On Wednesday two weeks ago, I was asked to write a piece about the protests for a major German newspaper. What is below is (with some tweaks, expansions, and stylistic updates) a rough translation of what I wrote. On Friday that week I was told that their editorial board (!) had decided that the text could not appear in the paper (they also, I would note, didn’t ask for any edits) – since I had unduly de-emphasized the raging antisemitism in the encampments. Which I don’t think is true, but whatever. More interestingly: this editorial board sits in Munich. So confident were they in their sense of what was happening on dozens of campuses that they’d never been to and knew no one at (on Friday I had to explain to a German interviewer where Emory University was), that they’d rather not print my article than ask a few clarifying questions. They knew THE CAMPUS, they knew what was there. Any local knowledge would have only unduly detracted from the visionary clarity of the image they had of US universities.
How many stories about students who were unfairly “indicted” for racism or sexism and then “thrown in cancel jail” or threatened with expulsion have you read in the press in the last decade? How many references to “policing” of speech? In the overwhelming majority of these cases, of course, nothing actually happened to these students and professors. Now there is a veritable deluge of suspensions, reprimands, evictions and arrests, and they are frighteningly literal. The New York Civil Liberties Union is protesting, the American Association of University Professors is concerned. But this is not their hour: it is the hour of university administrators, like Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who called the NYPD in the first place. It is the hour of big conservative donors, and of the politicians in Washington who seem to feel a certain glee tormenting in-over-their-head university administrators. Whether this is actually what this is: this certainly feels like the counter-revolution to a revolution that never happened.
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Over the last 50 years, the campus has become a projection surface (a “phantasm”, as Samuel Catlin writes in a brilliant essay in Parapraxis) through which American society (and, since the 1990s, certain Western European societies) has taken stock of itself. The campus has become increasingly virtual, a simulation that only partially corresponds to lived reality, but which has become an indispensable part of a reactionary movement within American politics. Even just the definite article is wrong: “the” campus. The demonstrations that began in elite Columbia have long since spread to public universities in Texas and Berkeley, to Swarthmore College and Emerson College, as well as to Cal Poly Humboldt - an institution 300 miles north of San Francisco on the remote Pacific coast, where the proportion of Latinx students is 33% and the proportion of Pell Grant recipients (i.e. students from low-income families) is 52%.
The image of “the” American campus and “the” American student that media representatives, members of Congress, and even those colleagues at elite institutions who usually get to talk in the media tend to utilize as though it were definitive and straightforward, is a deliberate distortion of a deeply ambiguous, complicated, contradictory reality.
The motives and ideas that drive these young people are certainly diverse. And you can't help but suspect that some people are consciously trying not to reflect on these motives too closely. Just to do some math, the young people who camped on the South Lawn were mostly born in the twenty-first century. Which also means: they can no longer remember the horror of September 11th, the global shock caused by the brutal act. But what they can remember very well: the massive restrictions on civil rights and human rights, the racism, the brutal campaigns through which the wounded superpower put itself more and more in the wrong with each passing year.
They remember it simply because they live with these consequences every day. There is not a single day in their young lives that they did not live under the shadow of the mistakes their country made back then. They live with the deadly consequences of American power left unchecked by its citizens. For many students, Israel is making a historic mistake with its actions in Gaza — and the US right alongside it. The echoes of Iraq, the protestors’ sensitivity to the cavalier disposal over Arab lives that is still so common in US foreign policy making: maybe they are not the right lens for looking at the conflict. But what makes us so sure?
