I promise this column on today’s student unrest will be more than a nostalgia tour, but I feel the need to mention that I went to college in the late 1960s and, therefore, unrested a great deal of the time.
And as a college-age reporter on a student-run alternative newspaper, I covered as much unrest as I participated in.
That said, I’m sure none of what I’m about to write will surprise those who consistently come to this space.
I support free speech, the right to demonstrate, the right for college students to annoy administrators. I violently oppose — metaphorically anyway — overreaction from timid college administrators who can’t stand up to political pressure, and, especially, from sanctimonious politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who tend to favor free speech only when they agree with what the speaker is saying.
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Or senators like Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley who hope to exploit the demonstrations for political purposes and have called for the National Guard to be sent to Columbia University.
If you were alive in the ’60s, or are allowed to read history books anyway, you may know that the late ’60s were, in part, a dreadful period in American history. A terrible war that still haunts us. Assassinations. Urban riots. Police riots. Generational divide. Kent State. Jackson State. J. Edgar Hoover. Chicago. Nixon.
It was also the time that I learned, along with many others, the value of protest, the meaning of taking a stand, the fulfillment in risking some small comfort — when often privileged students faced arrest or tear gas, or in the worst case, four dead in Ohio — for a larger principle.
It was also a time when America finally began to come to grips with civil rights — for minorities, for women, for gays — and sometimes at a terrible cost.
If I had learned only that much in college, the experience — a much less expensive experience, by the way, in those days — would have been worth my while.
So, you probably know where I’m coming from. Free speech — particularly on campus — was at the center of ’60s antiwar demonstrations, just as it’s at the center of the demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza, where many tens of thousands of innocents have died.
And just as the mass coverage of the death and destruction in Vietnam helped turn many Americans against the war, the instantaneous and unavoidable — for anyone with a smart phone — coverage of the war in Gaza has helped turn many Americans against it.
But what you might miss in much of the coverage of today’s demonstrations — particularly concerning the encampments that have roiled many college presidents and mostly Republican politicians — is that they have been overwhelmingly nonviolent.
Yes, the many encampments that have sprung up on campuses around the country are inconvenient, to some students as well as to college executives. But they’re rarely dangerous, despite what you may hear on cable TV news or even what you may read in some newspapers or on news sites.
For the most part, the demonstrations have been peaceful — despite, as an example, the warnings from Auraria Campus officials last Friday to stay away from Tivoli Quad due to what was called “civil unrest.”
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On nearly all involved campuses, the risk of violence has been quite low, and yet we’ve seen police in riot gear and, at a few campuses, even police snipers atop buildings.
On CNN, I heard about the risks of “outside agitators” and I thought I time-traveled back to the time of our long, national nightmare.
On Tuesday, some Columbia students occupied a building called Hamilton Hall, named after Alexander Hamilton, which had been occupied by demonstrators in 1968, 1972, 1985, 1992 and 1996. But Columbia has threatened to expel those students who have barricaded themselves today.
There’s history here, a long history known well to the university. Just as we saw history invoked when Angela Davis, the radical ’60s icon and Palestinian advocate, visited the Auraria campus last weekend.
I don’t want to minimize the debate or its origins. Israel was, in fact, attacked by Hamas, which is a terrorist group. More than 1,300 innocent Israelis and others were killed in the attacks. Reports of systematic rape can only horrify us. The condition of the hostages can only horrify us. Anyone who supports the Hamas attacks should be discredited and, as far as I’m concerned, spurned. And I don’t know who — including Hamas — didn’t think Israel would respond with devastating force.
And the fact that many in the protest groups seem to ignore the original assault is, to say the least, unfortunate. The fact that the word “genocide” is bandied about to describe the horror in Gaza is just as unfortunate.
Obviously, we shouldn’t ignore the fact of antisemitism, on campus or elsewhere, or the role it plays for some who oppose Israel.
But like a lot of people, I consider Israel’s response to be extremely disproportionate and seemingly, as far as I can tell to this point, never ending. And as an American Jew, who has dealt personally with many instances of antisemitism, I can promise you I am neither an antisemite or a self-hating Jew.
Still, the eagerness by some to conflate the policies of Israel with the ideals of ordinary Jews, many of whom are among the college protesters, is very much antisemitic. I don’t know if calling someone a Zionist is antisemitic — I don’t think it is — but we have to recognize that some people use it that way, just as some people mindlessly chant “from the river to the sea,” without understanding its context. But there’s context and there’s context. If you’ve ever visited the West Bank, you may understand that.
And so, there should be demonstrations. Who wants to contribute to bringing a nation of mostly innocent people to the brink of starvation? I surely don’t. I don’t want to contribute to the killings of more women and children. And, in any case, I believe that the cost of Israel’s futile attempt to eliminate Hamas will only serve to radicalize more of them.
Yes, we know of cases where Jewish students have been harassed. We know of Jewish students who simply don’t feel welcome, and how some college campuses have been slow to address the issue.
We know, too, that since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, there has been a demonstrable rise in antisemitic attacks in America.
This all belongs in the context, too.
But if you’ve noticed, you don’t hear much in the way of antisemitism coming from the demonstrators of late. I assume that upon hearing the criticism, there has been some self-censoring, hopefully accompanied by self-reflection. Bigotry is bigotry, as I might have mentioned in a few columns about the Donald Trump-enabled bigotry that is alive and well in MAGA world.
Or maybe you’ve forgotten the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville when Trump, apparently afraid to offend the racists in his base, actually said there were “very fine people on both sides.” Trump allies seem to have forgotten it.
The rally in Charlottesville was protected by the First Amendment. Hearing repulsive ideas is the price we pay, as some like to say, for freedom.
These demonstrations are nothing like Charlottesville, even though Trump makes the comparison, just as he says he wonders if student demonstrators will be treated the same as those convicted of assaulting the Capitol on January 6.
Bobby Kennedy, the original one, once said of student unrest, “Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives.”
Today, he would have said “people’s” lives. But it’s the same idea.
Look, I don’t expect the student demands that universities divest from Israel to be met. I don’t expect the occupations to last all that long.
I do expect attention to be paid and for the demonstrations to have an impact. Because the students will be heard. And, as RFK said and history confirms, being heard matters.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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