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      The Democrats lost the White House in 1968 amid anti-war protests. What will 2024 bring?

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      When student Lauren Brown first heard the commotion, including firecrackers, she assumed the sounds were coming from nearby frat houses. Then, at about four in the morning, she heard helicopters. Later, she awoke to news and footage of a violent attack by pro-Israeli protesters on an encampment set up to oppose the war in Gaza.“It was hard to watch,” said Brown, 19, a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose dorm was near the encampment. “And I wondered where the police were. I saw posts from people talking about them being teargassed and maced and campus security was just watching.”Eventually, a large police contingent did arrive and forcibly cleared the sprawling encampment early on Thursday morning. Flash-bangs were launched to disperse crowds gathered outside and more than 200 people were arrested. Afterward, campus facility workers could be seen picking up flattened tents and pieces of spray-painted plywood, and throwing them into grey dumpsters.Similar scenes of tumult have played out this week at about 40 universities and colleges in America, resulting in clashes with police, mass arrests and a directive from Joe Biden to restore order. The unrest has unfolded from coast to coast on a scale not seen since the Vietnam war protests of the 1960s and 1970s.The president has cause for concern as the issue threatens his youth vote, divides his Democratic party and gives Donald Trump’s Republicans an opening to push allegations of antisemitism and depict Biden’s America as spiralling out of control.There are inescapable parallels with 1968, a tumultuous year of assassinations and anti-war demonstrations that led to chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Democrats lost the White House to Republican “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon.Now, there are fears that history will repeat itself as anti-war protests again convulse university campuses, and the Democratic National Convention again heads to Chicago. Biden faces Republican “law and order” candidate Donald Trump in November’s presidential election.Bernie Sanders, an independent US senator from Vermont, told CNN this week: “I am thinking back and other people are making this reference that this may be Biden’s Vietnam.”Drawing parallels with President Lyndon Johnson, whose considerable domestic achievements were overshadowed by the Vietnam war and who did not seek reelection in 1968, Sanders added: “I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated not just young people but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war.”The Gaza war started when Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October last year, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 240 hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza, mostly women and children.The ferocity of that response, and America’s “ironclad” support for Israel, ignited protests by students at Columbia University in New York that rapidly spread to other campuses across the country. Students built encampments in solidarity with Gaza, demanding a ceasefire and that universities divest from Israel. The demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks and violent threats.University administrators, who have tried to balance the right to protest and complaints of violence and hate speech, have increasingly called on police to clear out the demonstrators before year-end exams and graduation ceremonies. More than 2,300 arrests have been made in the past two weeks, some during violent confrontations with police, giving rise to accusations of use of excessive force.View image in fullscreenBiden, who has faced pressure from all political sides over the conflict in Gaza, attempted to thread the needle on Thursday, saying: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But neither are we a lawless country. We’re a civil society, and order must prevail.”The president faces opposition in his own party for his strong support for Israel’s military offensive. Hundreds of thousands of people registered versions of “uncommitted” protest votes against him in the Democratic presidential primary.Yaya Anantanang, a student organiser at George Washington University in Washington, told the Politico website: “My message is that we do not support Biden. We do not capitulate to the liberal electoral politics, because, quite frankly, the liberation of Palestinians will not come through a Democratic president but by organizing and ensuring that there is full divestment within all of these institutions.”Such views ring alarm bells for those who fear that even a small dip in support from Biden’s coalition could make all the difference in a tight election.Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F Kennedy, who was gunned down while running for president in 1968, urged the protesters to support Biden despite their misgivings. “We need their votes now,” she said. “They might not love Joe Biden’s policies but the choice is not between Joe Biden and their ideal. The choice is between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who’s going to institute the Muslim ban on day one.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans, meanwhile, are seeking to exploit the unrest for political gain. They have accused Biden of being soft on what they say is antisemitic sentiment among the protesters and Democrats of indulging “wokeness” in America’s education system.Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, said: “The crisis you’re seeing on college campuses is a result of the colleges themselves not having and pushing the right education, the right discussion in the classrooms, in the right way. They play this woke game where they don’t want to touch an issue.“They create a vacuum of information. The students get bad information and propaganda. They’re effectively being used by terrorist organisations overseas to push an anti-American, anti-Israeli message, which is just awful. It’s not a difference of opinion. It’s complete misinformation.”Images of disarray on campus have played endlessly on Fox News and in other rightwing media, feeding a narrative of instability and lawlessness under Biden while conveniently sucking political oxygen away from Trump’s own negatives.On Tuesday, for example, the Republican nominee was in court for his hush-money trial; Time magazine published an interview in which Trump set out an extremist vision of an imperial presidency; and Florida introduced a six-week abortion ban after Trump helped overturn Roe v Wade. But TV screens were dominated by the protests.Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “All of those stories – any individual one would have been possibly disqualifying for a presidential candidate in a previous election – received a fraction of the coverage of the protests against [the Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s massacre of Gazans.View image in fullscreen“That’s problematic for those of us who want to see Joe Biden re-elected and want to see Democrats win because every day that we spend talking about this immoral war that US tax dollars are supporting is a day we’re not talking about the dangerous, creeping fascism presented by the Republican party.”Still, Democrats hope that, with the academic year soon drawing to a close, students will head home for the summer and the energy will disperse. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, doubts that the issue will be decisive in November.“We’re going to have an October surprise every month, and we cannot predict which of the many surprises will actually drive the election.” she said. “A month ago, it was abortion was going drive the election. Now it’s the campus protesters. Next month it’ll be something else.”Brazile also defended the students’ right to protest as past generations have against the Vietnam war, South African apartheid, the Iraq war and, during the most recent election campaign, police brutality. “I’ve been on several college campuses and the majority of them are quite peaceful,” she said.“These are students who are using their first amendment right to advocate for change in the Middle East, and everyone has to be clear that there are rules. Just a handful have gotten out of control because if you violate the rules or break the law, you you have no right to do that. That is forbidden.” More

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      I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat | Robert Reich

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      I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Student encampments have the potential to strengthen US democracy | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Three things are certain: antisemitism is on the rise; hatred of Muslims is increasing; and everyone – but especially those at universities with time to reflect – should be very, very troubled by this. Without taking account of the hate waves, it is impossible to understand why the seemingly mundane act of pitching a tent on campus has become so high stakes: is it announcing a desire to annihilate Israel, or is it a perfectly legitimate way to protest against particular US (and university) policies?University administrations are not supposed to take a stance on the content of student activism, but many have declared encampments as such to be unsafe. If anything, though, student (and professor) safety seems to have been endangered by police brutally coming after peaceful protesters.To be sure, today’s encampments are not hippie festivals; people might show up with guitars, but next to the guitar is a Hezbollah flag. To understand that camps do not pose a peril as such – and in fact can enable democratic action – we need to recall the 2010s: squares from Cairo’s Tahrir to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol saw encampments that were peaceful, self-policing and pluralistic; inside them, very different citizens could develop solidarity, but also engage each other across divisions.Protesters coming together need to show what the sociologist Charles Tilly memorably called “WUNC”: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. These might be achieved with demonstrating, once described by Eric Hobsbawm as “next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree”. Encampments create further possibilities: they might foster community, and they mark a site where those with particular beliefs can be found and engaged. They also serve as laboratories of how people want to live together; as progressive philosophers put it, they “prefigure” a different future.The anthropologist David Graeber, one of the organizers of Occupy, always insisted that the point of what happened in Zuccotti Park had been to show the world how supposedly naive anarchist ideals of free cooperation among equals could be realized.One might find free libraries, improvised kitchens, drums, chants and all the other communitarian kitsch. But the encampments of the 2010s proved not only remarkably resilient; they also served, for protesters on Kyiv’s Maidan, as sites where a new social contract could be negotiated. The gatherings in Tahrir Square – where devout and secular citizens camped together peacefully – also held out this promise. Open and diverse camps markedly contrasted with the fortress-style constructions anti-globalization activists created at the time of World Trade Organization and G8 meetings: they were not located in city centers, remained closed even to journalists, and essentially provided staging grounds for confrontations with the police.The campus camps have largely followed the example of the “movements of the squares”. Anyone who has bothered to look will have seen that Columbia’s camp is not a site of “mob rule”; there are strict guidelines, including ones about alcohol and littering. Of course, no rules can entirely prevent bad actors appearing (by that logic, no demonstration should ever happen, since what Mike Johnson called “lawless agitators” might join). The question is whether organizers will insist on something like the Hezbollah flag disappearing right away (apparently they did) and use the moment to school young progressives that Iran, Hezbollah’s backer, might not be the greatest ally for anyone who cares about women, life and liberty. All the self-policing in the world, however, will not change the fact that a campus is different from a public square; universities have the right to keep outsiders out and to prohibit conduct that specifically endangers their educational mission.Ideally, an encampment – or multiple encampments – would allow for unexpected, productive encounters and have an educative effect (or even produce empathy). To be sure, such encounters may well feel unsafe at first; but being serious about addressing conflicts together means being willing to take such risks. By contrast, the more encamping appears like claiming exclusive territory, the more it will be experienced as coercion. The “community guideline” at Columbia that tells people not to engage with “Zionist counter-protesters” is problematic: if you simply want to show how many you are, march; but if you’re sitting in a place, the advantage is precisely that people can find you and try to engage you.Many university administrations’ responses have been heavy-handed; they have also not lived up to a basic feature of the rule of law: clear and consistent messages about what is allowed and what is not. Yet, no matter how harshly universities act, Republicans bent on instrumentalizing the antisemitism charge will never be satisfied even by presidents sending in cops in ostentatious riot gear (except that it produces TV images of “chaos” that work for the opposition in an election year). Centrists, instead of defending rights to protest, are performing seemingly reasonable even-handedness in condemning Trumpists while also delegitimizing students. One does not have to agree with the encampments’ agendas (I differ on crucial points), to see that the former are a threat to democracy, while the latter have the potential to strengthen it.
