[[link removed]]

CALLING THE POLICE ON CAMPUS PROTESTS SHOWS THAT COLLEGE PRESIDENTS
HAVEN’T LEARNED A THING SINCE THE 1960S  
[[link removed]]


 

Michael Hiltzik
April 29, 2024
Los Angeles Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The lessons should be obvious. Bringing police onto a college
campus on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order”
invariably makes things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by
conditions on campus, but by partisan pressure on university adm _

Law enforcement officers confronted pro-Palestinian demonstrators at
USC, but was that the right approach by university administrators? ,
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

 

Students are massed peacefully on campus, making politically charged
demands on university presidents. The police are summoned, leading to
mass arrests and even to violence — and to the collapse of
confidence in the administration.

You may see the punchline coming: This picture isn’t drawn from USC
and Columbia University of the present day, but Berkeley in 1964.

The lessons should be obvious. Bringing police onto a college campus
on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order” invariably makes
things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by conditions on
campus, but by partisan pressure on university administrators to act.
Often it results in the ouster of the university presidents who
condoned the police incursions, and sometimes even in the departure of
the politicians whose fingerprints were on the orders.

In other words, nobody wins.

Perhaps in recognition of the astonishing ignorance of college
administrators of their own responsibilities, the American Civil
Liberties Union last week issued a succinct guide
[[link removed]] on
how to fulfill their “legal obligations to combat discrimination and
... maintain order” without sacrificing the “principles of
academic freedom and free speech that are core to the educational
mission.”

The ACLU advises that administrators “must not single out particular
viewpoints — however offensive they may be to some members of the
community — for censorship, discipline, or disproportionate
punishment.”

It’s one thing for protesters or anyone else to direct harassment
“at individuals because of their race, ethnicity, or religion,”
the ACLU observed. But “general calls for a Palestinian state
‘from the river to the sea,’ or defenses of Israel’s assault on
Gaza, even if many listeners find these messages deeply offensive,
cannot be prohibited or punished by a university that respects free
speech principles.”

The statement further advised that “speech that is _not_ targeted
at an individual or individuals because of their ethnicity or national
origin but merely expresses impassioned views about Israel or
Palestine is not discrimination and should be protected.” (Emphasis
in the original.)

The ACLU cautions that “inviting armed police into a campus protest
environment, even a volatile one, can create unacceptable risks for
all students and staff.” Its statement points to the history of
excessive force wielded by law enforcement units against
“communities of color, including Black, Brown, and immigrant
students.... Arresting peaceful protestors is also likely to escalate,
not calm, the tensions on campus — as events of the past week have
made abundantly clear.”

Finally, the statement urges administrators to “resist the pressures
placed on them by politicians seeking to exploit campus tensions to
advance their own notoriety or partisan agendas.... Universities must
stand up to such intimidation, and defend the principles of academic
freedom so essential to their integrity and mission.”

The history of campus protests suggests that they generally appear
more threatening and disruptive on the spot than they prove to be over
time. Strong, “decisive” responses almost always backfire.

Any university administrator contemplating bringing police onto campus
must reckon with what happened at Columbia in 1968, when 1,000 New
York police summoned to clear student protesters out of the
administration building made 700 arrests amid a melee that resulted in
injuries of students and police officers alike.

Then there’s Kent State, where Ohio National Guard troops fired on a
crowd in 1970, killing four students and wounding nine others,
producing images of the confrontation that remain indelible today.

That brings us back to Berkeley. The free speech movement that
originated at Berkeley in 1964 culminated in the student takeover of
Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, following a speech by student leader Mario
Savio in which he said, “There is a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you
can’t take part.”

When UC President Clark Kerr failed to take action, Gov. Edmund G.
“Pat” Brown stepped in, ordering police to clear the building.
This resulted in 773 arrests, the largest mass arrest in California
history.

Brown plainly was reacting to pressure from conservatives, who would
come to include Ronald Reagan, who based his 1966 campaign for
governor on sniping about “the mess at Berkeley.” Reagan beat
Brown in a landslide, and subsequently orchestrated Kerr’s firing.

The wisdom of avoiding confrontations between law enforcement and
campus protesters was lost on Linda Katehi, then-chancellor of UC
Davis, who in 2011 allowed campus police to clear an encampment linked
to the Occupy movement, which protested economic inequality.

A video of a campus officer casually pepper-spraying students seated
on the Davis quad went viral; Katehi never fully regained her standing
on campus and lost her chancellorship in 2016.

Judging from the responses to the Gaza-related protests on its
campuses, UC itself seems to have absorbed the lessons of the past.
Pro-Palestinian protests at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara
have been tolerated by their administrations, as my colleague Teresa
Watanabe has reported
[[link removed]],
and to date haven’t resulted in confrontations with law enforcement.

