The Canary in the Coal Mine
A harbinger of what is to come
Forward: What follows is something of an opinion piece. It’s different from what I usually do, but I feel relevant, particularly as it has now spread to area colleges. Due to its nature however, there is not a pre-release version for paid subscribers.
I make a point to bring up my age pretty often as I feel it decently establishes the grain of salt I want everything I say to be taken with. I am freshly 21 and write this as a hobby, I have no professional background in what I do here and don’t even have much of an interest in doing it professionally. Recently however I have found my age to be an asset, as in recent conversations with Democratic operatives and reading recent news on the ongoing pro-Palestine protests on college campuses and the crackdowns against them I have grown increasingly concerned something very obvious to me is being brushed aside.
On April 17th, 2024, Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik testified in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee, a body headlined by Virgina Foxx (R-NC) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) I can best describe as a partisan chop shop desperately trying to make the case alleged campus antisemitism is a natural inevitability of vague social progressivism. Some may take issue with that characterization, particularly with how it was presented in even liberal cable news media, but I’d look no further than their own press release the first time they brought college administrators in front of them as evidence. Have some quotes:
“which charged academia’s radical Left ideologies with fomenting antisemitism.”
“equated antisemitism with less pervasive anti-Palestinian sentiments”
“the reputation of universities being that they promote complete ideological convergence”
“raised concerns over the ethics of Harvard’s black-only, Hispanic-only, and gay-only graduation ceremonies”
“connected the rise of campus DEI practices with emerging antisemitism”
“Reps. Bob Good (R-VA) and Brandon Williams (R-NY) both contemplated this question aloud. They recognized that the billions in grants, contacts, research investments, student loan guarantees, and other sweetheart deals are all privileges the federal government bestows upon universities—not an unconditional blank check. Maybe it’s time we rethink what those conditions should be.”
Republicans have for many years been champing at the bit to find a way to destroy what they see as America’s “woke” higher education system. It appears in this issue they have found a compelling casus belli, given that the majority of House Democrats voted yesterday for the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” a bill Mike Lawler (R-NY) drafted to force the Department of Education to use the overly broad IHRA definition of antisemitism in Civil Rights Act Title VI cases, effectively incentivizing schools to prevent pro-Palestinian protests lest they risk the loss of federal funding on the grounds certain criticisms of the State of Israel under that definition are considered antisemitic. This usage has not only been condemned by groups like the ACLU, but even authors of the definition itself.
After seeing the disastrous fallout of the hearing for other college presidents in December, Shafik came far more prepared to kowtow to the committee than her peers. As she spoke to the committee, several student groups created the first encampment on Columbia’s campus. They demanded negotiations with the university over divesting from Israel, both in terms of research relationships and financially as was the demand 40 years ago with the last wave of anti-Apartheid protests against South Africa. There was a screening of a movie, a teach-in, and the next day mass arrests and injury as Shafik invited the NYPD-SRG to disburse the encampment.
The next day, there was an encampment much bigger. A little over a week later, in the midst of 142 similar campus protests nationwide, NYPD-SRG went in again to end an occupation of Hamilton Hall, a building which has seen many similar occupations throughout Columbia’s history. Press was disallowed access, making the only reporting that of campus radio, ran mostly by students younger than me. To hear it live was unbelievable, though to hear the recording also is. During that raid, students were recorded being manhandled by police, and an officer fired a gun. By pure luck, we narrowly avoided another Kent State.
College administrators, politicians, and law enforcement frankly have been flailing in their responses to these protests. Of course these actions are technically trespass at the school’s discretion, but the nastiness of the college president actually requesting local police sic their own students tends to only inflame things. There is a reason none of us are talking of Brown, Northwestern, Harvard, and other schools that either negotiated in good faith with protesters or simply ignore it.
The justification most of these schools use is that the rhetoric at the protests is antisemitic, or more recently that naive but good faith protests have been infiltrated by antisemitic “outside agitators.” I suppose it’s all anecdotal but from my personal observations and those of friends at other schools that just really hasn’t been the case. Without litigating the meaning of various slogans or chants, I feel it goes without saying I’d not be participating in something so clearly foul nor would the many Jewish students involved with these encampments.
I have no doubt that since October 7th antisemitism in America has increased. I’ve heard such from my Jewish family members and that’s part of what makes its use as a blanket cudgel against student protesters so harmful. It is somewhat ludicrous that the discourse around these protests requires me to qualify that I want no harm done to my distant cousins in Israel or other Jewish people. No doubt bad actors have showed up at some of these protests, but again in my personal experience these encampments have done a pretty good job ignoring them and making it clear they are not welcome to spread hate.
