What the pols get wrong about the protests

Plenty of public officials eagerly distract us from the real issues by focusing on campuses

Hail, Columbia: What kind of lessons are politicians teaching university students by their response to protests? (Photo by Chenwei Yao on Unsplash)

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On a sunny afternoon in Manhattan last week, the noisy chants and drumbeats of the Columbia University demonstrations faded as I walked down toward Riverside Drive, where tulips were in bloom and Norway maple were budding. Seasonal change in the city is a couple of weeks ahead of our Upstate home, but wherever you are, nature is comforting in its regularity.

So are certain markers on the calendar, like the academic year. Administrators at Columbia and at the dozens of other campuses where demonstrations about the Gaza conflict have spread — like the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, even the Fashion Institute of Technology — are hoping that passage of time and the coming end of the semester will lower the volume and urgency of the protests, and maybe bring peace to their campuses.

If that’s happens, it will be no thanks to so many of our political leaders, who are elbowing for advantage in the unrest of the moment, mostly by claiming that the loud pleas for attention to the suffering in Gaza are in fact dangerous expressions of antisemitism and markers of the dominance of the radical left in higher education. Nowhere is a nuanced and thoughtful analysis more needed, yet less apparent, than in our response to what is arguably the most morally complex issue in international affairs today.

Today’s brutal conflict in Gaza is a dispute with a long history, of course, rooted in the early Zionist movement of the late-19^th century, or perhaps in the time of Kings Saul and David, or maybe in the events remembered in this week’s Passover seders, which depicted the flight of Israelis from Egyptian slavery. In all that history, as in today’s conflict, there is nothing less at stake than justice for the oppressed. What is argued among thoughtful people nowadays is where the line lies between justice and oppression. Raw partisanship is not a useful tool for drawing such distinction.

Those ancient tensions present issues nearly impossible to fully resolve today. Yet that doesn’t excuse the misplaced focus of those who are eager to distract us from that task, and instead draw our attention to what is usually the protected environment of American college campuses — a place where young people should be free to question and argue and even make dumb mistakes as they grow. Students  shouting loud and sometimes ugly words shouldn’t be overlooked, certainly, but they ought to be considered in scale.

Just look at that, the politicians insist, those unruly kids calling for violence! Rather than joining in what should be a bipartisan effort to help bring peace to a torn land where each side has committed awful atrocities on the other, the politicians finding a bright place for themselves as they draw a spotlight to the campuses are taking an easier course — one that exacerbates domestic divisions. In that distortion of what’s truly important, we are served up what amounts to a lie.

The irresponsibility is bipartisan, but transparently transactional. House Speaker Mike Johnson, somehow concluding that his presence would be useful, stood at the center of the Columbia campus this week with a band of fellow Republicans and demanded the resignation of the university president, Minouche Shafik, if she cannot “bring order to this chaos.” The former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, wrote in The Wall Street Journal of “threats, terror tactics and menacing conduct” at the university, which he called a “disgrace” and “criminal conduct.”

A different take emerged at the University of Minnesota, where U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a liberal Democrat whose daughter was among the Columbia students arrested during the protests, said she was perplexed by the focus on student behavior. “While there is a discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Palestinians in Khan Younis… our media, our elected politicians, our president, every single leader, is spending their time and energy talking about the protests,” she complained.

Might that be because of the desire to please the outsized clout of the Israeli lobby in Washington, and the power of the money behind it in political campaigns? Or is it because Republicans see a chance that their attacks on higher education might underscore the anti-elitist current and class warfare that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House eight years ago?

Pointing to the supposed chaos on campuses, Republicans surely hope, might evoke an eagerness for order that is promised by Donald Trump, a fan of such despotic rulers as Hungary’s Viktor Orbàn and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All the better if this campus unrest evokes references to 1968, when youth protests helped Richard Nixon narrowly claim the White House. Never mind if the denunciations of universities for allowing protests heightens tensions among Americans who never set foot on college campuses.

To be clear, antisemitism cannot be tolerated – not on college campuses in 2024 any more than in the streets of Charlottesville in 2017, where Donald Trump ignored chants of “Jews shall not replace us!” by declaring that there were “good people on both sides.” But the three days I spent on the Columbia campus during this month’s demonstrations — I was there for an alumni event — convinced me that rather than exhibiting antisemitism, most demonstrators were speaking up for what they perceived as justice, which is of course a key tenet of Judaism.

It’s not antisemitic, after all, to complain that Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks has been reprehensible in its scope — killing and maiming children, decimating the Gazan healthcare system, leaving families on the edge of starvation. The revulsion to that strategy is shared across the American political spectrum. On some campuses, it appears that protest organizers took advantage of the activism the war has generated to draw attention to other issues — in Columbia’s case including complaints about the university’s relationship with nearby Harlem neighborhoods and the operation of its public safety unit.

In part, surely, the spread of demonstrations is FOMO-inspired — that is, the motivation of so much in the era of digital media, the fear of missing out. Who wants to be part of a student body so apathetic that it can’t even mount a decent anti-war demonstration that annoys the established order? So demonstrators are attacking university administrations from the left even as Republican politicians blast it from the right. Not for nothing is a university presidency considered one of the worst jobs in the country just now.

But any sort of even-handedness — including finding fault with both Israel and its critics — doesn’t play well at the extremes of American politics, which is where campaign energy and financial support reside. University administrators who tolerate demonstrations in the interest of supporting free speech are easy targets for the likes of Rep. Elise Stefanik, the Upstate Republican, a Harvard graduate who has refashioned herself as a populist MAGA Republican in pursuit of political advancement and, more recently, with the hope of becoming Trump’s running mate.