That may be the product of the 2011 episode, which yielded a
systemwide review and report outlining best practices for dealing
with campus protests
[[link removed]]. The report
called for “a substantial shift away from a mindset that has been
focused primarily on the maintenance of order and adherence to rules
and regulations to a more open and communicative attitude,” with
police force used as the very last resort.

That’s not the case at Columbia, USC or some other universities
where police have been deployed almost as the first resort. At USC,
police in riot gear made 93 arrests April 24 in clearing a protest
encampment.

The university has failed to get its arms around the protests
[[link removed]];
its missteps began with its cancellation of a commencement speech by
its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a Muslim, over unidentified
“threats.” Since then, the university has doubled down by
canceling its main commencement ceremony. Numerous speakers tapped for
keynote speeches at other academic commencements have canceled their
appearances.

Some university leaders may be trying to demonstrate a strong hand in
managing their campuses, but the message they communicate is the
opposite. “They look weak
[[link removed]], they
look mostly like they are appeasing hostile outsiders who have no
intention of being appeased,” Timothy Burke, a professor of history
at Swarthmore College, has written.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, bragged in 2019 of signing “a
law protecting free speech on college campuses.
[[link removed]]” But
he responded to an encampment at the University of Texas by saying the
demonstrators “belong in jail” and “should be expelled,”
[[link removed]] an
indication that his devotion to free speech is selective. State and
local police raided the encampment, arresting 57.

If the history of appeasement doesn’t sufficiently teach that
appeasement never works, the actions of today’s cynical goons such
as Abbott, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson
(R-La.) demonstrate that they aren’t in this game to be appeased.

They don’t care a hoot about the “safety” of students, or about
the rise of antisemitism nationally, or about hurtful rhetoric
emanating from the tent colonies on campus, which they claim to be
their concerns. Instead, they’re trying to exploit what appears to
be a violent situation to pursue their larger campaign to demonize
higher education — in fact, education generally — by softening it
up for the imposition of right-wing, reactionary ideologies.

One would hope that this message hit Columbia President Minouche
Shafik squarely after she staged a show of forcefulness April 18 by
calling on the New York Police Department to clear an encampment on
that campus’ central lawn; officers in riot gear arrested 100
individuals. That came the day after Shafik faced a lengthy grilling
by Stefanik and other Republicans on a House committee about reported
antisemitic incidents on and around the Manhattan campus. (Disclosure:
I hold a Columbia graduate degree.)

Shafik’s appeasement was unavailing. Three days after the police
incursion, Stefanik called on Shafik to “immediately resign” for
having “lost control” of the campus. Speaker Johnson followed up
three days later by visiting Columbia and also calling on Shafik to
resign
[[link removed]] “if
she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.”

Shafik is still trying to show a strong hand. Columbia’s efforts to
clear the encampment occupying a corner of its campus lawn has been
excessively punitive: Students who have been suspended in connection
with the encampment have been barred from campus facilities, including
its libraries, classrooms and the common spaces of their dorm rooms.

Monday, participants in the protest were given until 2 p.m. to clear
out and identify themselves to campus police, on pain of suspension
that would prevent them from taking final exams or graduating, if they
were scheduled to do so this year.

The politicians issued their calls for action after fostering the
impression that the campus protests are violent. In the case of
Columbia and USC, this is largely a fiction. The Columbia encampment
was “fairly calm” and reports that Jewish students feared for
their safety were “ridiculous,” Milène Klein, a Columbia senior
and member of the opinion page board of the Daily Spectator, the
campus newspaper, told Slate.com on April 22
[[link removed]].

The police presence was what created the tension, Klein said. “We
have prison buses around campus, and an egregious amount of police
officers off and on campus,” she said. “The presence has been very
overwhelming.”

As my colleague Lorraine Ali points out
[[link removed]],
media coverage of the campus demonstrations and the official responses
has tended to erase the goal of the protesters, which is to focus
attention on the carnage in Gaza.

But that’s only one casualty of the misdirected coverage. Another is
the conflation of anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism. These are
not the same thing. To many people appalled by the situation in Gaza
— including many American Jews and even Israelis — the issue
isn’t Israel as such or Jewishness but the behavior of the Israeli
government, or more specifically the Netanyahu regime.

The participants in the tent protests on campus include many Jewish
students who see the issues a lot more clearly than the politicians or
the media. That won’t change as long as university administrators
forget why their institutions exist — to defend academic freedom and
free speech. The effort may not always be easy, but it’s most
important when it’s hard.

_Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik has written for the
Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years. His business column appears
in print every Sunday and Wednesday, and occasionally on other days.
Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for
articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry._

* pro-Palestine protests
[[link removed]]
* Student arrests
[[link removed]]
* political power
[[link removed]]
* right wing
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]