There is a reason the rhetoric right now is not so much focused on the acts of individual protesters but on a vague “discriminatory learning environment.” It’s because such is a Title VI claim, and thus puts the federal funding of these schools in jeopardy. That in turn incentivizes these schools to clamp down on that kind of speech, and that’s exactly why we are seeing these kinds of police crackdowns. I have no doubts there are students who truly buy into that narrative. When I see these counterprotesters with Israeli flags, I have to wonder if the fact they are just ignored and certainly not ganged up upon triggers any self inquiry into whether that narrative is accurate.
Before clearing Columbia’s campus, Eric Adams gave a bizarre press conference insisting outside agitators were present, his evidence mostly being the “black bloc” style of clothes they were wearing. The NYPD reported about a quarter of protesters arrested at Columbia and the same night over half of those arrested at CUNY’s City College were non-students. That said, these numbers included protesters adjacent to those campuses, such as out on the public sidewalks or blocking prisoner vans. To date, the NYPD has provided no evidence nonstudents were involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation.
Particularly on more open campuses outside groups have showed up, but in my school’s case most of those were just kids and clubs from other local colleges. It was flashy to report about two thirds of those arrested were not Northeastern students, but many of those two thirds were kids from Berklee, Emerson, Wentworth, Simmons, Boston University, and other area colleges that did not have encampments. Ours was located immediately next to a subway station along a public road. It just was not the case that people were jumping fences or being snuck in.
As for more general nonstudent “outside agitators,” they numbered much smaller, mostly members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Palestinian Youth Movement. I have been concerned in the past about co-option of protests by other groups, particularly by the former, but by all accounts that’s just not what occured. They simply did not steer things off course. The highest form of co-option was them leading chants. Northeastern handled this in an interesting way where only nonstudents were legally charged and all student and faculty cases are being handled by our internal Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution. I should probably not say much beyond in one of these bodies, the evidentiary burdens are much lower and the will to prosecute much higher.
One thing we are seeing however is more and more aggressive counterprotesters. My school is a good example of this. Our encampment was shut down about two days in with a police raid that made about 100 arrests, with the university making a statement that part of the reason was because a chant of “kill the Jews” was heard. This chant did in fact occur, but was by pro-Israel counterprotesters, who marched to the center of the encampment with an Israeli flag attempting to goad protesters into some kind of fight no one was interested in having. They were so disruptive and clearly agitational in fact that campus police actually physically removed them from the demonstration.
Despite a highly credible tipoff of an impending police raid coming in hours before this incident, our school used this incident as justification for why it had to be shut down. Even since NPR and other outlets corroborated that it was the pro-Israel agitators, the school refuses to in any way acknowledge this, including a particularly bizarre comment to said NPR reporter to the effect of “well, doesn’t matter who it was it still happened!” Most media sources have at this point corrected the record, but simply ran with the school’s statement on face at the peak of their article’s visibility. A week later, the space where the encampment was is still being eyed cautiously by multiple police officers.
This is far from the only instance of counterprotest agitation. At UCLA, pro-Israel counterprotesters physically attacked their encampment in a clearly coordinated manner. Teenagers were pulled out of the encampment and beaten over the head with blunt objects, sprayed with chemicals, and had lit fireworks thrown at them. At the time of writing, zero arrests have been made in regard to that attack, but around 200 were made the next day when LAPD decided to raid the encampment, including firing rubber bullets and seemingly just for the cameras physically removing student’s masks as they were arrested. Many injuries were reported from both attacks.
As this spreads to more schools and as more police raids and mass arrests are made, it is touching just about everyone in my agegroup. There is some truth to elite universities being something of a bubble, anyone who knows my background is aware that’s hardly the culture I was steeped in. Most kids I grew up around were working class, few attended college. Those who did went to our local community college, and maybe now are at a SUNY. Of my core friends, me and an ex of mine are the only two that went straight to four-year institutions. The people I grew up around are not generally political, and yet talking to them before and after police crackdowns on their campuses has been incredibly telling of the generational mood. There is great shock and anger on the minds of young people.
It was one thing at Columbia, a school of course whose population skews the most upper of the upper class. But now it’s spread to plenty of public colleges, the CUNY system, and nationwide. Every person I know at an impacted college is at most two degrees removed from an arrestee. The raw number of arrests, around 2,300 at time of writing may be small comparative to the total student population, but few people are very far removed from the carnage. Perhaps they know someone arrested. Perhaps they watched arrests take place. Perhaps they were forced to hold in place by police. It will be no doubt be formative that this kind of state violence came to their campuses because other students chose to protest this ongoing genocide.
