Expelled for... um... Greenface?

Back in the halcyon days of the 2010s, the big annual event of this blog was the Curmie Awards, presented to the person or organization who most embarrassed the profession of education.  Curmie would compile a list of nominees from stories he’d covered during the calendar year, and readers would vote on the most (un)deserving recipient.

There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the foreseeable future for three reasons.  First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving badly.  That doesn’t mean there haven’t been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it were, other stories have done more to pique his interest.  Plus, the unethical or incompetent protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.

Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.

Finally, there are a lot fewer of you.  Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so as many hits as in yesteryear.  You, Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group.  It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if a half dozen votes would win the election.

All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA, like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda been a contender.

Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces.  One of the three apparently had rather severe acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”  The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried.  The lads photographed themselves because they “looked silly.”  Importantly, the boys did not post the photo to social media.

Nothing to see here, right?  Well, not to any rational person, no.  But this is a story about high school administrators, remember?  Two of those lads were about to enroll at St. Francis, a high-priced private school.  Again: so far, so good.

Flash forward three years.  It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota.  Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some increased tension.  Unbeknownst to the two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph.”  And one of her friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed them to be in blackface.  The photo was to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.

Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either withdraw or be expelled.

To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to do so.  So some of the furor, though not justified, was at least comprehensible.  But that doesn’t get the school off the hook.  They leapt to a false conclusion when even a cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did nothing wrong.  (Curmie isn’t convinced that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)

As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important to get names out there if possible.  We may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.

The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell, who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”  Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment at all.  Meanwhile the boys who did nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town.  The world knows that, now.  So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?” 

This being an education story, and Curmie being a career educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.

So…

They acted the way they did because…

a.    They have been so infected with a socio-political agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored glasses.

b.  They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.

c.     They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a dead battery and a turnip.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.

This story has received new life of late because the boys sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars.  The award is based on a new California law which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private schools, unions, hospitals, etc.  This is the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary school.

The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and violation of free speech.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t qualify as defamation.  Still, each boy will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its lesson.

Yeah, that’s likely to happen…

 

 

Today in Alliteration: Pyrrhus and Pro-Palestinian Protests

Pyrrhus in happier times

Curmie struggled to find a hook for this piece.  He first toyed with a baseball analogy—trying to stretch a single into a double and getting thrown out at second base.  But that didn’t quite work.  Maybe something from playing cards—overplaying a hand?  No, that isn’t exactly right, either.  “First, do no harm,” the famous line (probably inaccurately) attributed to the Classical Greek physician Hippocrates?  Again, close… but no cigar.

Ultimately, we’re going to go with the notion of a Pyrrhic victory.  The term comes from the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus, who ruled in the early 3^rd century BCE.  He is best known today not for his apparent brilliance as a general, but for winning consecutive battles against Roman armies, only to have his forces so depleted in the process that he could not continue his campaign.  Given that this is yet another post about demonstrations on university campuses concerning the situation in Gaza and Israel, the military terminology makes some sense.  And there are parallels between the actual conflict and the unrest on American campuses. 

The events of last October 7 were certainly a win for Hamas in the short term.  They inflicted far more casualties and far more damage than they incurred.  But they, and especially the everyday Palestinian people they purport to represent, have not seen a lot of wins since then.  Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including an estimated 14,000 children, have been killed by the Israeli military, and that figure does not include the imminent deaths from starvation or the displacement of over a million Palestinians.  There have been deaths and displacements on the Israeli side, too, but the numbers are significantly smaller.

On the “winning the hearts and minds” front, the process has been quite different.  There, the initial reaction across this country to the barbarity of the events of October 7 was predictably anti-Hamas.  There were pockets of dissent to that consensus, however, especially among student groups at major universities like Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Things get complicated from there.  Curmie has made a number of points in the past, arguing that whereas the Hamas attacks in Israel cannot be excused, the frustration of the Palestinian people is readily comprehensible, and Israel’s response to the attack was disproportionate to say the least.  Yeah, yeah, it’s war, and there will inevitably be collateral damage.  It’s funny, though, how that’s unavoidable when it’s our side inflicting it and an offense against God and the universe if we’re on the receiving end. 

The life circumstances of the average Palestinian weren’t unknown a year ago, but, like apartheid in the ‘80s, they had long since ceased to be news, and a good number of people were shocked, not into reality, but into a consciousness of it.  The protests both helped and hurt the pro-Palestinian cause.

