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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
America is angered by the stupidity – or worse – of its campus protesters. But it’s the adults who make the biggest fool of themselves. The role of adults faced with student unrest is to maintain peace without sacrificing rights. These include freedom of expression and physical safety. The task requires fundamental consistency. In practice, adults of all stripes – Republicans, Democrats, media and university administrators – display traits of hysteria and dogmatism that they deplore in young people. It should come as no surprise that the protests are getting angrier.
Students have every right to protest, even if they give a speech that many of their fellow students find offensive. One person’s outrage over the killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza could be another’s call for the extermination of Jews from Israel. Some of the protesters consciously promote a Hamas worldview that would wipe Israel off the map. At what point does anti-Zionism become anti-Semitism? The line is blurred. But most people – apparently with the exception of those in charge – can tell the difference between lawful protest and calls for violence.
Blame for this mess is widely shared. The protests have raised fears of a repeat of 1968 among Democrats. Like then, the current riots began at Columbia University. As in 1968, this year’s Democratic Party Convention will take place in Chicago. But that’s where the parallels end. The 1968 Congress was a disaster for two reasons. First, Democrats were deeply divided over Vietnam. Today’s left is angry at Joe Biden for being too soft on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. But this has nothing to do with Vietnam. No American troops die. And most criticism of Biden is that he is too weak. Protesters in 1968 compared Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, to Hitler and Hirohito. Humphrey’s main rival, Eugene McCarthy, refused to support him. Biden will be his party’s unanimous choice.
The 1968 convention was also a disaster because Chicago Mayor Richard Daley sent his police into a pitched battle with the demonstrators. The street battle dominated media attention. It would be astonishing if the same mistake was made in 2024. Of course, some of today’s protesters are obnoxious, idiotic, and at least sound threatening in their rhetoric. The suspicion is that many of them, like their 1960s counterculture forebears, do not know what they are advocating. “Queers for Palestine” is an admission of ignorance about Hamas’s homophobic (and all-purpose phobic) ideology.
But the main reason for these protests is humanitarian. It would be far more worrying if young people were indifferent to the deaths of thousands of children, some of them caused by US-supplied munitions. The same was true for those who joined Maoism in 1968. They had no idea what it was like to be caught up in China’s Cultural Revolution or of life in Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam. But the posturing of the fringe did not challenge the general disgust at a misguided war that wasted young lives.
The panic of many university administrators, including Columbia, needlessly fanned the flames. Columbia’s original decision last week to task the New York Police Department with clearing out the protesters was misguided. As the NYPD made clear, the students were non-violent. But they could be forgiven for being confused. Universities have for years promoted a worldview that advocates a hierarchy of suffering that ranks people based on collective racial guilt or victimhood. The more elite the university, the worse it is. It’s been a boomerang since October 7th. It is adults who have quietly placed Jews on the guilty side of this list. It is liberal arts schools that have validated the idea that language is violence.
Many speculate that today’s protests could spell the death knell for campus identity politics. That would be a silver lining, even if it’s unlikely to happen soon. But there is also an elephant in the room. Those who are loudest in calling for the protesters to be removed and even jailed are on the right. This includes Donald Trump. Until yesterday, conservatives were the harshest critics of diversity, equity and inclusion policies and the lack of free expression on campus. Now they want to eradicate it. Hypocrisy is too mild a word to describe such a change. Many of these politicians are calling for a pardon of the January 6 perpetrators for attempting to overturn an election.
What message does all of this send to the youth of America, regardless of how they feel about Israel? Confusion would be a natural consequence. The decision to do better could be different. The remedy is to calmly reflect on how so many adults have gone so far astray.