I wrote about that phenomenon some twenty years ago. "Administrators are capable of engaging in expense-preference behaviors that are compatible with the worldviews of sufficiently many campus politicians that those campus politicians acquiesce in administrative power grabs sufficiently frequently that come a truly obnoxious power grab, those same campus politicians have no consistent basis for stopping it."
Now Mr Zogby is worked up because the usurpation of faculty governance, which he credits Paul Goodman with detecting in the 1960s, and which I have called attention to on occasion, is now using the power so grabbed to stifle a cause he supports.
Israel’s assault on Gaza, following Hamas’ attack of October 7, spawned a nationwide revolt of the young. While organised groups helped mobilize demonstrations demanding a cease-fire and Palestinian rights, the breadth and depth of the effort was more akin to a spontaneous eruption.Maybe the people in Student Affairs shouldn't have been so quick to trash "civility" as something oppressive. Let's savor Mr Zogby's characterization of the first set of malign actors, donors who might have been culturally Jewish or inclined to be sympathetic with Israel, and contemplate that he's seeing a falling-out among people who consider themselves "progressive" and probably know the right wine pairings at a common room reception.
In this regard, it was not unlike earlier spontaneous protest movements that sprang up over the past decade: the Women’s March, the “Welcome immigrants” demonstrations that filled U.S. airports in response to the “Muslim ban,” the student-led “March for our Lives” after repeated mass shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd.
The cease-fire/pro-Palestinian movement had much in common with these earlier efforts. Its politics skewed left, it was youth-led, and it was racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. The difference was that a main locus of its activities was college campuses.
It began with demonstrations, teach-ins, and vigils. But as the war continued into the spring and the world became aware of the mass killings and devastation inflicted by Israel—and the Joe Biden administration’s unconditional support in the face of the enormity of human loss and suffering—the intensity of the student response grew as well. This gave birth to the “encampment movement” that rapidly spread to hundreds of campuses across the country.
From the early stages, the campus anti-war protests were confronted by a number of malign actors who sought to silence or discredit the dissent. Charging that administrations weren’t acting to quash the protests, a number of pro-Israel donors and trustees at some elite universities withdrew their financial support.
While most of the early protests were self-policed, there were often instances where students on both sides of this emotionally charged conflict engaged in hurtful or threatening behaviors. At this point, a second group of malign actors entered the fray.
A few prominent pro-Israel Jewish organisations drummed up an exaggerated campaign charging that the entire protest effort was at its core antisemitic and should be stopped to protect Jewish students who felt threatened or excluded. They published reports, conducted a huge media campaign, and testified before Congress making their case. While some examples they used were clearly hurtful, the bulk of the instances they cited were not, by any reasonable standard, antisemitic.
Sooner or later we would hit circles of oppression that don't overlap. "Illinois-Chicago is the place where the professional protest communities got a Trump rally cancelled. The whole point of women's and gender studies is to make UIC a hostile environment for male faculty and students. Institutional discrimination, particularly against Normals, is business as usual on campus. And now the victim studies departments have come for the Jews. Another special task force isn't going to fix that."
The post I cited referred to what Mr Zogby includes in the "second group of malign actors." If that includes students in the victim studies department, troubled by the pro-terrorist propaganda and eliminationist rhetoric from the Hamas enthusiasts, again, we're seeing a falling-out among people who might otherwise have a lot to agree on. I saw that coming years ago as well.
But now Mr Zogby is troubled because the same craven careerists who have for so long hassled the Normals and coddled the freakazoids turn out to be careerists.
This effort was enough to provide the impetus for a third group of malign actors: Republican members of Congress. For the GOP, this was “a perfect storm.” The cast of villains were “elite” universities with their spoiled upper-class students, those who oppose Israel, and Democrats who tolerate, or even encourage, disruptive behaviors.I repeat, those developments were a long time in coming.
Ivy League university presidents were summoned to testify before congressional committees, where they were badgered and confronted by deceptive and misleading questions designed more for media hits than information. The pressures placed on these presidents after they bungled their confrontations before different committees resulted in many feeling compelled to resign.
Republicans sensing victory and smelling blood in the water went further in their campaigns of harassment—threatening funding for colleges that didn’t act as the GOP saw fit and demanding more oversight. They also moved from maligning the movement as antisemitic to also supporting “terrorist ideology.”
Confronted by these multi-layered challenges and fearful of the pressures from donors and congressional meddling, many universities reacted by inviting in police to dismantle the protests—often using brutal force. In a few weeks, police arrested more than 3,000 students nationwide, with universities suspending many and banning several student groups from operating on campus.
When students and faculty returned to their campuses this month, they discovered that college administrators had been hard at work during the summer revamping policies with regard to both allowable protest activity and acceptable speech. While there were some differences from campus to campus, the new regulations had enough in common to lead researchers to uncover an industry of “security consultants” who had been brought in to advise on changing campus policies and practices.
The new procedures place limits on time, place, and duration of protests and require that sponsoring groups secure permission for protest activity and, in some instances, the content of signs to be used. Some faculty have been required to submit their curriculum for review (not only by administrators but by requesting members of Congress). More problematic has been the fact that all of these changes have been made without involvement of the schools’ faculty or student senates or the established faculty/student judicial committees. Instead of dealing with infractions internally, they involve external police enforcement.
While many have expressed concern that these polices are similar to McCarthy-era repression and intimidation, equally worrisome is what all of this means for the future of the university. And this is where Goodman’s parable is relevant, because what we have is a situation where the clerks, driven by fear, political pressure, and donors have engineered a power grab bypassing the established structures of governance and have securitized campuses, restricting both academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Did anybody object to free speech zones or restrictions on distributing leaflets when those restrictions were used to stifle Normals?
Will the faculty reclaim their stewardship of the curriculum?
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