On the plus side, we were reminded that such events—the storming of the Bastille, the attack on Fort Sumter, the Easter Rising, and on and on—never happen in a vacuum; there’s always a rationale.  Not everyone, certainly not those in power, regard that rationale as compelling or even reality-based, but it’s there. 

But the downside is demonstrable and significant.  First, the initial rhetoric about Israel being the sole cause of the attack is sufficiently daft that it alienates potential allies.  And whereas Curmie has argued repeatedly that in the absence of aggravating factors (e.g., “true threats”), chanting slogans like “from the river to sea…” is protected speech, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  Using phrases that even could be interpreted as a threat not merely to Israeli dominance in its occupied territories but to the lives of Jews worldwide is unlikely to win friends and influence people.

It opens the door for those—especially but not exclusively right-wing pols and pundits—to conflate Palestinians with Hamas and the Likud government of Israel with Jews in general.  This is, of course, a lazy and anti-intellectual construct, which is why it appeals so much to some of the dimmer bulbs in the GOP.  But it is also the stuff of headlines, largely because “lazy and anti-intellectual” is also a rather apt descriptor of the majority of so-called journalists. 

Still, there have been victories for the pro-Palestinian side, and they haven’t always come in the form of sympathy for the protesters in the wake of over-reaction from politicians, university officials, or law enforcement.  Deals—often including amnesty for protesters, consideration of divestment proceedings, creating cultural centers and Middle East Studies departments, etc.—have been struck on a number of campuses, including Northwestern, Rutgers, and Brown.  (Curmie won’t bother to link to all these stories, Gentle Reader, as he is well aware of your ability to operate the Google machine.)

But these triumphs, such as they are, have come at a price.  Negotiated settlements involving immunity for having violated either the law or at least university policy suggest a weak administration rather than a legitimate argument on the part of the protesters.  It is not unreasonable to suggest that breaking the law is breaking the law, and there is no question that some of the demonstrators did so.  Blocking access to campus, holding university workers de facto hostage, even violating reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions cannot be countenanced.  The fact that the demonstrators “got away with it” engenders resentment from those not already on their side.

More to the point, the cancellation of commencement ceremonies at the University of Southern California and the elimination of a university-wide exercise at Columbia are not going to sit well with the general public, which is already much more likely to be Islamophobic than antisemitic.  Why else would Republican pols who saw nothing wrong with a gang of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville a couple of years ago be eager to claim that criticisms of the Israeli government are now inherently antisemitic?  And those cancellations will be blamed on the protesters, whether they’re actually at fault or not.

Curmie is reminded of standing in the May 4 Museum at Kent State University, watching tapes of the TV coverage of the 1970 shootings on that campus.  Particularly memorable was a local woman, perhaps in her 60s, who proclaimed that the events of the day had been unfortunate, “but if that’s what it takes to restore law and order…”  Student protesters are always going to be the bad guys in the public’s eyes precisely because they are suggesting that all is not right in the status quo, and those who benefit from the current system like it just fine.  Sometimes the protesters are “right,” sometimes not.  Sometimes they are the perpetrators, sometimes the victims.  But they will always, always, be blamed.

It is also a fact of life that those who oppose Group X, whoever Group X might be, will take the stupidest member of that group as representative of the entire organization.  Just as not all Republicans are as vulgarly hypocritical as Lauren Boebert, as dishonest as George Santos, or as Machiavellian as Mitch McConnell, not all campus protesters are as self-entitled as Malak Afaneh. 

She’s the woman who barged into a private event on the property of Cal-Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, a month or so ago.  She then proceeded to use a microphone to interrupt the proceedings to yammer about Ramadan (she was stopped before she could get to what one presumes would have been the real content of her screed), claiming that the National Lawyers Guild says that such an intrusion is protected by the 1^st Amendment.  The National Lawyers Guild needs, as Popehat’s Ken White might say, to stop recruiting its membership out of the back room of a bait shop. 

Professor Fisk, not unreasonably, demanded that Afaneh leave her home, and attempted to wrestle the microphone from her.  Now the university is initiating a civil rights investigation against Fisk, whom Afaneh claims was trying to silence her because of her pro-Palestinian views.  No, she was “silenced” because she’s an entitled brat (Curmie refrains from using a different monosyllable beginning with the same letter).  The intrusion was, of course, planned and choreographed in advance—hence the video documentation that begins right on cue.

