Date: 2025-04-05 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026667
US CAMPUS UNREST
POORLY HANDLED
I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.
POORLY HANDLED
I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am pretty disappointed in the way the current wave of campus unrest is being handled. My impression of most of the writing is that it is very superficial and adds nothing to what should be a robust and deep discussion and analysis of the underlying issues that are the root cause of the concents the students are protesting.
In my opinion, this NYT opinion piece from a Columbia professor does nothing much of value. On the other hand there is an enormous amount of important discussion to be had ... but it seems to be missing. Why is this?
I trained as an engineer, not a historian ... but it is my understanding that jews were not treated very well for many centuries before before Hitler and the 'holocaust' and his 'ultimate solution.
Post WWII there has been an effort to avoid anti-semitism and be supportive of jews in many ways. Little is perfect ... but there has been an effort, and some success.
My impression is that there are some jewish groups who have taken advantage of various issues ... historic and current ... to advantage themseles in ways that are upsetting others. This is happening in the USA and it is happening in Israel.
I am surprised how little the media has chosen to describe the reasons why students at Columbia and other universities have started to protest. What are they protesting? Who are they protesting against? What is the problem? What are the problems?
My impression is that most of the students who are protesting have an issue ... and generally speaking, the issue will be valid and worth protesting about. But my impression is that another student can have another issue that is equally deserving of protest. Both also deserve discussion an dialog ... and compromise ... and creative thinking.
Little of this deserves the NYPD in riot gear ... and arrest. Talk about stupidity on steroids coming from the university administration at Columbia and spreading like wildfire to many other unisdversities are the country.
The press is loving it ... but frankly are doing little of value but rather going down an ever larging rabbit hole while ignoring a difficult but essential analysis of real issues that are important for our society both locally and globally.
I have not heard so much recently about October 7th and the taking of more than a hundred Israeli hostages and the killing of around 1,400 civilian Israelis near the Gaza border. I want to know more. How could it have happened? There are a lot of questions and the answers make me uncomfortable.
About six months into the Israeli response to October 7th, the AP is reporting that more 33.137 Palestinians have killed in Gaza, of which more than 13,000 are reported to be children.
YES ... the killings of October 7th by Hamas were awful. YES ... there should be an accounting for this.
BUT ... the killings since October 7th by Israel are also awful but and the deliberate choice by what must now be described as the evil regime of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right wing government.
I was a student protestor in the late 1950s early 1960s and particiapated in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). During the Easter weekend of 1959, around 40,000 students converged on Tranfgalgar Square in London to protest. We were allowed to protest as long as it was non-violent. 65 years later in the USA at Columbia University in New York in the USA 400 students cannot protest and more than 200 get arrested. Something is very wrong with the society I am living in in the United States in 2024! I wish I knew what it is / was!
Perhaps it has something to do with the violent nature of America. and in particulare the gun-violence. Almost certainly there were less guns in Trafalgar Square in London in 1959 with 40,000 people than with the 400 or so people around Columbia University last week. To me it makes little sense for the police to be armed and in riot gear dealing with a prefectly reasonable gathering in an academic space where freedom of expression should be sacrosanct.
Peter Burgess
Written by John McWhorter ... Opinion Writer
April 23, 2024
You’re reading the John McWhorter newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture. Get it in your inbox.
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33'' which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
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. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, 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. 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?
Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.
Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.
Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time. It varies by location and day; generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats. People will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All lives matter.”
And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, 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 other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent.
However, the issues are complex, in ways that this uncompromising brand of power battling is ill suited to address. Legitimate questions remain about the definition of genocide, about the extent of a nation’s right to defend itself and about the justice of partition (which has not historically been limited to Palestine). There is a reason many consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the most morally challenging in the modern world.
When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.
I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.
On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.
Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — 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. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.
But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.