College students’ protests of Israel’s war on Gaza seem to be going every which way just now. On some campuses (Yale), the tent encampments appear to be coming down; on other campuses, some of those outdoor campers have moved indoors—at Columbia, occupying Hamilton Hall. (When student protesters occupied Hamilton Hall in 1968, they also took Henry Coleman, dean of the undergraduate college, hostage for 24 hours, while today’s occupiers have occupied only empty classrooms.)

It’s not easy to find a general rule that describes how and why these protests take the particular course that they do, but Newton’s third law of motion—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—may be as close to a general rule as we can find. On many campuses, actions taken (or not taken) by college presidents seem to produce proportionate responses from the students.

In California, for instance, USC—historically, the most conservative of major California universities, though it’s gone through a sea change in recent decades—has witnessed a cascade of cancellations and at least one mass arrest, initially triggered by President Carol Folt’s rather paranoid cancellation of the undergraduate valedictorian’s graduation speech. In the sharpest of contrasts, UC Berkeley—historically, the most radical of American public universities—has treated its own protest encampment as just another day in Berkeley, with no mass arrests, and only limited disruption to campus life. (Certainly, less disruption than that caused by the strike of teaching and research assistants last year.)

Among the Eastern Ivies, Columbia stands out not just for last night’s building occupation, but also for the sheer ineptness of its top leadership. President Minouche Shafik, who was a World Bank economist and governor of the Bank of England, then director of the London School of Economics before she came to Columbia last year, had limited (and no pedagogical) contacts with actually existing students before embarking on her current job. Her appearance before a congressional committee of, chiefly, Republican inquisitors earlier this month featured her consistent caving to every deliberate provocation the Republicans could lodge, rather than trying to nuance her answers in the manner of the presidents of other Ivies who’d come before the committee and then quickly lost their jobs.

She even assured one committee Republican, a Christian fundamentalist, that Columbia would defend Jews in accordance with a passage out of Genesis designating them as God’s chosen people. (My take was that she should have answered, "That’s why Jews go to heaven and Christians go to hell," but, sadly, she didn’t.) Thus intimidated, she returned to Columbia to call in the cops the following day to arrest the protesters camped out on the South Lawn, though they didn’t appear to be guilty of anything except, perhaps, a rather draconian violation of university trespassing rules. That didn’t deter House Speaker Mike Johnson and upstate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik (hoping to be picked as Trump’s running mate) to call for her resignation on the basis of her not having caved to them sufficiently.

What links Presidents Folt and Shafik, I think, is the fear of being ousted by pressure from powerful conservatives—both elected officials and gazillionaires who’ve regularly donated to their universities. At USC, major donations still come in from the region’s conservative elite who remember USC as the place they sent their kids when they couldn’t get into Stanford. When Folt canceled the valedictorian’s graduation speech, she surely had given some thought to those donors—but it triggered a cascade of misfortunes. The cancellation led to the honorary degree recipients pulling out of the ceremony and then the cancellation of the university graduation ceremony itself, followed by arrests of USC’s protesting campers.

Folt had to be hyperconscious of the demands that hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and others of his ilk had been placing on university presidents to curtail the Gaza protesters—demands that had led to several of those presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, getting the boot. Shafik likely had similar fears, as all major universities depend way too much on the kindness of billionaires. Folt, I should add, had not seen the text—it may not have been written yet—of the valedictorian (Asna Tabassum, a biomedical engineering major) selected by faculty to give the address, but the fear of the sky falling on the president’s office was sufficient to trigger the cancellation and its calamitous follow-ups.

I confess the USC speech cancellation has triggered my own memories. Until some point in the 1970s, Los Angeles public schools divided classes, based on birth date, into January graduates and June graduates. I graduated from one such school, Palisades High, in January 1968, as the Vietnam War raged, and was selected by the English Department faculty to give the valedictorian speech.

Which I was all set to do until the principal read it—it was an anti-war speech—and canceled it. Prefiguring the Columbia and USC professors now protesting their respective presidents’ decisions, a number of English teachers protested the principal’s cancellation, to no avail. Whereupon, the following September, I enrolled at Columbia.