But a prospective lawyer, of all people, ought to know the basic principles of persuasion—things Curmie taught in a freshman-level speech course back in the day: realize that the audience might be hostile to your views and structure your message accordingly; understand, also, that the more sophisticated your audience, the more you need to acknowledge the legitimacy of at least part of their position; and for God’s sake, stay on message!

If you’re trying to convince a Trump supporter to vote for Biden, you don’t go screaming about how their guy says outrageous things.  Rather, you say “look, I know my guy makes his share of verbal gaffes, but have you really listened to the word salads your guy spews out?”  And you don’t do anything at all if they’re just trying to finish their breakfast at the local diner.

Malak Afaneh will no doubt be cheered by the true believers.  She got what she wanted: national attention.  But she unquestionably did her cause more harm than good by intruding into a private space, using a microphone to disrupt a gathering that had nothing to do with her speech, and generally being condescending to a pretty intelligent group of people.  Anyone not already firmly on her side of the controversy just moved further away from her cause because of her antics.  A small win is not worth a larger loss.

Curmie understands that.  Curmie’s students from 40 years ago understood that.  Pyrrhus definitely understood that.  Ms. Afaneh, for better or worse, does not.

The Axios Survey, For What It's Worth

Once upon a time, Curmie was something of a math whiz-kid; he’s really good at easy math.  We don’t talk about analytic geometry or natural logarithms in polite company, but various applications of algebra, from grading spread-sheets to strategies for investing the retirement nest egg, have been very much a part of Curmie’s world for a long time. 

Even keeping in mind Mark Twain’s observation that there are three kinds of lies—regular lies, damned lies, and statistics—Curmie has been fascinated by statistics since he was a little boy.  Of course, knowing the numbers is only part of the story; it’s the conclusions we draw from that raw material that matter.

First, we need to consider the possibility that the facts are not only misinterpreted, but actually wrong.  Ask anyone who paid even a little attention in high school English who the groundlings were at the premiere performance of Hamlet, and you’ll get a variation on “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.”  The evidence is two-fold: it cost only a penny to attend, and there are dirty jokes.

But the fact is that we don’t know how much it cost to attend.  We have a grand total of two contemporary sources that state what the standard admission fee was at the Globe.  It’s a reasonable surmise, but still not a certainty, that Hamlet cost the same as other plays.  But whereas we assume that a penny was an insignificant amount of money, it turns out that as a percentage of the disposable income of a journeyman laborer, the price of admission to the Globe was almost identical to a cost of a ticket to the National Theatre today.

Curmie also has it on good authority that, notwithstanding Victorian era claims to the contrary, well-educated and even wealthy people think dirty jokes are funny at least some of the time.  That whole “my head in your lap… country matters” business?  [Note: in Elizabethan England, the “t” in “country” would have been part of the first syllable.]  Oh, Will, you naughty rascal!

One more thing: the Globe was an outdoor theatre, dependent on daylight for spectators’ ability to see the stage action.  The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker were butchering, baking, and candlestick making at that hour.  Hamlet’s audience would likely have looked like that of a Broadway matinee today: people who don’t need to work or are visiting the city, or those who worked different hours (the Inns of Court often did business at night, for example).

Curmie was thinking about all these things when he read the Generation Lab poll commissioned by Axios about the concerns of today’s undergraduates.  Titled “Exclusive poll: Most college students shrug at nationwide protests,” the article suggests, among other things, that perhaps the protests on American campuses won’t hurt President Biden’s re-election chances as much as might have previously been believed.  Students don’t blame him for the situation in the Middle East as much as they do Hamas, you see. 

Curmie apologizes for bluntness, but the idea that literally anyone would suggest that Biden was more responsible than the actual combatants has crossed the line into full-blown lunacy.  If you want to say he hasn’t handled the situation as well as he might have, you’ll get no argument from Curmie.  But to say that he’s more culpable than Hamas (or Likud, for that matter) is begging for a nice padded cell.

Curmie does stop short of declaring the entire poll and its interpretation redolent of bovine fecal matter, but that one eyebrow did indeed shoot upward and the opposite eye did close to a squint.  Believing that it definitely cost exactly a penny to attend Hamlet or indeed that the groundlings were who your high school English teacher said they were requires considerably less of a leap of faith than trusting these poll results.

