Thoughts on Columbia and More
Unpopular student protests threaten higher education, elections, and sanity.
Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash
In early December, just a few weeks after Oct 7th, I wrote about anti-Israel protests on college campuses. Students didn’t protest October 7th or deaths in Ukraine, so I wondered why Israel’s retaliations in Gaza was motivating their anger. Other wars and terrorism didn’t phase them. The war was still early on before the civilian death count was high. I wrote that young people were poorly informed, had a simplistic worldview amplified by TikTok, and were left unchecked by the spineless college leaders.
Yeah, that still works. Some related links today.
Here’s my piece from December.
The Free Press wrote that kids are giving up on elite colleges and applying to Southern colleges and flagship state colleges, in part because of these protests. Nate Silver wrote a viral tweet advising students to go to state colleges. Here in my high achieving suburb that sends 94% to college, I can confirm this trend. Southern colleges and flagship state colleges are big. It was already happening, but these protests are accelerating this trend. I wrote about the flagship state college trend in 2019.
From Noah Smith: “Leftists would like to believe that the Palestine protests are reinvigorating their movement; instead, I think they represent a dead end that the movement won’t easily be able to recover from, no matter who wins the election in November.”
Matt Yglesias: “The stated position of SJP groups (see point 5) is that even if Biden successfully pressures Israel into a unilateral ceasefire, withdrawal from Gaza, resumption of humanitarian aid, etc. they would still maintain the campus occupations until the "right of return" is fulfilled.” His whole thread on this topic is excellent.
Michael Powell, Atlantic: “Privacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.”
There’s a massive generational divide on the student protests. While a great number of people on the left have very reasonable issues with the length and scope of the war, almost nobody over age 30 thinks that these protests are productive, coherent, or sympathetic. When things calm down, we have to examine this problem. Should we blame social media or the massive deficits of education since the pandemic?
LINKS
From my disability newsletter:
AP: America’s childcare crisis is taking atoll on moms without a college degree.
Personal: Some pictures of life on my personal blog.
Watching: We finished Fallout. Now, we’re watching Shogun.
Travel: We’ll only doing day trips for the next month.We’re over scheduled with dinner parties and lot events through May and can’t take off for a full weekend. This Sunday, we’ll probably go to New Paltz for a hike and a nice lunch.
Lots of parties for Ian’s 22nd Birthday.
It's worth remembering that people over 40 have not approved of almost any student/young person-dominated protest movement since 1950. We tend to falsely remember that there was a wide moral embrace of MLK and the civil rights movement, when in fact he was disliked by a majority of Americans (even more disproportionately so by older white Americans) until well after his death, and the same for the civil rights movement in general. The early SDS of the Free Speech movement and the Port Huron statement was seen as a fringe group of weirdo leftists by older Americans, and later antiwar campus protests were what enabled Reagan's political acension in California. Protests for feminism and women's rights and for gay rights were persistently mocked and disdained by the conventional wisdom of older Americans throughout the 1970s. The anti-apartheid movement on campuses was seen as useless and uninformed. Occupy was widely derided by tribunes of the mainstream.
So I'm not sure this is a new situation. Considering that some of those movements in retrospect seem incredibly important and others not so much, I don't think conventional disdain for protestors is a good guide to whether they have philosophically coherent goals, reasonable political objectives, or will have a meaningful impact or not. The disdain seems structurally hard-wired even when the causes change and the organizational clarity or lack thereof is different.
Michael Powell - antisemitism is flaring, all governing. Students are conflicted. Few Jews feel they belong. Sadly, a self-loathing is real. Among Jews and others. Hamas is pleasing and abusing the Palestinians that elected them. Hamas and Hezbollah, is Iran Inc. Antisemitism is the constant. Campus protests are simply a function of classic antisemitism and the confused identity of Jews that have not assimilated. Jesus isn’t selling. Love isn’t selling. Hatred is selling, marketed by a self absorbed cowardly self-loathing liar - The Orange Man. Republican are fascist.. that started long ago. The reformation did not work. Lincoln was dead. And the Negro was not emancipated. The Negro was crushed. Separate but equal was another lie. And American ambivalence is terminal.