What Columbia’s Protests Reveal About America

By Howard W. French, 

Each day that has followed, I have made my way a few blocks north to the site of the object of this extraordinary show of policing, the campus of Columbia University, where I have long taught, and the recent birthplace of a momentous student protest movement.

As protests on my school’s campus have unfolded, they have spurred increasingly widespread emulation on other campuses across the country. And these, in turn, have inspired a growing chain of reactions by university administrators, politicians, and law enforcement, respectively, that have sought to curtail, prevent, denounce, or crack down on student demonstrations—in more and more cases, violently.

What this moment has revealed most clearly to me is not so much a crisis of student culture or of U.S. higher education, as some have claimed, but rather a crisis of politics in the United States that centers on the country’s foreign policy, and specifically its close, long-standing relationship with Israel.

Before explaining further, a couple of disclaimers are in order. What follows is no defense of hate speech. Antisemitism is deeply repugnant, as are all forms of racism, no matter what flavor or color they come in. This includes the deep institutional history of antisemitism once practiced by my own university, which historically restricted the admission and hiring of Jews largely in order to shield white Protestants from academic competition.

I have no doubt that instances of attacks, harassment, and insults against Jewish students or any supporters of Israel have occurred on U.S. campuses in recent days, and they are truly and inexcusably deplorable. But the limited experience I have of my own campus tells me that such occurrences are not especially commonplace.

My impression has been bolstered by seeing the same footage aired on Fox News for an entire week of a menacing heckler screaming in support of Hamas in the face of a Jewish man as he emerged from the subway stop just outside of Columbia’s main gate. It is anything but clear that this abusive person was a student. Furthermore, my campus has been surrounded by television crews working long shifts every day, so if incidents like this were rife, it seems likely that we would be seeing many others instead of replays of the same encounter over and over.

What I have seen inside the university’s gates has generally been a picture of exemplary civility. For nine days now, there has been an orderly encampment of students, most of them chatting relaxedly, some of them with tents, occupying an expanse of lawn in front of Butler Library, the biggest of Columbia’s libraries. The demonstrating students have even posted (and overwhelmingly seem to be living by) an admirable code of conduct. It reads in part: Don’t litter; no drug or alcohol use; respect personal boundaries; do not engage with counter-protesters. I will return to the last of these momentarily.

On a recent day, as I have many times before, I read the storied names chiseled above Butler Library’s colonnaded neoclassical façade: Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, and the like. Then I asked myself: What is the threat to Western civilization, to U.S. democracy, or even to higher education that the Columbia protests and others that have followed them are supposed to pose?

The answer seems to lie more in a fear of the protesting students’ speech than in their abuse of speech. And the key seems to lie precisely in a line from their code of conduct that I’ve just paraphrased: They forswore engaging not just with any counter-protesters but specifically with “Zionist” ones.

Here comes another disclaimer. I have no issue with the support that many Jews express for Zionism. Their venerable faith, one of the oldest in the world, has sustained one of humanity’s greatest stories of identity, perseverance, and survival. It is rooted in Old Testament stories of exodus and claims that many Jews take as legitimate to an ancient homeland called Israel. To me, the extermination and persecution of Jews on a monumental scale in Europe during the Holocaust understandably deepen the attachment to Zionism for many Jewish faithful, as does the more recent, and largely unacknowledged, rank discrimination that Jews suffered in Western societies even in the postwar years.