The Faux Campus Revolution

WHAT STARTED AS a ‘revolution’ in American universities has now entered a farcical phase. Af­ter a month and more of protests against Israel, rampant anti-Semitism and outright disorder in dozens of campuses across the US, police and law enforcement authorities had detained more than 1,600 students by the night of May 2. The ‘encampment’ at Columbia University in New York, the epicentre of the protest, has been dismantled. One student ‘revolutionary’ at Columbia went so far as to say that protesters were in need of “humanitarian aid”.

The idea that Israel could be ‘deterred’ or forced to change the course of its security policies has finally met reality. So long as the ‘protests’ remained peaceful and did not cross red lines such as occupying university buildings and hampering academic activities, they were tolerated. But then came a phase when the danger of disorder became alarmingly high. It was at that point administrators and political leaders cried a halt to the protests. It was bound to happen at some point as students and academics showed no signs of re-considering the folly of their actions.

As with all efforts at changing the world that involve collective action, there are three questions about the so-called ‘movement’ in these universities: its origins, its future trajec­tory and its ends.

While the origin story—based on ‘justice’ for Palestine—is long. One can date it all the way back to 1948 when the State of Israel was founded and the expulsion of the people of Arab origin who lived in that territory. But that is not ana­lytically helpful. The more proximate starting date is soon after the attacks by the Hamas terrorist group on Israel on October 7 last year. That started a chain of events that culminated in action by law enforcement authorities in various universities in recent days. Two months after the Hamas attacks, lead­ers of three American universities— Harvard, Pennsylvania and MIT—were called for a hearing at the US Congress. The hearings were prompted by the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Ameri­can campuses and Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, came close to justifying anti-Semitism when, in response to a question by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether anti-Semitic speech constitutes harass­ment, Gay said “It depends on the context.” That infamous answer led to her ouster a month later.

That was a signal that a large section of American academia justified what was considered unacceptable behaviour at one time. Many academics in the US have backed the so-called “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” or BDS movement against Israel. In this permissive environment, it was only a matter of time before something ugly occurred. And soon enough, it did.

Months after that event, in the wake of Israel’s action in the Gaza Strip, the campus protests erupted. To begin with, it was not clear what these ‘protests’ could have done about events that were taking place thousands of miles away. One aim was to force the US government to stop helping Israel with arms and am­munition. The ultimate goal was to force Israel and make it ‘back off’ from the Gaza Strip. Another strategy in this respect was to force US universities—which are large corporations as well—to disinvest in Israel. This demand is unlikely to be met and on April 29, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik said the university would not divest from Israel.

Since April 29, law enforcement agencies across different campuses have begun restoring order in what had become an unruly coalition of students, activists and university teach­ers. At places, this became violent and hundreds of students have been arrested and academics have been detained as well.

On the one side is the ‘protester complex’, and on the other side are university leaders and sane academics—who, unfortunately, are outnumbered by more extreme members of the community—who have to ensure that academic continuity and scholarly work are not impeded

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Where is this movement likely to go? Opinion is divided. On the one side is the ‘protester complex’, and on the other side are university leaders and sane academics—who, unfortunately, are outnumbered by more extreme members of the community—who have to ensure that academic con­tinuity and scholarly work are not impeded. Which side is likely to prevail? One sane, analytical, voice in these events has been that of Timur Kuran, a well-known economist who has studied the microeconomics of protest movements and other collective phenomena. In a post on X on April 26, he said, “…Judging by the postings of random pro- Palestine students, many are beginning to see joining in as a rite of passage [higher benefits]. Meanwhile, the stigma of getting arrested is surely falling [lower costs].” He went on to add, “Keep in mind this basic rule of political mobilization: after a certain participation threshold is reached, there is power in numbers…”

The acuity of Kuran’s analysis cannot be doubted. But there is more at work here. US presidential elections are round the corner and any sign that protests have ‘gone out of hand’ are likely to give momentum to former President Donald Trump’s chal­lenge. Then, beyond a certain point, the US administration and university leaders are unlikely to back down: to do so would risk further disorder. For the universities, there is added pressure from influential donors who are—rightly—worried about the deterio­rating environment in US campuses. The scenario sketched by Kuran would certainly pan out if there were no countervailing force. Usually, such scenarios emerge in authoritarian countries where rulers are unable to decide whether to quell the protests or whether they should let their numbers swell up. It is a ‘calcula­tion error’ that most authoritarian rulers are unable to avoid. But democracies are unlikely to meet that fate. The use of force in democracy has far greater legitimacy than in any authoritarian country. The heavy hand of order is already visible.

The final question around the protests is about the ‘why’ of academics veering away from their proper domain—scholar­ship and learning—into active politics. The answer to this question is difficult even if the changes in academic behaviour over time have been very obvious. There are certain disci­plines—such as anthropology, among others—that have ‘activist tendencies’. This is, in part, due to the ‘original sin’, so to speak, that marks these disciplines. Talal Asad, a very thoughtful anthropologist, outlined this in his book Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973). There he showed the colonial origins of the subject and its role in helping colonial administrators ‘control native societies’. In the half-century since the publication of that book, the discipline and its leaders have veered violently in the other direction: towards activism against any, real or perceived, ‘injustice’. This expiation of guilt has made the subject a factory of manufacturing activists. A spillover of sorts has marred other subjects as well where the idea that knowledge can be used to ‘correct injustices’ in society has become a dominant tendency. The primary activity of any scholarly endeavour, to first under­stand the world, has been given a go by. The role of ‘changing the world’ falls on politicians and leaders of any society and not its intellectuals. Unfortunately, in the past two to three decades, academics have confused their role in the world. The protesting students and activists in American universities are the end-prod­uct of that confusion. It has been an expensive misadventure. To paraphrase Lenin, one can say activism is the highest stage of aca­demic liberalism. But unlike capitalism, which gives jobs, work and meaning to the world, activism cannot give any of those. Its encounter with reality is bound to be unhappy.

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Siddharth Singh

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