      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden defends right to protest but says ‘order must prevail’ amid college unrest

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      Joe Biden on Thursday defended the right to protest but insisted that “order must prevail” as college campuses across the US continued to face unrest amid pro-Palestine demonstrations against the war in Gaza and universities’ investments in companies that support Israel’s government.The US president has stayed mostly quiet about the current phase of intensified protests at dozens of colleges coast to coast, from the Ivy League to small public institutions in the last two weeks, which has prompted the use of outside police on some campuses in controversial crackdowns.“Dissent is essential for democracy,” Biden said at the White House. “But dissent must never lead to disorder.”Biden said he did not support calls to send in national guard troops, which prominent Republican lawmakers have demanded he do.He also said that the protests had not prompted him to reconsider his approach to the Israeli military offensive in Gaza aimed that followed the attack led by Hamas on southern Israel last 7 October but, since, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians. The Democratic president has occasionally criticized Israel’s conduct but continued to supply it with weapons.Biden admonished protesters using what he termed “violent” methods, which included a broad sweep.“Violent protests are not protected. Peaceful protest is,” he said, adding: “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.”And he said: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campus, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation … none of this is a peaceful protest.”He added, however, that the right to free speech must be protected in the US.“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people and squash dissent … but neither are we a lawless country,” he said.Biden’s previous public comment on the protests came more than a week ago, when he condemned “antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”. Some dismayed at America’s vigorous support for Israel have warned they may not vote for Biden and experts also warned that many younger voters could sour on the Democrats, a little more than six months out from the presidential election.On 19 May Biden is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Morehouse University in Atlanta, a historically Black college where the president’s imminent visit is causing controversy.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      US House votes to pass antisemitism bill in response to campus protests

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      The US House of Representatives has voted to pass an antisemitism awareness bill, a controversial measure sponsored by a New York Republican amid controversy over pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in Manhattan and across the US, as Israel’s war with Hamas drags on.The bill passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support.Mike Lawler’s bill will “provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”.Democrats opposed it as a messaging bill meant simply to boost Republicans on a hot-button issue and trap Democrats into taking politically awkward votes.The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill, telling members: “Federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities.“[The bill] is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.”The Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), which “works to ensure a just, secure and peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis”, has defined the shifting meaning of “antisemitism” in US political discourse.“Traditionally,” the FMEP says, “‘antisemitism’ has meant hostility and prejudice toward Jews because they are Jews – a scourge that has imperiled Jews throughout history, and is a source of resurgent threats to Jews today.“In recent years there has been an energetic effort to redefine the term to mean something else. This new definition – known today as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s ‘working definition of antisemitism’, is explicitly politicised, refocusing the term to encompass not only hatred of Jews, but also hostility toward and criticism of the modern state of Israel.”In the House on Tuesday morning, the Illinois Republican Mary E Miller acted as speaker pro tempore to oversee debate on the Republican antisemitism awareness bill.As a choice, it was not without irony. Miller made headlines in 2021, when as a newly elected member of Congress she was forced to apologise after saying in a speech at the Capitol: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ Our children are being propagandised.”Representatives for Miller did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.Introducing the bill with Lawler sitting beside her, Michelle Fischbach, a Minnesota Republican, said: “Jewish college students have faced increasing antisemitism. And since 7 October there has been an over 300% increase in incidents on campuses.”More than 1,100 people were killed on 7 October, when Hamas attacked Israel. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the subsequent Israeli offensive.Fischbach continued: “Students are supposed to be protected from harassment. But it has been made abundantly clear that the leaders of these institutions are not going to do anything to stop it. Instead, they are allowing large-scale harassment to reign, forcing Jewish students to stay home. Since these institutions refuse to protect their students, it is time for Congress to take action.