Methinks they doth protest too much!
Student protests continue to roil college campuses. According to a Columbia professor they have become "a form of abuse." Can you still call it "civil disobedience" when it's uncivil?
NEW YORK CITY – As anti-Israeli protests continue to roil college campuses across the US many of the demonstrations have turned decidedly ugly. There are widespread reports of injured police and security officers, threats and intimidation against Jewish students, and the disruption of student and academic life.
At Columbia the University President, Nemat Shafik, is being simultaneously condemned for doing too much to quell the disruptions, and not enough. Within the span of a week she was scolded by members of a Congressional committee for failing to take decisive action to stem the protests and protect Jewish students, while back at the University she faces possible censure by the University’s Faculty Senate for doing anything at all.
While protesting students have been so far unsuccessful in pursuing what they claim is their primary goal — forcing the school “to withdraw investment funds from what they describe as companies profiting from Israel’s military action in Gaza” — they have been successful at creating chaos and a no-win situation for Jewish students, college administrators, and the greater campus community.
In response, and some charge in surrender, the University has decided to go to a hybrid virtual/in-person class schedule for the remainder of the semester and is reportedly considering cancelling graduation.
Double talk and a double standard.
John McWorther, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, wrote eloquently and powerfully about the disruption of academic life on campus — as well as the double-standard evinced by the protestors “almost continuous…lusty chanting of ‘From the River to the Sea.’” He’s worth quoting extensively.
“I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like ‘D.E.I. has got to die,’ to the same ‘Sound Off’ tune that ‘From the river to the sea’ has been adapted to,” McWorther, who is Black, wrote. “They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus.”
“Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Columbia professor John McWorther
“Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange,” he continues, “heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way.” He later wondered, “Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
Good question.
Many of the protest’s supporters — and the protestors themselves— insist the protests are peaceful. But “calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly,” writes McWorther. How can they claim the protest is peaceful, he wonders, “when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas as heroes?”
The answer to “why” is, McWorther argues, “in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance.”
On the very same day that McWorther’s essay was published the New York Times also published a column by contributor Bret Stephens. Like McWorther, Stephens called out the double standard embraced by both protestors and campus administrators who allow the protests. “The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews.”
Uncivil disobedience.
The anti-Israeli protestors incessantly chanting “From the River to the Sea,” and who are disrupting the right of other students to peacefully and safely pursue their education, insist that the protests are both not antisemitic and peaceable free speech — part of the long American tradition of civil disobedience and participative democracy.
But “Civil disobedience,” explained liberal tradition philosopher John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice,“ is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies.”
According to The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “people who engage in civil disobedience operate at the boundary of fidelity to law, have general respect for their regime, and are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions.”
Demanding action, refusing accountability.
Civil disobedience requires two things – that it be peaceful and that protestors recognize the rule of law by accepting the legal consequences of their actions. No so at Columbia, or at many campuses across the US. They demand action while refusing accountability. That’s just disobedience.
“Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views,” Stephens wrote in his New York Times essay. “It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.”
For example, take the case of Columbia student Khymani James, who the New York Times describes as “a leader in the pro-Palestinian student protest encampment.”
This past Friday Columbia announced that it had banned James, “who declared on video in January that ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’” from the Columbia campus. In the very same video James ironically compares Zionists, a euphemism for Israeli Jews, to “Nazis” and white supremacists.
During a hearing before Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, a university administrator asked James if he understood why his comments were “problematic in any way?” James reply. “No.”
The claims of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia that they are not motivated by antisemitism ring hollow when, as the Times reported, James had “emerged as a public face of the demonstrations,” and “led a news conference to assert the demands the movement is making of the Columbia administration.” They have also refused to publicly disavow his comments, including when asked at a press conference on Friday afternoon.
Many Jewish students have complained, repeatedly, that campus protests have devolved into an antisemitic reckoning and a vehicle for intimidation and antisemitism.
“What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness,” McWorther lamented, “a form of abuse.”