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REFLECTIONS ON STUDENT ACTIVISM – AND THE STRUGGLE FOR A BETTER
WORLD  
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William D. Hartung
May 14, 2024
TomDispatch [[link removed]]


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_ My most important training came outside the classroom, as a student
activist. As I look at the surge of student organizing aimed at
stopping the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, participation in such
movements can have a long-term impact... _

Palestine Solidarity Protest in San Francisco, Jan. 25, 2008. The
protesters, carrying banners in different languages, chanted in
English and occasionally in Arabic, denouncing the US govt, Israel and
the Arab regimes, , calling for the lifting of the Gaza siege. (Photo
by Hossam El-Hamalawy is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr)

 

I’ve spent most of my life as an advocate for a more peaceful world.
In recent years, I’ve been focused on promoting diplomacy over war
and exposing the role of giant weapons companies like Lockheed Martin
and its allies in Congress and at the Pentagon as they push for a
“military-first” foreign policy. I’ve worked at an alphabet soup
of think tanks: the Council on Economic Priorities 
[[link removed]](CEP),
the World Policy Institute
[[link removed]] (WPI),
the New America Foundation [[link removed]], the Center
for International Policy [[link removed]] (CIP),
and my current institutional home, the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft [[link removed]] (QI).

Most of what I’ve done in my career is firmly rooted in my college
experience. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia
University, class of 1978, and my time there prepared me for my
current work — just not in the way one might expect. I took some
relevant courses like Seymour Melman’s
[[link removed]] class
on America’s permanent war economy and Marcia Wright’s
[[link removed]] on the history
of the colonization of South Africa. But my most important training
came outside the classroom, as a student activist.

STUDENT ACTIVISM: COLUMBIA IN THE 1970S

As I look at the surge of student organizing aimed at stopping the
slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I’m reminded that participation
in such movements can have a long-term impact, personally as well as
politically, one that reaches far beyond the struggle of the moment.
In my case, the values and skills I learned in movements like
the divestment campaign
[[link removed]] against
apartheid South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s formed the foundation of
virtually everything I’ve done since.

I was not an obvious candidate to become a student radical. I grew up
in Lake View, New York, a rock-ribbed Republican suburb of Buffalo. My
dad was a Goldwater Republican
[[link removed]],
so committed that we even had that Republican senator’s “merch”
prominently displayed in our house. (The funniest of those artifacts:
a can of “Gold Water
[[link removed]],”
a sickly sweet variation on ginger ale.)

Although I fit in well enough for a while, by the time I was a
teenager my goal had become all too straightforward: get out of my
hometown as soon as possible. My escape route: Columbia University,
where I expected to join a vibrant, progressive student movement.

Unfortunately, when I got there in 1973, the activist surge
[[link removed]] of
the anti-Vietnam War era had almost totally subsided. By my sophomore
year, though, things started to pick up. The September 1973 coup
[[link removed]] that
overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chile’s
Salvador Allende and the ongoing repression of the Black population in
apartheid South Africa had sparked a new round of student activism.

My first foray into politics in college was joining the Columbia
University Committee for Human Rights in Chile. It started out as a
strictly student organization, but our activities took on greater
meaning and our commitment intensified when we befriended a group of
Chilean exiles who had moved into our neighborhood on New York’s
Upper West Side.

In 1974, I also took time off to work in the New York branch of
the United Farm Workers
[[link removed]]‘ boycott of
non-union grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine. I ran a picket line in
front of the Daitch Shopwell supermarket at 110th and Broadway in
Manhattan. One of my regulars on that picket line was an older
gentleman named Jim Peck
[[link removed]]. It took a while
before I learned that he had been a central figure in the Freedom
Rides in the South during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had
first been arrested [[link removed]] for
civil rights organizing in 1947 in Durham, North Carolina, alongside
the legendary Bayard Rustin. He and his fellow activists, black and
white, went on to ride buses together across the South to press the
case for the integration of interstate transportation. On a number of
occasions, they would be brutally beaten by white mobs. In my own
brief career as a student activist, I faced no such risks, but Jim’s
history of commitment and courage inspired me.

When I got back from my stint with the United Farm Workers, the main
political activity on the Columbia campus was a campaign to get the
university to divest from companies involved in apartheid South
Africa. We didn’t win then, but we did help put that issue on the
map. Ten years later, a student divestment movement finally succeeded
[[link removed]], and
Columbia became the first major university to commit to fully
divesting from South Africa. That modest victory, part of sustained
anti-apartheid efforts on college campuses and beyond, would be
followed nationwide by Congress’s passage
[[link removed].] of
comprehensive sanctions on the apartheid regime, despite a veto
attempt by then-President Ronald Reagan.
 