For one thing, the questions are incompetent.  Notice that neither antisemitism nor freedom of speech and assembly is an option.  Of course “the conflict in the Middle East” didn’t generate as many responses as issues that affect students directly: healthcare, education funding, etc.  

The Vietnam War, the source of student protests in Curmie’s youth, was a different matter: college-aged young American men were being drafted and used as cannon fodder for a war many of them thought was unjust.  It’s hardly surprising that there were a lot of protests on university campuses.  What’s happening now in Gaza has little direct relevance except to those with relatives in either Israel or Gaza.

More to the point, given that there are an estimated 15.8 million undergraduates in the country, that “small minority (8%)” of students who have taken part in a demonstration on one side or the other represents over one and a quarter million students.  That’s a lot of folks in Curmie’s neighborhood.  There are multiple unknowns here: the percentage of demonstrators on each side of the dispute, for example.  It’s evident that a significant majority support the Palestinian (not to say Hamas) position: we’ve certainly heard more about them, and one doesn’t often stage a demonstration in favor of the status quo.  “Don’t divest” comes up rather short as a rallying cry.

We also don’t know why those students were involved in protests.  For some, no doubt, the demonstrations were more social than political.  For others, they were an excuse to skip class.  And to suggest that there was a fair amount of naïveté in evidence is only to state the obvious.

But even granting that the Venn diagram of those who see the conflict as a major concern and those who have actively taken part in protests isn’t exactly concentric circles, there is a good deal of overlap.  The statistic that jumped off the charts to Curmie but apparently not to Axios’s Sareen Habeshian was this: the number of students saying they’d demonstrated about the situation in Gaza and Israel was over 60% as high as the number who consider the Middle East a “most important” topic. 

That’s an extraordinarily high number.  Even if half of the demonstrators weren’t true believers, that leaves a third or so of those who regard the conflict as of high importance willing to demonstrate on behalf of their beliefs.  When was the last time, Gentle Reader, that you saw a demonstration about those issues more students allegedly care more about: better healthcare, education funding, or gun control? 

Even demonstrations about abortion access (speaking of an absurd omission in a poll about what matters to college students!) have faded as the Dodds decision moves further into the past.  (Perhaps abortion issues may have been folded into the umbrella of “healthcare,” explaining why it was the number one response to the survey?  If so, why?)

One of Curmie’s professor friends suggests that today’s college students, a group we might call the post-COVID generation, are angry at the world at large, and the conflict in Gaza and Israel is as good a flashpoint as anything else.  Perhaps.  But Curmie, old fart that he is, revisits Buffalo Springfield’s biggest hit, linked above, which is chillingly relevant 57 years after it was recorded.  It’s difficult to decide what the most telling line is.  “There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”?  “Young people speaking their minds / Getting so much resistance from behind”?  Or maybe the opening line, “There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”?

The one thing that is clear is that this survey tells us more about Generation Lab and Axios than it does about what today’s undergrads are thinking.

On Campus Protests, With a Stroll through Curmie's Memories

UCLA, this week

Can it really be almost nine years ago when Curmie wrote about his experience at the May 4 Museum at Kent State University, and the memories that visit engendered?  Apparently so.  The murders (yes, Gentle Reader, murders) by National Guardsmen of four students on that campus 54 years ago today was only the beginning of the process by which teenaged Curmie came to be wary of anyone with a uniform and a gun. 

The subsequent revelations of what actually happened and therefore of the prevarications of the politicians and news media alike were the confirmation that Curmie’s worst suspicions were accurate, but that voyage into (self-)awareness was triggered—if you’ll pardon the expression—by those shootings.  Two more deaths at Jackson State eleven days later, this time perpetrated by police instead of the National Guard in an even more outrageous display of recklessness, made it clear that those First Amendment rights we’d all heard about in school weren’t all that absolute. 

Kent State, 54 years ago today

It’s all too easy to forget that non-participants were among the casualties at Kent State.  One of the students who died was ignoring the protest and simply walking to class.  Another was watching from a distance; he was enrolled in ROTC.  I think we can take it on faith that he posed no threat to the Guardsmen.  The nearest of those killed was 85 yards from the shooters.  Eleven of the thirteen students who were killed or injured were shot from behind.  The list of things that aggravate the atrocities committed by the National Guard goes on and on.

