about George Soros and Rothschilds and global cabals of money changers. But those espousing that were thankfully few, as I recall. This movement is much more inclined to not just accept but center terrible ideas.
And on your last point, I'm reminded of the Keynes quote-- "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Which I take to mean that being "homegrown" is quite overrated. I find a lot more value in being able to absorb information and read critically than to come up with ostensibly original ideas (which are, 99.999% of the time, crackpot). In this case, the issue is less that relying on others' ideas is bad-- it's that Charles Murray or SJP or what have you trot out terrible ideas. My takeaway from these protests is that the protesters should be taking their cues from J Street, not SJP.
Bravo, Tim. I’m appalled by how the administrators are being let off the hook—and the “inside agitators” (donors/trustees/legal advisors) are being given a complete pass. Thanks for not doing that.
Yes, that makes sense - your point that all politics has to engage the local, to translate and connect to specific audiences, to be effective is well taken. But this one slogan can also be the very thing that connects a global movement across so many spaces. It works so well, also, as a call and response slogan. Changing it could gut some of the affective connective tissue. (we could riff endlessly on slogans of the global anti-apartheid movement!)
It's those slogans that I am thinking about in part. Some of the most effective ones put anyone who wanted to push back in a bad spot, though people did so--"Free Nelson Mandela", say, which did a spectacular job of calling out the racists like Jesse Helms or Margaret Thatcher who just couldn't stomach celebrating Mandela. And thankfully nobody in the global anti-apartheid movement took up "Kill the Boer", partly *because* they were cued to the ANC's nonracialism and the fairly adroit movement work the exile leadership was doing with global publics. (As opposed to the management of the armed struggle or the way some of the exiles operated when they returned.) But I also think there was some pretty cringy stuff in the mid-1980s in terms of emulation/simulation--and some missed opportunities to make the anti-apartheid movement lead to ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice within Canada, the US and Europe.
Another smart and thoughtful piece of writing from you, thanks Tim. I worry about your suggestion (here or on yesterday's article? not sure) that 'from the river to the sea' should be dropped because it is unhelpful. I want to dig in my heels a bit, because dropping it would be giving in to the very deliberate and systematic strategy of demonising and criminalising just about every symbolic peg and slogan of the Palestine solidarity movement. 'We' (those who have been following Palestinian struggles for a long time) know that the slogan predates Hamas, we even know that the right wing Israelis have used this phrase themselves - and that there is some intertextual discourse happening with that slogan. The slogan doesn't say 'from the river to the sea, the land will belong to Palestinians and no one else. It's a simpler claim - 'Palestine will be free'. If the argument is 'drop it because the audience is responding badly' then I think we should be talking about the hasbara campaign and its pernicious effects on public discourse. To AI9706, HOW is the effect often antisemitic? I'll invoke Tim's point that we should show not tell.
I wouldn't drop something as a concession to a demand, and especially a demand that is being made with such transparent lack of interest in the history and meaning of the phrase. But I also think there's a kind of dialectic here where protesters get locked into a kind of semantics of mutual provocation that then inhibit the creative or adaptive moves that a movement has got to make. So not so much "we agree to stop saying this" (because that formalizes a kind of submission to power) but a quiet, slow withering-away or movement to phrases and touchstones that are of the moment, in the moment. The deeper provocation here for me is that maybe "solidarity" becomes a bad constraint on student protests when they come to see themselves as directed from or part of a global movement whose leadership is elsewhere, and thus obliged to reproduce (often badly) the semantic content of a struggle with a history that is located in real material terms somewhere else. Simultaneity matters, but a perceived need for coordination or synchronization can kill the local vitality and coherence of social movements.
Thank you for this article; it gave me a useful vantage point to read this morning's Times story about protests on my campus, Indiana University: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/indiana-university-protest-encampment.html
First, as to claims of anti-Semitism. The story raises the issue in a few places:
"In November, after some students raised concerns about antisemitism on campus, a Republican congressman from the state, Jim Banks, sent a letter to Dr. Whitten warning that the university could lose federal funding if it was found to condone or tolerate antisemitism." and...
"All the while, some Jewish students said they had felt an alarming shift in the campus atmosphere.
“It is scary here, and this is the first year I have felt like that here,” said Amalya Sykes, a marketing student who is from Jerusalem." and...
"But across the street from the protest at Chabad House, a Jewish student center, Rabbi Levi Cunin called for the university to end the demonstrations immediately. Chabad House has been blaring music, he said, to drown out protest chants that Jewish students found offensive. “What violence has to happen for them to shut it down?” said Rabbi Cunin, who described some of the protesters’ rhetoric as hostile. “They need to shut it down now.”"