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BUY THE BOOK
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Many of us kept working on the anti-apartheid issue after graduation.
I remained a member of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to
South Africa
[[link removed]] and,
for a while, was also a member of the collective that put
out _Southern Africa Magazine_
[[link removed]] in
support of the anti-apartheid struggle and liberation movements in
southern Africa. In New York, our mentors and inspirations in the
anti-apartheid movement were people like Prexy Nesbitt
[[link removed]], a charismatic organizer
from Chicago, and Jennifer Davis
[[link removed]],
a South African exile who edited our magazine and went on to run the
American Committee on Africa. For that magazine, I helped track
companies breaking the arms embargo on South Africa as well as
multinational corporations propping up the regime, an experience that
served me well when I went on to become a researcher in the world of
think tanks.

FROM STUDENT ACTIVIST TO THINK-TANK EXPERT

By that time, I was fully engaged politically. As I approached the end
of my four years at Columbia, however, it slowly dawned on me that I
was going to have to get a real job. The good news was that, in my
brief career as a student activist, I had learned some basic skills,
including how to craft an article, give a speech, and run a meeting.

The bad news was that I had absolutely no idea how to find gainful
employment. So, I went home to Lake View for a while and my mom, who
was a member of the International Typographical Union, gave me a crash
course in proofreading and how to use official proofreading symbols.
On the strength of those lessons, I got a job at a New York print
shop, where I spent a miserable year proofreading magazines
like _Psychology Today, Modern Bride, Skiing, Boating, _and pretty
much any other publication ending in -ing.

Then I got lucky. A friend had just turned down a job, mostly because
the pay was so lousy, at the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), a
think tank founded to promote corporate social responsibility. But my
expenses at the time were, to say the least, minimal, so I took the
job.

The focus of my first CEP project was economic conversion
[[link removed]], a
process designed to help communities reduce their dependency on
Pentagon spending. It had been launched by Gordon Adams
[[link removed]] (now Abby
Ross [[link removed]]), then finishing _The Iron
Triangle_
[[link removed]],
his immensely useful analysis of the military-industrial complex.
While at CEP, I wrote about the top 100 Pentagon contractors, the top
25 arms exporting firms, and the economic benefits
[[link removed]] of
a nuclear weapons freeze. My goal: produce research that would help
activists and advocates make their case.

And so it went. Other than a stint in New York State government from
the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, I’ve been a think-tank
analyst ever since. At the moment, most of the issues I’ve advocated
for, from reducing the Pentagon budget to cutting nuclear arsenals,
are heading in exactly the wrong direction. By contrast, though, the
issues I worked on as a student did indeed make progress, though only
after years of organizing. South Africa’s apartheid regime
actually fell
[[link removed]] in
1992. In 1975, California Governor Jerry Brown pushed through a state
law [[link removed]] guaranteeing
the right of farmworkers to organize. In Chile, Pinochet was ousted
[[link removed]] thanks
to a 1988 national referendum and lived his last years as an
international pariah, even spending
[[link removed]] 503
days under house arrest in the United Kingdom on charges
[[link removed]] of
“genocide and terrorism that include murder.”

The main difference between the successful solidarity movements I
participated in and the other political movements in which I’ve
played some small part was that both the South Africa divestment
campaign and the United Farm Workers (UFW) boycott took their leads
from people and organizations on the front lines of the struggle.
Solidarity movements contributed in a significant fashion to those
victories, but the central players were those front-line
organizations, from the African National Congress
[[link removed]] and
the Black Consciousness Movement
[[link removed]] in
South Africa to UFW organizers working in the fields of California.

THE STUDENT MOVEMENT FOR GAZA

Which brings me back to the state of current student activism. I live
10 blocks from the main gates of Columbia University, the site of one
of the more active student organizations pressing for a ceasefire in
Gaza and an end to government and institutional support for Israel’s
brutal military campaign there, which has already killed
nearly 35,000
[[link removed].] people
and left many others without medical care, adequate food, or clean
water. The International Court of Justice has already suggested that
a plausible case
[[link removed]] can
be made for the Netanyahu government being guilty of genocide. Whether
you use that term or simply call Israeli actions “war crimes,” the
killing has to stop, which makes me proud of those Columbia student
activists and deeply ashamed of the way the leadership of my former
university has responded to them.

This April, when the president of Columbia called in the riot police
to arrest
[[link removed]] students
engaged in a peaceful protest, she inadvertently brought a whole new
level of attention to activism about Gaza. Students at scores of
campuses across the country started
[[link removed]] similar
tent cities in solidarity with the Columbia students and protests that
had largely been ignored in the mainstream media are now drawing TV
cameras from outlets large and small.