It was Stefanik whose questioning in a Congressional hearing cost two Ivy League presidents their jobs when they seemed inadequately incensed by student unrest — including some seeming expressions of antisemitism — and unwilling to crack down. Now the target is Columbia’s Shafik, born in Egypt to wealthy Muslim parents, who is in her first year as an American university president, after leading the London School of Economics and serving as Vice President of the World Bank. Her background undeniably identifies Shafik to right-wing politicians as a member of the suspect elite, which is true, yet only partially revelatory: Her most recent book, What We Owe Each Other (2021) is an argument for more shared responsibility across societies, and a new social construct that would benefit the very populations that demonstrators accuse her of denigrating. “Moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity,” she wrote hopefully in that book.

Yes, but that borders on naïve, because it assumes a measure of good will on the part of all players in society. And that is often sacrificed on the altar of political opportunity, claiming as victims even those who try to avoid partisan pitfalls, as university presidents must, whether they’re in New York City or Austin or Bloomington.

“All issues are political issues,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, in words that are surely even more true today, “and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” Orwell was writing about the impact of post-war politics on prose, and his conclusion was overly broad — there are fair-minded and thoughtful folks in politics, sir — but he wasn’t wrong to pin his hopes on individual conscience: “One cannot change all this in a moment,” he wrote, “but one can at least change one’s own habits.”

So can we today. Perhaps our best hope in the face of the over-simplification of issues and the manufacture of easy targets by politicians is to resist the urge ourselves: to recognize that issues as fraught as the conflict in Gaza will not be solved by demonizing one group or another, nor will tensions surrounding hard topics diminish by imposing repression. Spring, a time of loosening the bonds of cold and welcoming the flow of nature, is an apt moment for such an awakening.

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NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES

Dispatches from our common ground *

Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.

This week, we share reporting published here:

• Springfield, Mo. (Springfield News-Leader, news-leader.com)

• Somerville, N.J. (Courier News, mycentraljersey.com)

• Montgomery, Ala. (Montgomery Advertiser, montgomeryadvertiser.com)

• Brookings, S.D. (Sioux Falls Argus Leader, argusleader.com)

NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes on some Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!

MISSOURI

Bummer, man: Cannabis sales stalled by demand

With 24 states and the District of Columbia now allowing legal sales of marijuana, April 20 has emerged as the record day of demand annually. It’s a fact traceable in cannabis lore to some California high school students’ slang for pot, “420” — the time they gathered to smoke after school in the early 1970s. But when April 20 came this year, cannabis dispensaries in Missouri were mysteriously afflicted for the second straight year by technological glitches that slowed sales to a crawl. Rebecca Rivas of the nonprofit Missouri Independent, in a story republished in the Springfield News-Leader, reports that the culprit was a software system designed to track the state’s seed-to-sales cannabis program. It happened in other states, too, that use the “Dutchie” software. Even so, Dutchie’s chief technology officer said the systems powered more than two million transactions, representing $165 million in retail commerce — which was a 50% increase from last year’s 4/20. Dude!

NEW JERSEY

Towns pushed to allow more “granny flats” in neighborhoods

As the cost of housing puts pressure on more families, New Jersey is among the states rethinking single-family zoning. One solution, reported by Allison Balcerzak and Megan Burrow of NorthJersey.com, is the so-called “granny flat,” or ADU — an “accessory dwelling unit” in a backyard, a basement or above a garage. Tax incentives could spur more construction of such housing, providing small units that advocates say might encourage inter-generational relationships and a greater inventory of affordable housing. But there is resistance: Some say the practice threatens home values, and municipalities want to regulate where the practice is allowed. Yet California, Oregon, Connecticut and Vermont have statewide laws to encourage ADUs, and New Jersey is moving toward similar legislation.

ALABAMA

Legislature moves to threaten librarians with jail time

The Alabama House has approved a bill that would threaten librarians with prosecution and jail time if they fail to quickly remove books from shelves that are challenged for their depictions of “sexual conduct.” Victor Hagan reports in the Montgomery Advertiser that the bill, which now awaits Senate action, applies to K-12 public schools, public libraries and other public places where minors may be present and without the consent of a parent. It defines the threatening material as “sexual or gender oriented material that knowingly exposes minors to persons who are dressed in sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumes, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing presentations." The legislature is dominated by Republicans; Democrats opposed the bill, arguing that it isn’t the legislature's job to regulate morality, and describing the bill as government overreach.

SOUTH DAKOTA

Turning cow manure into energy called a “win, win, win”

A new facility has gone online that sends renewable natural gas made from cattle manure to local energy customers, reports Joshua Haiar of South Dakota Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom. Turning dairy cow waste into pipeline-grade natural gas begins with collecting manure, which is then transported to the dairies’ on-site tanks, where the absence of oxygen facilitates the breakdown of the waste by microbes. As the manure decomposes, it emits biogas, which is captured and processed to remove moisture and carbon dioxide. Sulfur is also removed and turned into fertilizer for farm fields. The new facility will provide gas to 10,000 residential customers. “It’s a win for the dairy farmers because they have another product to sell, it’s a win for consumers because it’s another source of natural gas that doesn’t have to be shipped into South Dakota, and it’s a win for the environment because that methane is no longer going up into the environment,” said the state’s public utilities commissioner.

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If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live class Rex co-teaches that is offered by The Memoir Project. Click below for information. Our next class is coming up on Tuesday, May 7, at 6 p.m. Eastern. Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. Join us!

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country.

-Rex Smith