School’s Out
The ole college try: Occupy Wall Street-style campus protests of Israel’s war in Gaza are officially a thing. Tent encampments that went up at Columbia University have now been copied by student protestors from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to Emory University in Atlanta, all the way to Indiana University in Bloomington.
Demonstrators even stormed the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. This is no longer just an elite Ivy University thing. Because Israel/Palestine is a divisive issue even amongst mostly liberal and left-wing college students, we’re seeing lots of pro-Israel counter-demonstrations as well.
School administrators have dusted off their “abundance of caution” COVID-era playbooks; canceling in-person classes and exams, moving instruction online, and shutting down graduation events.
The University of Southern California in Los Angeles earned bipartisan condemnation a few weeks ago for canceling the commencement speech of a pro-Palestinian valedictorian. Widespread student protests have now prompted the university to shut down the entire commencement event.
A few universities, with the eager support of some conservative commentators and Republican politicians, have called in the cops to dismantle encampments and arrest demonstrating students and faculty. Even where students are violating university policy and “time, place, and manner restrictions,” the scenes from these crackdowns do not look particularly proportional or First Amendment-friendly.
Given the immediate concerns of protestors, the easiest historical parallel people have drawn is to the anti-Vietnam campus protests of half a century ago. Fortunately, no one has burned down an ROTC building or waylaid Robert McNamara’s car. Yet.
Occupy 2.0: The more apt comparison is to the Occupy Wall Street protests of the last decade. Left-wing demonstrators mad about the issue of the day (inequality then, Israel now) and disappointed with the insufficient radicalism of the Democrat in the White House are pitching tents and demanding change.
The awkwardness of progressives protesting the policies of a progressive administration has seen demonstrators focus most of their ire on institutions that are a little easier to criticize. For Occupy Wall Street, it was the banks. For today’s students, its university administrations and the Israeli government.
Like Occupy Wall Street, a single-issue protest is quickly devolving into a general criticism of society. Stopping the war in Gaza is now being linked to stopping gentrification in Los Angeles, “Cop City” in Atlanta, and climate change everywhere.
Odds are this protest movement will stick around for a while, both on the ground and in the discourse. It’s an election year after all, so emotions are running high. A re-do of the 2020 presidential election with the same unpopular, uninspiring candidates
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