The Manufactured Consent of Campus Crackdowns
For the last two weeks, the college students of the United States have used their extensive and expensive education to organize mass civil disobedience in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Through occupying open sections of their campuses and conducting non-violent disruptions to the ordinary course of daily life, these students are trying to convince the institutions they are paying eye-watering amounts of tuition to divest some of that money from Israel and its businesses.
In return, administrators are being totally norm—lol, no, they’re losing their damn minds. School presidents and leadership have blackballed, evicted, and called the cops on the very students they promised to protect. Commentators and news organizations are finding every angle and pretext to undermine and erase protest demands. And elected officials all the way up to members of Congress are condemning them and invoking the need for an armed assault to handle what amounts to a group of 20-somethings and teenagers gathered on the quad.
For all of this fuss, you’d have to assume that the students represent some extraordinarily unpopular position or extreme ideas. This is the kind of response you’d expect for public demonstrations of fringe beliefs, armed gatherings preaching hateful ideologies, or groups openly invoking the violent overthrow of the state. Yet recent polling shows just the opposite: More than half the country agrees with the protesters’ basic premise.
Approval for the Israeli campaign in Gaza is around 36% with disapproval at 55%. The crosstabs are even more brutal, with more than 60% of independents and 75% of Democrats disagreeing with the assault in Palestine. Even from the aggregate view, filtered through a broken and fragmented media environment, people know that something wrong is happening. If we had more in-depth coverage of six-year-old Hind Rajab, or the stories of thirst and starvation, the targeting and killing of aid workers, or the discovery of mass graves with handcuffed bodies, it’s almost guaranteed that public opinion against Israeli operations would be much, much worse.
Which is why the campus crackdowns are happening, of course. If we were having a reasonable discussion about the merits of the college protests, it wouldn’t be much of an argument. What is there to disagree about when it comes to giving starving people food, stopping a bombing campaign on a civilian population, and mourning the unnecessary and cruel deaths of more than 14000 children? So instead, we have endless think-pieces about the surely dysfunctional sex lives of student protesters (blech), the erasure of Jewish protesters and circular debates about antisemitism, or the need for militarized police reaction—all to distract us from the actual issue.
Attacking the approach of the protests is an easy way to deflect from the moral cowardice of the status quo, but the suppression of popular will always comes with backlash. In the case of the student protests, it has created more attention, imitation, and resistance as institutions attempt to normalize crushing dissent, denying peaceful petitions, and deploying disproportionate force against anyone disagreeing with the bottom line. Because as much as they claim otherwise, these crackdowns aren’t designed to protect us from violence; they are to convince us that we need to be protected.
The students are the villains of the peace and quiet we would otherwise have. They are dangerous, disruptive, damaging, and must be acted against for our well-being. They are threats to the order of things, and will destroy us if we don’t move quickly. This isn’t freedom, we are told, because these protesters aren’t calling for peace, but a different kind of war. Claim prejudice for the entirety of the demonstrations, and we never need ask if there is a point these students are trying to make about the world we are asking them to take responsibility for as they pass into adulthood.
We could have a discourse around the campus protests right now that centers good faith and better intentions, shared values and shared definitions. We aren’t having it because that kind of discussion doesn’t serve the interests of people who don’t want anything to change. If we had that open exchange and met on equal terms, there is an argument that would win over the opinion and the intentions of the majority. So as we watch the system react to collections of young people agitating and protesting and demanding something better than the war we have, it’s worth remembering that force doesn’t have to be the only answer. It’s the answer they’ve chosen to use—because when someone has a good argument, they make it.
