I think you're right. I teach at a much smaller college in upstate New York which now has an active chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. They've created a little bit of disruption on campus - showing up at events for admitted students, holding signs and chanting. They have the usual demands. The college president met with them, and answered with the expected administrative non-answers that made it clear that she wasn't going to agree to their demands. She also said that they had the freedom to express their views on campus. Only about 15 students were involved in the activities. No one was arrested. So far the college seems to be following the playbook you outline. I think that if the president and administration continue to keep their cool, it will be fine for the rest of the semester.
It's like the old fairy tale "The Emperor Has No Clothes" but we're learning that the entire court has no clothes. How can so many people whose job is managing politics (and fundraising) be so bad at politics?
Excellent from a pragmatic perspective, Dave. But, fundamentally, this is what happens when you don’t have principles other than trying to keep your job and the money rolling in. That goes for Democrats, College Administrators, and the mainstream media.
Would it have just gone away, given Shai Davidai and his supporters were also doing their best to escalate? If it were only a matter of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment students in their tents shouting slogans into the void, waiting it out would make sense. But there are counter-protesters who really want to mix it up with the encampment protesters, which will also make headlines.
Also, this might sound a little harsh, but I thought an important element of civil disobedience was getting arrested at the end. Breaking rules in support of a cause also means accepting punishment in support of a cause. If your cause is just, the greater public will sympathize, and those in power have a difficult choice: don't enforce the rules, or enforce them and face the public's judgment.
Shafik had to weigh which outcome would incur greater public disapproval: calling in the police to clear out the encampment, or allowing it to continue in violation of university rules. Either is guaranteed to get you condemned by a lot of people. Glad I'm not her.
The main trick, if you've got another side trying to escalate, is to wait for individuals to cross an obvious line and then throw the book at the individual. That way you don't expand the conflict. You stay in the "students have speech rights, and we're not gonna turn peaceful protest into *A THING*, but *action XYZ* is obviously way out of bounds.
This, granted, is more complicated than just-read-chapter-1-of-Schattschneider.
Annoyingly, Davidai has probably already crossed the line — at least a line that would get you disciplined on a college campus and nowhere else. Columbia should have gone on a speed run through the administrative disciplinary process for everyone who has been actually disruptive or threatening and left the kids on the quad alone.
There’s a difference between civil disobedience as a planned, deliberate strategy to break a longstanding unjust law—sitting in at a segregated lunch counter, e.g.—and committing a violation when a university prohibits nearly any form of public assembly and expression. The football powerhouse university near me just prohibited chairs, tables, putting a sign on the ground, using a sound system—in short, every type of behavior that would be celebrated if these were tailgaters in the fall. I don’t think the students should have to risk expulsion or arrest just because of the content of their protests.
I agree. Public universities (so, not Columbia) in general must allow protected expression, subject to "time, place, and manner" restrictions, but these need a reasonable justification and need to be content neutral. Columbia isn't legally obligated to follow that standard, but ethically they ought to. The university near you banning chairs and tables and signs and sound systems isn't being reasonable at all. If they want to ban all that stuff at 3am, cool. But there's no good faith reason to ban it during the day. Hopefully they get taken to court and lose.
Where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has crossed a well-justified line is in setting up tents and staying there 24/7. Universities have good reason to disallow this practice, from a content-neutral point of view. Of course, whether enforcing their rule against it is smart from a PR standpoint right now is another matter.
Ya know, you have this so completely, spectacularly right. But the usual suspects had her boxed in -- the nihilism of the usual suspects just make them better at this game.
Of course, on the other side of things, down the street I've got the Guv, who's an ambitious man, proving just how tough he is. He's proud of the chaos and trying to go after the actual legal authorities who are looking at the actual facts and going, "nah...."
It's a corallary to Swerer's "the cruelty is the point". The chaos is the point. Whether its the wine and cheese kerfluffle of forcing a major university president to resign, or the jackpot of "rioting student" forcing the school to call out the Pinkertons. The more chaos, the better for you-know-who (and not just Trump).
"A State Department friend of mine once gave a briefing to [Lyndon] Johnson. The subject was a Latin-American country where it looked as if one of our military juntas was about to be replaced by a liberal non-Communist regime. Johnson was distraught. 'What, what,' he cried, 'can we do?' To which one of his advisors—whose name must be suppressed, though his wisdom ought to be carved over the White House door—replied, 'Mr. President, why not do nothing?'”
OK now I feel smart because I never read this book but thought what you say was pretty obvious.
I assume this was all prompted by calls from angry donors--who appear to have insdvertently started a whole movement.