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTeresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from New Mexico, spoke in answer to Fischbach. She quoted Thomas Massie, a rightwing Republican from Kentucky, as saying the bill was “a political trap … designed to split the Democrat [sic] party and get them stuck” on an issue over which the party is divided.Leger Fernandez also said a different bill should be considered, to “designate a senior official at the [US] Department of Education to combat antisemitism on college campuses”.In his own remarks, Lawler listed alleged outrages on college campuses and said: “We must give the Department of Education the tools to identify and prosecute any antisemitic hate crimes committed and hold college administrators accountable for refusing to address antisemitism on their campuses.”Democrats, he said, were “tripping over themselves because of electoral politics” in states with large Muslim populations which traditionally vote Democratic.Debate then descended into back-and-forth over whether the bill was necessary to defend Jewish students, as Republicans claimed, or an illegitimate attack on free speech, however abhorrent that speech might be, as some Democrats said.In closing, Leger Fernandez said: “We need to remind everybody we all condemn 7 October. We all have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation.“We have taken up these resolutions over and over again. And once again, our Republican colleague [Massie] has spoken the truth when he has said that these are sticky resolutions simply intended to divide the Democrats.“Let’s not work on division. Let’s come together in love, and in belief, and [use] our individual strength to push back against the hatred that we see, and to do it in a manner that is not partisan.” More

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      Dozens arrested at Columbia University as New York police disperse Gaza protest

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      Dozens of students have been arrested after hundreds of New York City police officers entered Columbia University on Tuesday night to clear out an academic building that had been taken over as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.Live video images showed police in riot gear marching on the campus in upper Manhattan, the focal point of nationwide student protests opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Police used an armoured vehicle with a bridging mechanism to gain entry to the second floor of the building.Officers said they used flash-bangs to disperse the crowd, but denied using teargas as part of the operation.Before long, officers were seen leading protesters handcuffed with zip ties to a line of police buses waiting outside campus gates. NYPD spokesman Carlos Nieves said he had no immediate reports of any injuries following the arrests.View image in fullscreen“We’re clearing it out,” police yelled as they marched up to the barricaded entrance to the building.“Shame! Shame!” jeered many onlooking students still outside on campus.One protester at Columbia, who only gave their name as Sophie, told the Guardian that police had barricaded protesters inside buildings before making arrests. “It will not be forgotten,” she said. “This is no longer an Israel-Palestine issue. It’s a human rights and free speech and a Columbia student issue.”The police operation, which was largely over within a couple of hours, follow nearly two weeks of tensions, with pro-Palestinian protesters at the university ignoring an ultimatum on Monday to abandon their encampment or risk suspension. On Tuesday, Columbia University officials threatened academic expulsion of the students who had seized Hamilton Hall, an eight-story neo-classical building blocked by protesters who linked arms to form a barricade and chanted pro-Palestinian slogans.The university said in a statement on Tuesday it had asked police to enter the campus to “restore safety and order to our community”.View image in fullscreenIt said: “After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice. Columbia public safety personnel were forced out of the building, and a member of our facilities team was threatened. We will not risk the safety of our community or the potential for further escalation.”The university reiterated the view that the group who “broke into and occupied the building” was being led by individuals who are “not affiliated with the university”.It added: “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing.”View image in fullscreenNew York congressman Jamaal Bowman said he was “outraged” by the level of police presence at Columbia and other New York universities. He said on X: “The militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy.”Bowman has called on the Columbia administration to stop the “dangerous escalation before it leads to further harm” and allow faculty back on to campus.Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, has requested that police retain a presence until at least 17 May “to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished”. Earlier, Shafik said efforts to reach a compromise with protest organisers had failed and that the institution would not bow to demands to divest from Israel.Separately, the New York Times reported dozens of arrests at City College of New York, part of the City University of New York system (CUNY), when some students left Columbia and moved north to the campus where a protest sit-in was still in effect.One protester who offered their name as OS, told the Guardian: “We need to keep protesting peacefully and the truth needs to come out. This is a genocide happening in front of us, and the people in power are allowing this to happen.“It’s scary to speak out because so many people are losing their tuition or being fired from jobs.”An NYPD official confirmed that CUNY had requested that police enter the campus to disperse protesters.An encampment at the public college has been going since Thursday and students had attempted to occupy an academic building earlier on Tuesday.At a Tuesday evening news briefing, Mayor Eric Adams and city police officials said the Hamilton Hall takeover was instigated by “outside agitators” who lack any affiliation with Columbia and are known to law enforcement for provoking lawlessness.Adams suggested some of the student protesters were not fully aware of “external actors” in their midst.