Opponents of the student demonstrators, whose real goal is to get them
to stop criticizing Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza,
have hurled claims of antisemitism at them that largely haven’t
distinguished between actual acts of discrimination and cases of
students feeling “uncomfortable” due to harsh — and wholly
justified — criticisms of the Israeli government. As Judd Legum
underscored at his substack Popular Information
[[link removed]], there was
no evidence of antisemitic acts by the students running the
pro-ceasefire encampment at Columbia. Individuals and organizations
outside the student movement seem to have been responsible for
whatever hate rhetoric and related incidents have occurred.

Genuine antisemitism should be roundly condemned but confusing it with
criticism of Israeli policies in Gaza will only make that job harder.
And keep in mind that the Republican politicians hurling charges of
antisemitism at students protesting repression in Gaza are, ironically
enough, closely linked to actual antisemites.

To cite just one example, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited the
Columbia campus last month in a purported effort to express his
concern about antisemitism, has long promoted
[[link removed]] the racist “great
replacement theory
[[link removed]],”
which holds that welcoming non-white immigrants is part of a plot to
undermine the culture and power of white Americans. That theory has
been cited by numerous perpetrators of racial and antisemitic
violence, including the attacker
[[link removed]] who
murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in
2018.

Despite attempts to slander those student activists and divert
attention from the devastation being visited on the people of Gaza,
activists associated with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace
[[link removed]] and Students for Justice in
Palestine [[link removed]] continue to bravely build a
vibrant movement that refuses to back down in the face of attacks by
both college leaders and prominent donors. Such leaders have, in fact,
interfered with student rights of assembly and free speech, suspended
them for making statements critical of Israel, and used the police to
break up protests. As the repression accelerates, with a surge
[[link removed]] of
campus expulsions of protesters and the arrest of more than 2,500
students at more than 40 universities nationwide, the student
activists continue to show courage under fire of a kind I was never
called on to exhibit in my days in college. In the process, they have
echoed the even larger protests of the anti-Vietnam War era.

If you were to look at a list of what the administrations at Columbia
and other colleges and universities have done to student protesters in
these weeks, without identifying the institutions doing it, you might
reasonably assume that theirs was the work of autocratic regimes, not
places purportedly dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of speech.

A number of universities — including Brown, Evergreen State,
Middlebury, Rutgers, and Northwestern – have agreed
[[link removed]] to meet
various student demands, from making formal statements in support of a
ceasefire in Gaza to providing more transparency on university
investments and agreeing to vote on divestment.  Meanwhile, President
Biden has pledged
[[link removed]] to
impose a partial pause on arms transfers to Israel if it launches a
major attack on the residents of the vulnerable enclave of Rafah. But
far more needs to be done to end the killing and begin to provide
reparations for the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza,
including a cutoff of the supply and maintenance of _all _the
American weaponry that has been used to support the Israeli military
effort.  Student organizing will continue, even in the face of
ongoing efforts to smear the student rebels and divert attention from
the mass killing of Palestinians. Those students remain remarkably
(and bravely) determined to end this country’s shameful policy
of enabling
[[link removed]] Israel’s
devastating assault and they are clearly not about to give up.

TODAY’S CAMPAIGNS AND TOMORROW’S

One thing is guaranteed: the commitment of this generation of student
activists will reverberate through the progressive movement for years
to come, setting high standards for steadfast activism in the face of
the power of repression. Many of the activists from my own years on
campus have remained in progressive politics as union organizers,
immigration reform advocates, peace and racial justice activists, or
even, like me, think-tank researchers. And don’t be surprised if the
ceasefire movement has a similar impact on our future, possibly on an
even larger scale.

Face it, we’re living through difficult times when fundamental
tenets of our admittedly flawed democracy are under attack, and openly
racist, misogynist, anti-gay, and anti-trans rhetoric and actions are
regarded as acceptable conduct by all too many in our country. But the
surge of student activism over Gaza is just one of many signs that a
different, better world is still possible.

To get there, however, it’s important to understand that, even as we
rally against the crises of the moment, suffering both victories and
setbacks along the way, we need to prepare ourselves to stay in the
struggle for the long haul. Hopefully, the current wave of student
activism over the nightmare in Gaza will prove to be a catalyst in
creating a larger, stronger movement that can overcome the most
daunting challenges we face both as a country and a world.

_[WILLIAM D. HARTUNG, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is a senior research
fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the
author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the
Military-Industrial Complex
[[link removed]].]_

_Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung. Cross-posted with permission. May
not be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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* Activism
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* student activism
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* Protest
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* Gaza protests
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Gaza
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* pro-Palestine protests
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* Palestine solidarity
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* Student protests
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* campus activism
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* student movement
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* Education
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* Colleges
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* policing
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* police repression
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* Police assaults
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* Israel-Palestine
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* South Africa
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* apartheid
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* Anti-apartheid
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