The g-word may give some people pause. It will be a historical question of course, but I use the term for a reason. I am really not qualified to litigate it, but I’d refer to this piece by Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg. Even if one thinks we are not there, reports that the impending invasion of Rafah will involve intentionally trapping older boys and men in the warzone through sophisticated military checkpoints gives a horrific parallel to the Srebrenica massacre, one of the more recent acts formally ruled genocide. Few but those most ideologically committed to Israel recognize the present situation as at all justified, with even the Biden administration being harsher in rhetoric though not action. It is the nature of our economically stratified society that those at Columbia and other schools having their views shaped by these events will lead this country one day, and when the history of this moment is written it will not look kindly upon the actions of this government.
But don’t just take it from me that students are up in arms. Look out the windows. Perhaps the most stunning development showing this has been the College Democrat’s pointed statement about the party’s response to this movement and the subsequent police crackdowns, in particular this tweet:
Have you ever been to a College Democrats meeting? I went to one freshman year and kids wore suits to it. Not quite my scene, to say the least. These are hardly the kind of people I imagine to be in open revolt with the party establishment and yet, here we are. As it turns out, brutalizing teenagers for protesting on their campuses is a pretty sure-fire way to anger even the most milquetost.
The Biden campaign in turn appears to be operating from a perspective of pure delusion. There seems to be a general sense from their statements that this will all blow over. The issue with that belief is this is not a normal political issue. It is one thing to come home to the party after your chosen, more progressive primary preference loses. It is a complete other matter to come home to a candidate who appears to not only be abetting some of the greatest crimes of the 21st century, but actively, enthusiastically, nonsensically, not only immorally but potentially criminally opting into that support over the recommendations of the State Department and the overwhelming opinion of the Democratic base. You and I are complicit in it by virtue of merely being citizens of this country and paying taxes. There was at least an argument once that he kept the peace domestically, it is hard to feel that way when you are watching your classmate’s blood powerwashed off the sidewalk.
What has been the Biden administration’s response? Telling hundreds of millions of people us students are antisemites, physical threats to our Jewish peers, bickering about the linguistic meaning of the term “intifada,” and not a single specific word against the police brutality we have witnessed. Is it all that shocking then that with this picture painted by the media and the president himself, pro-Israel counterprotesters showed up prepared to fight? All the while, our Congress chose to send send $13.1 billion more in arms to Israel and is set to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before them, despite an impending arrest warrant against him by the International Criminal Court, something the Biden Administration is apparently desperately trying to prevent behind the scenes.
I’m not much of a protest vote person. I’ve cast exactly one, in the Boston DA’s race two years ago where both options were going through intense political scandals. My mother moved to North Carolina in 2023 where I am presently registered and voted Uncommitted in the primary, so I suppose I will have to agonize over the prospect of such a general election vote actually having some relevance. In Massachusetts or New York though, I have no doubt I would not vote for him. But if they allow me to vote by mail (big if given new laws passed by the state’s Republican supermajority), the only motivator to vote for him is the intense duress of what a second Trump presidency would mean for someone like me.
That is the overwhelming perspective of every classmate I have talked to on the issue who isn’t in a swing state, and even a few that are. It is not some proclamation that Cornel West or Jill Stein, etc would make a great president. Few people have a candidate in mind, some are thinking of blanking the ballot. But no one has any desire to throw themselves on Biden’s funeral pyre as he careens towards what is at time of writing quite likely to be his defeat. The president had an unbelievable number of offramps since October 7th, and he has taken none of them even as the horrifying prospect of a second Trump presidency remains on the horizon. Without a dramatic change of course, it is ensured. Every drop of blood is on his hands not for his inaction, but for his willing, despicable actions.
Youth voters have low turnout, it is true. But we still are the demographic that pushed Biden over the edge in 2020 and lead to a Democratic overperformance after the Dobbs decision in 2022. You depress youth turnout at your own peril, and the Biden campaign already seems to be pivoting to the vague block of “swayable moderate Republicans” that is every contemporary Democratic campaign’s golden goose. It is hard for me to imagine a significant bloc of people voting for Trump twice and then Biden, but that’s just me. All I know is that if Biden wins, the claim will be that Biden never needed us anyways and if Biden loses, we will be blamed for it. This is what I see, the canary in the coal mine, and I sincerely hope it is recognized before it is too late.