It also destroyed the right's original and so-far successful tactic, which was to isolate every president one by one and find particular student scapegoats to penalize, like they did at Harvard. This works less well when you have to go after every single president of every major university, and all the students come to see those scapegoats as brave (which they are).
Now many things that previously worked look incredibly stupid, and will enrage even more people, casting a spotlight on free speech restrictions in a very Streisand-effect way.
But that was probably inevitable.
I am sure they will come up with a new tactic but it's much more challenging now, and it was working before.
This is starting to remind me of the movie 'A Bug's Life.'
Yep. It’s obvious that students are angry now BECAUSE they’ve been ignored since last October.
How the administration of a major university didn’t see this coming in light of Israel’s continued bombing of “safe zones” is beyond belief but here we are.
So now not only do administrators have to deal with the original protesters, but also those offended by snipers(!) on rooftops.
I'm a veteran of the anti-apartheid/divestment battles in the late 1980s/early 1990s. We managed to get a limited divestment from Univ. of Florida. "Ignore" and "Just wait them out" pretty well describes the strategy of the university. They also collaborated with other universities facing their own divestment movements to come up with a set of tactics and talking points to use against the student activists. The universities had most of the advantages, one of biggest being the continuity of the players from one semester to the next - the student leaders were always turning over but the admins didn't.
I haven't seen any mention of it in the press, but the universities appear to have settled on the same tactics with regards student encampments now: respond as quickly as possible with overwhelming force by police not associated with the school. Same talking points, same tactics, same outcomes. Oddly, they seem to be responding to summons from bad actors in the GOP in the same way too, even if it isn't working well for them. I'd love to know what consulting companies or "crisis management" outfits are getting paid to provide all of this bad advice.
"But in the meantime, she called in the NYT to clear the encampment."
I'm guessing you meant that she called the NYPD, but if she really called the New York Times to get them to clear the encampment, that would be a truly interesting tale.
I don’t want to appear rude but your article is the type of sanitised view on power dynamics that work with two parties that operate from fundamentally the same paradigm view of power.
What do I mean by this? Well the University has a simple, effective but unused power that tomorrow will stop the demonstrations: every student caught will be automatically expelled.
The power of the students is because they are students in an elite institution. Stripping them of this will stop the demonstrations immediately. Some will revel in being expelled only to find the outside is very cold and unaccommodating as they try to repay their student loans. Yet the vast majority of students are actually conformists to the status quo of going to an elite institution to get a job while TikToking their obligatory Social Justice Warrior moment.
University administrators don’t use this power because they are uncomfortable with being in a position of authority. Students are also unwilling to take the protests to the next level (a la Kent State of Mai ‘68) because these protests are fundamentally performative art. They don’t want to go all the way because they don’t want to risk being kicked out of the very institutions they so desperately want to be part of.
The administrators are fake authority while the students are fake subversives.
Universities are not going to expell all of their students using their right to free speech because student tuition is their main revenue stream. And how many students would be willing to attend a university that quells free speech by automatic expulsion next year and the year after that? They have to still be able to stay open.
The majority of students are not activists. The activists and administrators are mainly performance artists.
We’ve heard activists say they want to kill Zionists but most people know they are not serious. They demand a divestment but are not actively carrying through their threats with any meaningful action. The protestors are more interested in having the brand value of an Ivy League attached to their resume with a sprinkling of Social Justice Warrioring than actually effecting change.
The Administrators are similarly going through a performance art piece. If the protests are genuinely threatening or incentivising hatred against certain protected groups then the university would have no hesitation in expelling the students. It’s just that “Zionists” are not a protected group so university administrators have no incentive to use the effective power of expelling students.
So we get more performance pieces of fake power moves by administrators and fake subversiveness by activists.
"Oh no! What an awful thing, the protest against genocide is being effective at drawing attention! It's better if NOTHING happens and we just ignore both genocide and the protest"
Dave Karpf, grow a conscience, stop being such a Democrat and think for yourself. The expanding protest is a GOOD thing, being heard for once is a POSITIVE, and encampments expanding is a WIN
I am certain you are mistaken if you are reading into Dave's article an opinion about whether it is good or bad for more attention to be drawn to what is happening in Gaza.
Dave is a professor of political strategy. He wrote here about the lack of strategy in what Shafik did. He was not passing judgment on whether what the students were protesting deserved to be protested.
Didn’t you comment somewhere else in this thread that “politics is bad” — and now you’re making the argument that this escalation of a *political protest* is good, actually? “Stop being a Democrat” is a *political* phrase. The encampments expanding is a *political* win. Politics isn’t good or bad, it is simply part of everything we do. Stop pretending there’s no political element to the pro-Palestinian protests — in fact, there NEEDS to be a political element to them, otherwise they would remain completely ineffective in every way.