But nowhere in the story does it refer to an actual *thing* - anti-Semitic literature or posters or harassment of students. Even the University's hapless administration has not cited anti-Semitism in its attempts to justify bringing heavily armed militarized police to help enforce a policy against tents (yes, that really is it) on a ground that has long been a dedicated space for student protest, and which poses no interference to classes.
And that raises something important, I reckon: the need to distinguish the substance of the protest with the methods used to deal with it. To my mind, it does not make a difference whether the protests are about Israel and Gaza, or the actions of the Chinese government in Xinjiang, or climate change and fossil fuels, or reproductive rights, or Kant's theories of beauty and the sublime: you don't invite that sort of police intervention to deal with a peaceful student protest. What our administration did is not about Israel and Gaza; it is about dissent on campus, and how you cannot claim to support free speech and the right of dissent *and* call in the troops when you are uncomfortable with it.
Today I'm going to argue that students need to shift ground a little precisely to illuminate this point. This started with a reaction to the content of protest, but it's become far more than that. For the "inside agitators" who are demanding a crackdown, it is now about control and power, and not just on campuses.
A couple of things stick out here.
First, I'm not sure the claim that the intention of the speaker typically controls how speech is policed. With something like "from the river to the sea," the intent may not be antisemitic, but the effect often is. Then the key is consistency. Columbia's antisemitism task force seems to suggest that in previous protests, the interpretation of the audience rather than the speaker controlled (https://president.columbia.edu/content/report-1-task-force-antisemitism). If that's the case, there's a case for Jewish students and community members to feel aggrieved that administrations have one set of rules for speech that offends members of the black, LGBTQ or other communities and another for speech that offends Jewish students. The Columbia report doesn't provide evidence supporting that assertion, but if it's true, we should agree that it's an issue.
Second, I think the outside agitators claim is making the opposite point-- that students by and large are well-meaning and thoughtful, and the unsavory scenes are caused by outside agitators who aren't students. And that largely checks out, I think-- the videos covering social media from Columbia that show truly abhorrent language ("Jews go back to Poland," "Yehudim Yehudim," etc.) are taking place on Broadway, outside the gates of the campus. They're abhorrent, but also constitutionally protected. It's much worse if students are the ones harassing their Jewish classmates than if it's outsiders who aren't part of the community.
And I think the challenge for university presidents is separating the legitimate protests that are occurring from the antisemitic sweltering that's coming from them. Which is largely but not exclusively driven by outsiders. But when, for instance, Students for Justice in Palestine issues a celebratory statement calling October 7 a "historic win" (https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/10/DAY-OF-RESISTANCE-TOOLKIT.pdf), it goes quite a bit beyond making students feel uncomfortable and toward feeling like those groups are, at best, quite indifferent to the lives of Jews.
First point is a good one, and goes along with the thought by some free speech critics that universities have made this mess via enunciating impossibly utopian or incoherently inconsistent standards about who gets to decide whether something is offensive or not. I am gonna say that the people who have been the strongest voices on that point are not necessarily breaking in the direction that you'd expect in this crisis, which is notable. A good example might be the judgment that "all lives matter" is an unbearably offensive riposte to "Black lives matter". It may be ill-formed, maliciously intentioned, etc., but it is like "from the river to the sea"--it cannot be pre-emptively declared to have a particular meaning, nor is it up to the person hearing it to decide autonomously what it meant.
It's definitely much worse if it's people inside rather than outside. Which is why in my more recent entry I say: you have to prove that if you want to claim it. And not with ambiguous phrases but profoundly actionable statements and deeds.
Dependence on external organizations is an old problem for student movements on the left AND right. I feel like a student movement that was entirely local wouldn't have been saying "Oh, Charles Murray is the best" if the AEI weren't serving him up on a freebie platter; I feel like a homegrown Palestinian rights movement might not be just shovelling out SJP slogans. But that is another very complicated zone of discussion--how are we to say, "Read this person, they are interesting" and also say "Think for yourself"? It is a very deep pedagogical problem, but it is also a deep tactical challenge--what is a homegrown movement if it insists strenuously that it has nothing to do with anything happening anywhere else? No movement meets that standard--it contradicts the very idea of a movement.
