About those student protests

Lessons in collective behavior

I was going to do a deep dive into the issues surrounding the college protests at Columbia and other campuses across the country. If you want to know specifics, this compendium from this morning’s Inside Higher Ed is a good place to start. It begins:

Since Columbia University shut down an encampment last week where pro-Palestinian protesters were demonstrating for divestment from companies with ties to Israel, students on other campuses have set up their own encampments, making similar demands.

At more than a dozen institutions across the country, students have set up tents and sleeping bags on central quads or thoroughfares, where they are spending nights, hosting teach-ins, reciting prayers, and waving signs and Palestinian flags, in an effort to get administrators to hear out their demands.

In yesterday’s Morning Shots newsletter, Bill Kristol of the Bulwark (formerly of the Weekly Standard) reacted to stories about the protests with concerns about “mob rule”.

Yes, it’s true that the consequences of the mob spirit taking over one of our two major political parties are greater than those of the mob spirit erupting on some elite college campuses. But lesser evils are still evil, and they can grow into greater ones. And history also suggests that indulging the mob spirit on one side soon enough empowers it on another. The mob spirit must be resisted across the board.

Resisting the mob isn’t all it takes to establish a sound society or a healthy politics. But it’s a necessary start. 

To Krisol’s credit, he is talking as much about right wing mobs as campus protests. But he starts his essay with an AP story about them.

The Columbia protests followed the president testifying last week before the House Education Committee, where Republicans like Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx tried to paint Columbia as decidedly antisemitic. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump observed, their outrage is partially shaped by their antipathy toward higher education in general and elite colleges in particular.

In his Philadelphia Inquirer newsletter, Will Bunch looked at the situation at Columbia from the perspective of the student journalists there.¹ It’s a very different picture than is painted by those on the right.

While the denizens of X and other social media sites were yelling back and forth over the severity of antisemitic incidents in and around campus since the encampment began last Wednesday, the reporters at the Spectator, using their on-scene access and doing some shoe-leather reporting, produced a piece that analyzed the alleged incidents, where they occurred and, where possible, who was involved. The story found many — although not all — tirades or threats against Jewish students came from non-students or happened just off campus, but their piece also made it clear why some students feel unsafe, and why the chaos has vexed authorities seeking calm.

Good journalism means actually talking to folks, fact-checking, and setting the record straight, wherever those facts lead — which is exactly what the Spectator’s reporting on antisemitism achieved. But having the best facts can also form the basis for powerful opinion journalism. And while opinions on what’s happening at Columbia, and whether Shafik should resign, are a dime a dozen, the Spectator editorial board used both its journalism and its lived experience at the university to craft a truly powerful defense of the free speech that is currently under attack.

One of the aggravating events of the protests at Columbia was the decision to call the NYPD to break up the encampment. Over 100 students were arrested for trespassing.² In spite of social media uproar, things may be getting better there.³ According to today’s Washington Post,

In a statement provided to The Washington Post, Columbia said it was extending the deadline by 48 hours in light of “important progress” that had been made with the organizers.

The student protesters agreed to dismantle and remove a “significant number” of tents; committed to ensuring that only Columbia students will participate in the demonstrations; and have taken steps to ensure no discriminatory or harassing language is used at the encampment, according to the statement.

But rather than focusing on the narrow specifics of what happened when, it’s important to set a broader context. First, it’s important to recognize how limited these protests really are. Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education had a helpful map of the protests.

By my count, that’s 22 campuses out of the 3,000 plus campuses across the country. In addition, some of these specific protests are fairly small. Photos of the Berkeley protest for example, seemed to show about a dozen tents. In light of the size of the student body there or at Columbia or Washington St. Louis, the vast majority of students aren’t involved. Some passersby rightly may feel intimidated by a crowd but its not like there’s only one way across campus.⁴ Yes, the crowds have been noisy as one music professor complained, making it hard to hear the compositions he was playing for his class.

Here’s another component impacting the protests. It’s what I call the Governor Tarkin rule. In the first (fourth) Star Wars film, Princess Leia tells Tarkin, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Once the Columbia students were arrested over the weekend, it was bound to spawn more protests.

Yet another component is the connection to the BDS movement. Standing for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction, this has been part of college activism for years. This is especially true of the high-endowment institutions. Advocates argue that the university’s huge investment portfolio benefits various bad actors. It was a big part of anti Apartheid protests over South Africa. A theme across some of the current protests is the call for institutions to divest from the weapons manufacturers who are part of Israel’s attacks on Gaza.

Then there is the concern over an eventual Palestinian state and over the mass casualties resulting from Israel’s actions since October 7th. Such concern over human rights has been part of campus activism for decades. Painting these concerns as antisemitic and pro-Hamas is unfair and demagogic.

Finally, there is the collective action problem. Critics of the protests will read my last paragraph and ask, what about the anti-Jewish slurs that were shouted? What about the student whose way was blocked by protestors or the one who was poked in the eye (the story about it said “stabbed”) by a flag pole that was tossed in her direction?

These are clearly bad acts. But they result in part from the anonymity and emotional enthusiasm that is part of any protest. The same bad behaviors can be seen in other famous protests: Watts, Rodney King, George Floyd, a sports team winning a championship. Because these efforts are often leaderless, there is no one to police the boundaries of acceptable behavior⁵. Since the actors are anonymous, there is a freedom that wouldn’t be there if they were more individualized.⁶ The agreement reported in the Post suggests real steps forward in this regard.

Protests are happening on a minority of campuses, involving a minority of students, protesting for a variety of reasons, and often met with draconian institutional responses. Demagogues will attack them as representative of students today as part of villainizing higher education or declaring their fierce support for Israel at all costs. They forget that these are passionate18-22 year olds who aren’t skilled at broad collective action. Just like the critics were when they were that age.

1. This was very similar to what I heard from the Pitt editor at RNA.

2. The vast majority of these will be dismissed. Arrests for trespassing is a common way to disrupt a protest without any intent to actually prosecute.

3. Although Speaker Mike Johnson is going there tonight, which I don’t think is going to help.

4. When I was at Purdue in the mid-70s, we regularly had to avoid Iranian students protesting the US support of the Shah.

5. Back in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Stephen Colbert (on his old show) did an excellent job of demonstrating the failings of leaderless movements.

6. One of my favorite scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird is when Scout talks to Mr. Cunningham about his son and the anonymous lynch mob comes back to their individual identities.