I mean not for nothing but we're all aware of who Minouche Shafik is, right? A management class boob who's mishandled every challenge and failed upwards into higher and higher positions as a result.
the student-to-permanent staff ratio at LSE decreased during Shafik's directorship and had, as of July 2023, the worst student-to-permanent staff ratio among comparable universities in the UK, according to HESA data.[21]...
In response to a legal strike action taken by the University and College Union (UCU) in the summer of 2023, overpay, and casualised working conditions, the LSE management, under Shafik's directorship, decided to impose punitive pay deductions on academic staff participating in the action...
In addition to imposing pay deductions, the LSE management, under Shafik's directorship, pushed through an "Exceptional Degree Classification Schemes" policy, in response to the strike action.[23] Under this scheme, undergraduates can be awarded provisional degrees on the basis of only approximately 85 to 90 percent of their grades and Masters students, only 75 percent of their grades.[23] In the event that the full and final assessment (100 percent of their grades) would lower their classification, the higher provisional classification would stand.[23] This policy allowed students to graduate on time, but effectively lowered the standards of LSE degrees, awarded during the strike action.
She basically turned LSE into a diploma mill while openly breaking labor law (At least I would assume slashing pay unilaterally and suddenly in response to protected union action would be illegal in most normal places, but the English basically invented bootlicking). And then someone gave her Columbia University and then someone decided she would be a good person to go represent that university to Congress in the middle of a bad faith witchhunt in support of our century's Holocaust.
I remember the anti-apartheid protests at my college in the late 80s. It went exactly as you describe - the university made some bland statements and the protests eventually petered out by themselves. Go figure!
I think you're right. I teach at a much smaller college in upstate New York which now has an active chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. They've created a little bit of disruption on campus - showing up at events for admitted students, holding signs and chanting. They have the usual demands. The college president met with them, and answered with the expected administrative non-answers that made it clear that she wasn't going to agree to their demands. She also said that they had the freedom to express their views on campus. Only about 15 students were involved in the activities. No one was arrested. So far the college seems to be following the playbook you outline. I think that if the president and administration continue to keep their cool, it will be fine for the rest of the semester.
One correction to your timeline: Shafik called in the NYPD from a "war room" at her DC lawyers' offices. She had not yet returned to NYC to see the situation for herself. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/nyregion/columbia-university-campus-protests.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU0.ej7k.saTgE3fSXwYL&smid=url-share
It's like the old fairy tale "The Emperor Has No Clothes" but we're learning that the entire court has no clothes. How can so many people whose job is managing politics (and fundraising) be so bad at politics?
Politics is bad to begin with.
The old "don't vote, it only encourages them" soft-shoe? What do you think the alternative to politics is?
Excellent from a pragmatic perspective, Dave. But, fundamentally, this is what happens when you don’t have principles other than trying to keep your job and the money rolling in. That goes for Democrats, College Administrators, and the mainstream media.
Would it have just gone away, given Shai Davidai and his supporters were also doing their best to escalate? If it were only a matter of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment students in their tents shouting slogans into the void, waiting it out would make sense. But there are counter-protesters who really want to mix it up with the encampment protesters, which will also make headlines.
Also, this might sound a little harsh, but I thought an important element of civil disobedience was getting arrested at the end. Breaking rules in support of a cause also means accepting punishment in support of a cause. If your cause is just, the greater public will sympathize, and those in power have a difficult choice: don't enforce the rules, or enforce them and face the public's judgment.
Shafik had to weigh which outcome would incur greater public disapproval: calling in the police to clear out the encampment, or allowing it to continue in violation of university rules. Either is guaranteed to get you condemned by a lot of people. Glad I'm not her.
The main trick, if you've got another side trying to escalate, is to wait for individuals to cross an obvious line and then throw the book at the individual. That way you don't expand the conflict. You stay in the "students have speech rights, and we're not gonna turn peaceful protest into *A THING*, but *action XYZ* is obviously way out of bounds.
This, granted, is more complicated than just-read-chapter-1-of-Schattschneider.
Annoyingly, Davidai has probably already crossed the line — at least a line that would get you disciplined on a college campus and nowhere else. Columbia should have gone on a speed run through the administrative disciplinary process for everyone who has been actually disruptive or threatening and left the kids on the quad alone.