I think in the example you raise, the first response is education, and the response to that is staking out a position. Commonly speaking, both "All Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter" and "From the River to the Sea" have very specific meanings to a group of people. They're less dog whistles than vuvuzelas. If someone is speaking in good faith, then they would take education about what those things mean to heart and change. So if someone yells "all lives matter" and then a black person explains how the sentiment alienates and marginalizes them, and their response is, "I don't care, I mean something else," I'm not sure their claim professing their good intentions means anything if they don't care to stop-- at that point, they're staking out a position that the views of people they're yelling at don't matter. The proof that you're asking for is in the pudding-- if they don't care enough to change their rhetoric upon being told how it is internalized, they're proving the point of the critique.
Regarding agitators, I think it's agitators in significant part, but not exclusively so (which is why I bring up SJP). The students are nowhere near as bad as the worst images making their way to social media, but their self-proclaimed leaders aren't exactly out there with clean hands. And that's why policing and curating their own movement on an issue like this one is so important-- because it is so easy to veer into dangerous territory. When Ik was at Swarthmore in 2008, there was a lot of justifiable anger at the finance industry and its role in melting down the economy. Among some, that veered unfortunately and predictably into diatribes about George Soros and Rothschilds and global cabals of money changers. But those espousing that were thankfully few, as I recall. This movement is much more inclined to not just accept but center terrible ideas.
And on your last point, I'm reminded of the Keynes quote-- "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Which I take to mean that being "homegrown" is quite overrated. I find a lot more value in being able to absorb information and read critically than to come up with ostensibly original ideas (which are, 99.999% of the time, crackpot). In this case, the issue is less that relying on others' ideas is bad-- it's that Charles Murray or SJP or what have you trot out terrible ideas. My takeaway from these protests is that the protesters should be taking their cues from J Street, not SJP.
Bravo, Tim. I’m appalled by how the administrators are being let off the hook—and the “inside agitators” (donors/trustees/legal advisors) are being given a complete pass. Thanks for not doing that.
Yes, that makes sense - your point that all politics has to engage the local, to translate and connect to specific audiences, to be effective is well taken. But this one slogan can also be the very thing that connects a global movement across so many spaces. It works so well, also, as a call and response slogan. Changing it could gut some of the affective connective tissue. (we could riff endlessly on slogans of the global anti-apartheid movement!)
It's those slogans that I am thinking about in part. Some of the most effective ones put anyone who wanted to push back in a bad spot, though people did so--"Free Nelson Mandela", say, which did a spectacular job of calling out the racists like Jesse Helms or Margaret Thatcher who just couldn't stomach celebrating Mandela. And thankfully nobody in the global anti-apartheid movement took up "Kill the Boer", partly *because* they were cued to the ANC's nonracialism and the fairly adroit movement work the exile leadership was doing with global publics. (As opposed to the management of the armed struggle or the way some of the exiles operated when they returned.) But I also think there was some pretty cringy stuff in the mid-1980s in terms of emulation/simulation--and some missed opportunities to make the anti-apartheid movement lead to ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice within Canada, the US and Europe.
Another smart and thoughtful piece of writing from you, thanks Tim. I worry about your suggestion (here or on yesterday's article? not sure) that 'from the river to the sea' should be dropped because it is unhelpful. I want to dig in my heels a bit, because dropping it would be giving in to the very deliberate and systematic strategy of demonising and criminalising just about every symbolic peg and slogan of the Palestine solidarity movement. 'We' (those who have been following Palestinian struggles for a long time) know that the slogan predates Hamas, we even know that the right wing Israelis have used this phrase themselves - and that there is some intertextual discourse happening with that slogan. The slogan doesn't say 'from the river to the sea, the land will belong to Palestinians and no one else. It's a simpler claim - 'Palestine will be free'. If the argument is 'drop it because the audience is responding badly' then I think we should be talking about the hasbara campaign and its pernicious effects on public discourse. To AI9706, HOW is the effect often antisemitic? I'll invoke Tim's point that we should show not tell.
I wouldn't drop something as a concession to a demand, and especially a demand that is being made with such transparent lack of interest in the history and meaning of the phrase. But I also think there's a kind of dialectic here where protesters get locked into a kind of semantics of mutual provocation that then inhibit the creative or adaptive moves that a movement has got to make. So not so much "we agree to stop saying this" (because that formalizes a kind of submission to power) but a quiet, slow withering-away or movement to phrases and touchstones that are of the moment, in the moment. The deeper provocation here for me is that maybe "solidarity" becomes a bad constraint on student protests when they come to see themselves as directed from or part of a global movement whose leadership is elsewhere, and thus obliged to reproduce (often badly) the semantic content of a struggle with a history that is located in real material terms somewhere else. Simultaneity matters, but a perceived need for coordination or synchronization can kill the local vitality and coherence of social movements.
Thank you so much for this wise take.
It's not like they are chanting hey hey Joe Biden, how many kids did you kill today...