Columbia and several other schools have really stepped on their own dicks here. There are examples of colleges that have engaged with student protestors in the way that educators should. Then there are the schools that somehow think they can appease Elise Stefanik (R-Trump's Ass) and engaged the protestors in exactly the way that they hoped to be engaged.
The historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called The March of Folly, where she examined great historical blunders. What made them "folly", argued Tuchman, was that people at the time knew it was a bad idea. It's easy to look back in hindsight and criticize a decision, but if a lot of people in the moment knew it was a bad idea and then people did it anyway, that's folly. Think the invasion of Iraq.
What's been so dispiriting about all the events since October 7th is that each side is being hijacked by the absolute worst voice, if your hope is peace. Netanyahu and Hamas obviously go without saying. However, on college campuses, you have people who are generally and rightly outraged over Israel's indiscriminate use of force in Gaza. You also have people who wish to erase the state of Israel, and yes, you have people who are generally anti-Semitic. What's more, on some campuses you have pro-Israeli actors who want to escalate things and discredit the protestors by shouting anti-Semitic things on the sidelines.
In other words, within a broader protest movement that has real merit there is a subset who want to take things up a notch by blocking access to parts of a college campus. This allows administrators (remember, they suck) to "look tough" for Stefanik and their donors by calling in the cops.
As a result, each side is managing to squander whatever goodwill the extreme actions of the other engenders in "normie" observers.
Because it's Columbia, natural parallels are being drawn to 1968. Several commentators have said things like "When have the students ever been wrong?" (Uh, the Cultural Revolution? The Khmer Rouge?) However, protesting against Vietnam was the right thing to do. Storming Hamilton Hall - whether in '68 or '24 - is taking things up a notch. In both instances the police we called in.
In 1968, Nixon ran as the "Law and Order" candidate and explicitly ran against student protestors (and sort of the riots that attended MLK's assassination). Authoritarianism craves social disorder as a reason to seize power, and Nixon was able to seize on general antagonism towards student radicals. Hell, the same thing happened in 1848 in Europe. Student protestors are easy rhetorical targets as rich, spoiled dilettantes (whether they are or not).
If it's true that anti-Vietnam protests helped elect Nixon, it's worth noting that Nixon:
- Scuttled peace talks that Johnson was holding to try and end the war before election day in 1968. Nixon sabotaged that chance at peace.
- Continued the war for 5 more years.
- Made it palatable to Americans by withdrawing ground troops and bombing the everliving shit out of North Vietnam and invading Cambodia.
So "When have the students been wrong?" would have to include not just the morality of their cause, but the consequences of their actions. The 1968 protests did not end the war - it continued for another 5 years and almost as many Americans died after Nixon's election as before and Vietnamese casualties were probably worse. If - as some historians and political scientists have argued - those protests, especially at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, helped elect Nixon, then that would be an argument that the student's were wrong.
The Law and Order president turned out to be a huge crook, and now we have an actual indicted Trump running on his brand of "American Carnage" that will feed on images of clashes on college campuses.
Ideally, summer vacation disperses some of the vitriol that is currently seething through both extremes of this latest societal divide.
UPDATE: This piece in The Atlantic is a good examination of the tactical pointlessness of the demonstrations.
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