There’s a difference between civil disobedience as a planned, deliberate strategy to break a longstanding unjust law—sitting in at a segregated lunch counter, e.g.—and committing a violation when a university prohibits nearly any form of public assembly and expression. The football powerhouse university near me just prohibited chairs, tables, putting a sign on the ground, using a sound system—in short, every type of behavior that would be celebrated if these were tailgaters in the fall. I don’t think the students should have to risk expulsion or arrest just because of the content of their protests.
I agree. Public universities (so, not Columbia) in general must allow protected expression, subject to "time, place, and manner" restrictions, but these need a reasonable justification and need to be content neutral. Columbia isn't legally obligated to follow that standard, but ethically they ought to. The university near you banning chairs and tables and signs and sound systems isn't being reasonable at all. If they want to ban all that stuff at 3am, cool. But there's no good faith reason to ban it during the day. Hopefully they get taken to court and lose.
Where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has crossed a well-justified line is in setting up tents and staying there 24/7. Universities have good reason to disallow this practice, from a content-neutral point of view. Of course, whether enforcing their rule against it is smart from a PR standpoint right now is another matter.
Ya know, you have this so completely, spectacularly right. But the usual suspects had her boxed in -- the nihilism of the usual suspects just make them better at this game.
Of course, on the other side of things, down the street I've got the Guv, who's an ambitious man, proving just how tough he is. He's proud of the chaos and trying to go after the actual legal authorities who are looking at the actual facts and going, "nah...."
It's a corallary to Swerer's "the cruelty is the point". The chaos is the point. Whether its the wine and cheese kerfluffle of forcing a major university president to resign, or the jackpot of "rioting student" forcing the school to call out the Pinkertons. The more chaos, the better for you-know-who (and not just Trump).
Show up to the hearing, refuse to answer any questions, tell any alumni who get mad to pound sand. Simple as.
"A State Department friend of mine once gave a briefing to [Lyndon] Johnson. The subject was a Latin-American country where it looked as if one of our military juntas was about to be replaced by a liberal non-Communist regime. Johnson was distraught. 'What, what,' he cried, 'can we do?' To which one of his advisors—whose name must be suppressed, though his wisdom ought to be carved over the White House door—replied, 'Mr. President, why not do nothing?'”
-Gore Vidal, interview, 1969
OK now I feel smart because I never read this book but thought what you say was pretty obvious.
I assume this was all prompted by calls from angry donors--who appear to have insdvertently started a whole movement.
It also destroyed the right's original and so-far successful tactic, which was to isolate every president one by one and find particular student scapegoats to penalize, like they did at Harvard. This works less well when you have to go after every single president of every major university, and all the students come to see those scapegoats as brave (which they are).
Now many things that previously worked look incredibly stupid, and will enrage even more people, casting a spotlight on free speech restrictions in a very Streisand-effect way.
But that was probably inevitable.
I am sure they will come up with a new tactic but it's much more challenging now, and it was working before.
This is starting to remind me of the movie 'A Bug's Life.'
Yep. It’s obvious that students are angry now BECAUSE they’ve been ignored since last October.
How the administration of a major university didn’t see this coming in light of Israel’s continued bombing of “safe zones” is beyond belief but here we are.
So now not only do administrators have to deal with the original protesters, but also those offended by snipers(!) on rooftops.
Unreal.
I'm a veteran of the anti-apartheid/divestment battles in the late 1980s/early 1990s. We managed to get a limited divestment from Univ. of Florida. "Ignore" and "Just wait them out" pretty well describes the strategy of the university. They also collaborated with other universities facing their own divestment movements to come up with a set of tactics and talking points to use against the student activists. The universities had most of the advantages, one of biggest being the continuity of the players from one semester to the next - the student leaders were always turning over but the admins didn't.
I haven't seen any mention of it in the press, but the universities appear to have settled on the same tactics with regards student encampments now: respond as quickly as possible with overwhelming force by police not associated with the school. Same talking points, same tactics, same outcomes. Oddly, they seem to be responding to summons from bad actors in the GOP in the same way too, even if it isn't working well for them. I'd love to know what consulting companies or "crisis management" outfits are getting paid to provide all of this bad advice.
"But in the meantime, she called in the NYT to clear the encampment."
I'm guessing you meant that she called the NYPD, but if she really called the New York Times to get them to clear the encampment, that would be a truly interesting tale.
Yeah, that was a typo. And also a pretty solid writing prompt if anyone wants to try their hand at fiction...
I absolutely love the image that "called in the NYT" conjures up.
It was a typo, and I've corrected it. But, yes, probably the finest typo I'll ever produce.
Notebooks up, Charge!
