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 only 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 signaling, 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.