But something else I wrote about from my dorm room on the Kent State campus sticks in my mind: “I fear there couldn’t be a Kent State today. Yes, I fear that, because such a declaration betrays a profound and disturbing apathy among today’s post-adolescents.”  That observation, referring to the protest, not the shootings, of course, may have been true then, but as literally scores of rallies, walk-outs, and encampments around the country in recent weeks have made clear, today’s youth isn’t as passively disengaged as we might have thought.  Several professors, Curmie’s Facebook friends, have posted of late about the anger of their students. 

Curmie confesses himself shocked that there have as yet been no deaths and few if any serious injuries linked to pro-Palestinian protests; we’ve come pretty close, though: witness the treatment of a journalist covering events at the University of Texas at Austin.  We’re about a half step away from increased police violence.  If the terms of that “man or bear” meme that’s making the rounds of late were changed to “cop or civilian,” Curmie confesses he’d need a moment to consider his options.

Anyway… you can see Curmie’s musings on Kent State in the piece linked above, or in this one from two years ago today.  But I thought today I might take a stroll through other memories.

Curmie was just a little too young to have participated in (or chosen not to participate, as the case may be) protests concerning the Vietnam War.  He had a draft card and a random number (4… ouch!), but he was in the first year in which no one was drafted. 

I did, however, experience a college campus in many ways before becoming a student.  My father was president of one of the SUNY colleges, and we lived on campus; the view out my bedroom window was of two dormitories and a dining hall.  I also attended the campus school associated with the college. 

I don’t remember the exact circumstances by which I found myself sitting on the lawn in front of one of the main campus buildings on the first Earth Day, twelve days before the events at Kent State.  What I do remember was listening to some student ramble on about how no one in the college administration, least of all the president, cared about the environment.  I finally had enough, and responded that I was confident that he did indeed care.  “How would you know?” smirked the student to this long-haired junior high kid.  “Because I’m his son.  He’s been a conservationist all my life, and he has a PhD in Botany.  I think his credentials are probably as good as yours.”  (Curmie was a snarky SOB even then.)

There was also a time when my mom asked me to take a letter or something up to someone (not my dad) in an office in the administration building.  Unbeknownst to either of us, students had taken over the building.  They barred my way to the elevator and to the stairs.  I shrugged and went back to apologize to my mom for the non-delivery.  She was very happy that no one knew who I was; in retrospect, I think her fears were probably misplaced, but there’s a difference between “probably” and “certainly.”

My other memory of being the president’s son came a little later (I think… timelines from a half century ago get a little blurry sometimes).  I was sitting in the kitchen with my mom when someone threw a rock through the dining room window.  As it happened, a campus policeman saw it happen and apprehended the perpetrator almost immediately.  He brought kid to the door to ask what my dad wanted to do. 

They asked this young man why he’d vandalized the house.  Turns out, he was demanding 24-hour visitation (there had been a curfew for men to be out of women’s dorms and vice versa).  My dad asked, simply, how he was supposed to know that from a baseball-sized rock amidst the glass shards on our dining room floor.  The look on that guy’s face when he realized that he had no answer to that question!

There weren’t any significant protests, at least that I can recall, in my own college days.  There was a smallish anti-National Front (a far-right party in the UK) rally at the University of Birmingham when I was doing my MA there, but it was literally nothing to write home about. 

We move on to a different event and to responses that weren’t centered on a college campus but certainly affected students both here and abroad.  When Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of people hostage, Curmie was teaching at a small church-related college in Kentucky.  One of the school’s star soccer players was beaten up rather severely by a gang of local yahoos, simply because he “looked Arab.” 

In fact, he had a close family member (Curmie thinks it was his father, but he may be misremembering) who was part of the Shah’s inner circle.  If there was anyone in the state who was disinclined to support the Ayatollah Khomeini and his minions, this was the guy.  That, of course, would have meant nothing to his subhuman attackers.  Similar scenaria played out across the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, too, of course.  Bigots do tend to be stupid in other ways, as well.

Cornell, 1985

The other incident involving large numbers of students that Curmie witnessed first-hand was the “shantytown” erected on the Arts Quad of Cornell University in 1985.  Curmie was working on his PhD there at the time.  The encampment was located between the theatre building and the library, so I walked past it a lot, and the window in my carrel in the library looked out over it.