I don’t want to appear rude but your article is the type of sanitised view on power dynamics that work with two parties that operate from fundamentally the same paradigm view of power.
What do I mean by this? Well the University has a simple, effective but unused power that tomorrow will stop the demonstrations: every student caught will be automatically expelled.
The power of the students is because they are students in an elite institution. Stripping them of this will stop the demonstrations immediately. Some will revel in being expelled only to find the outside is very cold and unaccommodating as they try to repay their student loans. Yet the vast majority of students are actually conformists to the status quo of going to an elite institution to get a job while TikToking their obligatory Social Justice Warrior moment.
University administrators don’t use this power because they are uncomfortable with being in a position of authority. Students are also unwilling to take the protests to the next level (a la Kent State of Mai ‘68) because these protests are fundamentally performative art. They don’t want to go all the way because they don’t want to risk being kicked out of the very institutions they so desperately want to be part of.
The administrators are fake authority while the students are fake subversives.
Universities are not going to expell all of their students using their right to free speech because student tuition is their main revenue stream. And how many students would be willing to attend a university that quells free speech by automatic expulsion next year and the year after that? They have to still be able to stay open.
The majority of students are not activists. The activists and administrators are mainly performance artists.
We’ve heard activists say they want to kill Zionists but most people know they are not serious. They demand a divestment but are not actively carrying through their threats with any meaningful action. The protestors are more interested in having the brand value of an Ivy League attached to their resume with a sprinkling of Social Justice Warrioring than actually effecting change.
The Administrators are similarly going through a performance art piece. If the protests are genuinely threatening or incentivising hatred against certain protected groups then the university would have no hesitation in expelling the students. It’s just that “Zionists” are not a protected group so university administrators have no incentive to use the effective power of expelling students.
So we get more performance pieces of fake power moves by administrators and fake subversiveness by activists.
"Oh no! What an awful thing, the protest against genocide is being effective at drawing attention! It's better if NOTHING happens and we just ignore both genocide and the protest"
Dave Karpf, grow a conscience, stop being such a Democrat and think for yourself. The expanding protest is a GOOD thing, being heard for once is a POSITIVE, and encampments expanding is a WIN
I am certain you are mistaken if you are reading into Dave's article an opinion about whether it is good or bad for more attention to be drawn to what is happening in Gaza.
Dave is a professor of political strategy. He wrote here about the lack of strategy in what Shafik did. He was not passing judgment on whether what the students were protesting deserved to be protested.
Didn’t you comment somewhere else in this thread that “politics is bad” — and now you’re making the argument that this escalation of a *political protest* is good, actually? “Stop being a Democrat” is a *political* phrase. The encampments expanding is a *political* win. Politics isn’t good or bad, it is simply part of everything we do. Stop pretending there’s no political element to the pro-Palestinian protests — in fact, there NEEDS to be a political element to them, otherwise they would remain completely ineffective in every way.
I mean not for nothing but we're all aware of who Minouche Shafik is, right? A management class boob who's mishandled every challenge and failed upwards into higher and higher positions as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minouche_Shafik#Presidencies
the student-to-permanent staff ratio at LSE decreased during Shafik's directorship and had, as of July 2023, the worst student-to-permanent staff ratio among comparable universities in the UK, according to HESA data.[21]...
In response to a legal strike action taken by the University and College Union (UCU) in the summer of 2023, overpay, and casualised working conditions, the LSE management, under Shafik's directorship, decided to impose punitive pay deductions on academic staff participating in the action...
In addition to imposing pay deductions, the LSE management, under Shafik's directorship, pushed through an "Exceptional Degree Classification Schemes" policy, in response to the strike action.[23] Under this scheme, undergraduates can be awarded provisional degrees on the basis of only approximately 85 to 90 percent of their grades and Masters students, only 75 percent of their grades.[23] In the event that the full and final assessment (100 percent of their grades) would lower their classification, the higher provisional classification would stand.[23] This policy allowed students to graduate on time, but effectively lowered the standards of LSE degrees, awarded during the strike action.
She basically turned LSE into a diploma mill while openly breaking labor law (At least I would assume slashing pay unilaterally and suddenly in response to protected union action would be illegal in most normal places, but the English basically invented bootlicking). And then someone gave her Columbia University and then someone decided she would be a good person to go represent that university to Congress in the middle of a bad faith witchhunt in support of our century's Holocaust.
I thought the Harvard president did resign. Plagiarism isn't a faux scandal, though it doesn't make much difference to an administrator.
I remember the anti-apartheid protests at my college in the late 80s. It went exactly as you describe - the university made some bland statements and the protests eventually petered out by themselves. Go figure!