On Campus Protests

 George Packer at The Atlantic makes the case that the events at Columbia and elsewhere are a product of the sort of campus illiberalism that Jon Chait has been going on about for years. Packer quotes a student:

I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.

I lived through the "political correctness" debates of the late '80s. However, it was a debate. It's unclear to me whether students are allowed to challenge certain orthodoxies. Packer's conclusion from the student letter:

So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.

The retreat into safe spaces has garnered a lot of contempt from right wing critics, and little of that is in good faith. However, the inability of students to accept a challenge to a position that they might have, especially one based on identity, means that they aren't really learning.

I don't know where I heard this, but the "colonization" framework is really just the left wing version of "Blood and Soil" nationalism. I never really bought into the "language is violence" framework, and frankly I would be loath to argue against it. (Actually, that's not true, I love a good argument.) The idea that accidentally or even intentionally misgendering someone constitutes "violence" means that Jewish students can plausibly call chants calling for a Palestinian state as anti-semitism.

Protests are, by definition, provocative. Columbia and the University of Texas have handled these protests about as poorly as they possibly could. The provocation is intended to elicit an overreaction. 

However, the broader pedagogical question of how to be true to the same practices across all parts of the student body is not something the universities have really wrestled with. 

UPDATE: What is happening at Emory and Texas is immoral and, perhaps even worse, a mistake.