The idea was to force the university to divest from companies doing business with a particular foreign country.  Today, that nation is Israel.  In 1985, it was South Africa, which was still operating under the apartheid system of radical racial discrimination.

Whatever we think of the students’ intentions, the protest itself was silly: a bunch of privileged kids “roughing it” for a few hours at a time.  The joke on campus was that after doing their shift, the protesters would drive the BMW daddy gave them for their 18^th birthday back to their apartment for a hot shower and a change of clothes before heading to the Moosewood (an iconic vegetarian restaurant, apparently still in business now) for lunch.

Predictably, the Cornell trustees did not divest in 1985, but there is some chance that the short-term rejection of student demands was the result of not seeming to give in to the strategy; considerable but not complete divestment did indeed take place in subsequent years before the gradual but inexorable disintegration of apartheid in the early ‘90s.

So now there are protests and demands for divestment happening on college campuses across the country.  There have been hundreds if not thousands of arrests but, as noted above, mercifully few injuries and no deaths… so far.  The issues at play—that is to say, the issues motivating the protests—are complex, and no one, certainly neither Hamas nor the Israeli government, looks good in all this. 

As Curmie noted months ago, neither side gives a proverbial shit about the Palestinian people, whose plight is worsened by the belligerence and bellicosity of both combatants.  Like the upcoming presidential election in this country, it’s not a question of who’s better, but who’s worse.

Moreover, some of the protests cross the line into illegality; others are being illegally suppressed.  Curmie keeps coming back to “context,” a term which has become anathema to the pro-Israel faction of American society.  If demonstrations do indeed threaten a part of the student population—not their belief system, their sensibilities, or the continued existence of a foreign country or its government, but them—then shutting down that protest or even arresting the participants is absolutely in order.  The same is true for violations of reasonable campus-specific time, place, and manner policies.

But 1^st Amendment rights to freedom of speech mean less than nothing if they apply only to non-objectionable speech.  If that speech does not represent a true threat, if it is not “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” it’s protected speech.  (Both “and” and “objectively,” as opposed to “or” and “subjectively” are significant terms here.)  True, private institutions can set their own rules—as Alex Morey of FIRE said on a webinar this week, you don’t go to BYU expecting the same freedoms you would be guaranteed at a public university.  But if your mission statement offers essentially the same commitment to intellectual freedom as the 1^st Amendment does, you damned well ought to live up to your promises.

Anti-semitism is abhorrent.  Islamophobia, which to be honest Curmie has seen considerably more of on college campuses, is, too.  But mere expressions of hatefulness are protected.  Curmie thinks the benefits of such a policy outweigh the disadvantages.

So, what is the analogy to what we’re seeing today?  The demonstrations against the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia?  Well, they were pervasive and fervent, but what was being protested affected American college-aged men (in particular) directly.  That’s not happening now.

The Civil Rights movement?  Sort of, to the extent that violating the law was seen by participants as ethically unproblematic.  Willingness to risk arrest for one’s beliefs is simultaneously admirable and naïve.  Those who have only the law on their side are not heroes, but they do have some moral authority.  Still, we tend to prefer Martin Luther King, Jr. to Bull Connor.

The divestment protests of the ‘80s?  Well, that seems to be the goal of many if not most of today’s protesters.  They can hardly expect to influence the actions of the Israeli government, and the US response has been sufficiently irresolute that it’s difficult to criticize except for that wishy-washiness.  We’ll also see whether the energy of the demonstrations can be upheld when campuses are, relatively speaking, empty over the summer.  More relevantly, no serious person could argue that apartheid was anything but deplorable.  Israel may not be without fault in all this, but they’re not the embodiment of evil, either.

Or is this a return of those students from Curmie’s youth, smug in their fervency and their ignorance, and committed to a strategy that not won’t change anything but literally cannot do so?  Yes, there are those who are protesting for the sake of doing so, or for virtue signalling, or to meet boys/girls.  Or, perhaps, as the Prophet Mick Jagger suggested, “to get [their] fair share of abuse.”  That song?  “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Yes, there are elements of all of these.  But this round of protests seems very much to be its own phenomenon.  Here’s hoping that there are no casualties, including the Constitution.