The only thing university administrators had to do was NOTHING.

They had one job. How did they mess it up so badly?

I am not on campus this semester. I’m on sabbatical, sitting in coffeehouses, writing blog posts and a book.

But if I were on campus this semester, yesterday I would have seen the quad across the street filled with tents yesterday. And then I would have seen the police arrive, to break up the encampment. Not the campus cops either — the real ones.

Those are my students occupying the tents. I don’t mean that figuratively. Among the students who organized the protest action on campus yesterday are almost certainly people who have taken my strategic political communication class. They’ve shown up to my office hours. They did the reading. (FWIW, several of them are jewish.)

One book that I have my students read every semester is E.E. Schattschneider’s 1960 classic, The Semi-Sovereign People. The book is a tight 180 pages. It weighs only 7.1 ounces. I mention its weight because, if I were on any college campus right now, I would be mighty tempted to smack a few administrators in the face with it. Doing so would leave an impression without leaving a mark.

Schattschneider tells us that contentious politics can be best understand through a lens of conflict expansion. Those in power will (and, strategically, should) try to maintain and contain the scope of a conflict. Those arrayed against them will (and should) attempt to expand the scope of the conflict. If you want to understand an episode of contentious politics, don’t evaluate the substance of the arguments as though you are judging an intercollegiate debate. Instead, watch the crowd.

I don’t personally know Columbia University’s President, Minouche Shafik. But I am pretty confident that, unlike my students, she has not read her Schattschneider.

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If you had asked me on April 17th what I thought of the Columbia University encampment, I would’ve shrugged my shoulders before apologetically explaining why it didn’t seem like an especially powerful tactic. Around 100 Columbia University students had set up a tent city on the campus quad. They were standing in solidarity with the residents of Gaza, while making demands of the campus administration.

This is a radical tactic, but it is not a novel tactic. It breaks campus rules while demonstrating commitment and solidarity among the participants. But it is also a radical tactic that is relatively easy to defuse or ignore. There is less than month until finals and the end of the semester. The students aren’t preventing the university from operating. They are making some noise and making a scene. Once the semester ends, the campus shuts down, as does the encampment.

The way that administrators normally respond to a tactic like this is to just wait it out. Have campus security keep an eye on them to make sure things don’t get out of hand. Make vague statements to the campus paper. Schedule some meetings. Maybe declare that you’ll form a committee to look into things further.

Traditionally, the weakness of this tactic is that it does little to expand the conflict. Students are outraged. They have demands. But they don’t have numbers or time on their side. Even when the majority of their peers agree with them, so long as the administration slow-walks the response, it will remain a conflict between the most-committed student activists and a slow-moving bureaucracy.

All the administration has to do is nothing. University administrators are great at doing nothing.

But that’s not how it looked to President Shafik. Because she wasn’t responding to the students.

She was responding to the former Presidents of Harvard and Penn.

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Here’s the basic timeline of events.

• Five months ago, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before a House committee. This was a trap. It was not subtle. Everyone knew it was a trap.

• Instead of prepping for the testimony by talking to a comms professional, they prepped by talking to a lawyer. (Don’t do that. Don’t treat televised spectacle like a deposition. It will go badly for you in all the very predictable ways.)

• Having screwed that up, outraged conservative alumni were able to force Penn’s President to resign. That was a win for them. They tried to force Harvard’s President to resign. That didn’t work, so they ginned up some more faux scandals until they got their way. Double-win.

• Fast-forward to this month. Columbia’s President is asked to testify before the House committee as well.

• She decides to do the opposite of those other Ivy League Presidents. That, apparently, is her entire comms strategy. Just agree with everything the hostile Republicans say, and hope they applaud you at the end.

• But they aren’t asking these questions in good faith. They are strategic actors, pursuing another win. (Again, this isn’t exactly subtle.)

• Having given them every answer they asked for, she then went back to campus and clamped down on the protest, in order to prove that she really totally meant it, guuuuuuys.

• They’re calling for her resignation anyway, and turning Columbia into a prop. Of course they are. That’s what they were planning to do anyway. You only win against these Congressional Republicans by refusing to play their game.

• But in the meantime, she called in the NYPD to clear the encampment. And she tried to shut down the campus radio station. And she barred journalists (IN NEW YORK!) from covering the Columbia protests (DESPITE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL BEING THE PLACE THAT AWARDS THE PULITZERS).

• And, oh yeah, now that the conflict has expanded, a bunch of protestors unaffiliated with the university, some of whom are rabid antisemites, are showing up and shouting things at students in front of cameras as well. Not great, because this part can potentially escalate in directions that pose an actual safety risk to students. (Unlike the encampment, which wasn’t a risk to anyone. And which you could’ve just ignored if you weren’t shadowboxing the phantom figures of other universities’ former presidents.)

• So now you’ve launched the biggest crackdown on campus speech since the 1960s. The conflict has now expanded. Every college campus is now going to feature an encampment. And that encampment is both a show of solidarity with people in Gaza and a show of solidarity with students at Columbia. (And Emory. And UT Austin. And probably a dozen other places.)

All you had to do was ignore the fuckin’ encampment for a month. Maybe make a bland statement. Have campus security issue a citation or two. Declare that a committee is going to look into things.

Saul Alinsky writes that “the action is in the reaction.” The campus encampments don’t work if you don’t react to them. And not reacting to student speech on campus is usually one of the things that university administrators do best.

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Instead, here we are. Snipers on the roofs of major universities. Encampments springing up everywhere. Actual cops arresting students and faculty. Enough of a spotlight that every university administration is worried that shit might go sideways. Republican politicians gleefully egging it on, crowing about “chaos on campus.” (Because the more this moment resembles 1968 on tv, the better.)

The conflict has expanded. Colleges are passing draconian measures to clamp down on campus protest. Students are responding to those actions, and responding to the police violence. The action is in the OVER-reaction. The semester will end soon, but it now seems more likely that it will form an ellipses instead of an ending.

I’m worried for my students. They are smart and they are brave and they are outraged. They are facing batons and tear gas. This escalation did not have to happen. This escalation will not end well.

I blame Republican legislators. But I also expected them to behave this way. Tom Cotton is exactly how we thought he was. Elise Stefanik’s outrage is scripted, typecast. They have not been subtle about their views or intentions.

I did expect more from University administrators — Shafik especially. All she had to do was act like an average university administrator. Make noncommittal promises, and wait.

Now this is spiraling. And I sit here in this coffeehouse, tapping away at the keyboard. Hoping my students are safe. Hoping I taught them well enough. Wishing that the people who run universities would learn anything at all.