“We cannot and will not allow what should be a peaceful gathering to turn into a violent spectacle that serves no purpose. We cannot wait until this situation becomes even more serious. This must end now,” the mayor said.Neither Adams nor the university provided specific evidence to back up that contention.One of the student leaders of the protest, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian scholar attending Columbia’s school of international and public affairs on a student visa, disputed assertions that outsiders had initiated the occupation. “They’re students,” he told Reuters.View image in fullscreenHamilton Hall was one of several buildings occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protest on the campus. This week, student protesters, displayed a large banner that reads “Hind’s Hall”, renaming it in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza City who was killed by Israeli forces earlier this year.Columbia journalism professor Seyma Beyram, said on X that she and her journalism school colleagues were trapped on one block surrounded by police barricades. “All I can document right now are students getting put on one of the buses.”On Tuesday night, Columbia’s student radio station reported that Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, was threatened with arrest if he and others in the building came out. “Free, free, free Palestine,” chanted protesters outside the building. Others yelled: “Let the students go.”At CUNY as the police moved off, one student said: “We de-escalated , and now the police are leaving. We’re proud of standing up for something. All we’re saying is were not happy university tuition fees are being used to fund wars, and we want to see what we can do about it, but without violence.”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      The overreaction to US campus peace protests doesn’t feel free or brave | Cas Mudde

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      Across the world people have been shocked by social media footage of heavily armed law enforcement officers arresting peacefully protesting students and professors at university campuses around the United States. The so-called “land of the free and home of the brave” looks neither free nor brave – except for the brave protesters who continue to stand up to state and university repression.Although government repression of student protests is not unique to either the US or this particular period, the current orgy of state repression is very much an illustration of the current crisis of liberal democracy as it is squeezed by both illiberalism and neoliberalism.But let’s take a step back. Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, many university campuses have been on edge. As Israel’s retaliation in Gaza reached what the United Nations has called genocidal levels, student protests started to appear at some university campuses. Although there were troubling incidents of antisemitism – and Islamophobia – the protests, overall, are neither antisemitic nor violent. This notwithstanding, the far right has jumped on them to intensify its attack on universities.The far right has portrayed universities as “hotbeds of terrorist sympathizers” and “wokeness” that threaten core “American values” like freedom of speech. In far-right propaganda, universities are the dystopian future of the whole country, where women, non-whites and LGBTQ+ people oppress “real Americans”, ie white, Christian conservatives. And their propaganda has paid off. When Donald Trump launched his campaign, the public image of universities in the US was already not in great shape.In 2015, a modest majority of 57% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Since then, it has plummeted to just 36% in 2023. Although the biggest drop was among Republicans (-37%), confidence also decreased among independents (-16%) and Democrats (-9%). This is not that surprising, given how far-right talking points are feverishly amplified by “liberal” media like the Atlantic and the New York Times.Ironically, the mismatch between perception and reality couldn’t be greater. Academia has always been a thoroughly conservative industry and universities have rarely been hotbeds of radicalism, particularly in the global north. But since the rise of the neoliberal university in the 1980s, higher education has become highly commodified and universities have been turned into “edufactories”, run by professional administrators on the basis of market principles.Although there are fundamental differences in financial and political dependence between perversely rich private universities like Harvard, with an endowment of almost $50bn, and poorer public universities like the many community colleges across the country, the neoliberal logic of contemporary higher education has made university administrators increasingly submissive to assertive private donors and public politicians (who are, predominantly, advocating for rightwing causes).What sets the current student protests and state repression apart is not just the intensity but the scope. While the rightwing attacks in the past decade have mainly targeted public colleges in Republican-dominated states such as Florida, the past week saw state repression of protesting students at such universities (like the University of Texas at Austin), but also at private universities in Republican-dominated states (like Emory University in Atlanta), and even at private universities in Democratic-governed states (like Columbia University and the University of Southern California).The starting signal for the current repression was the congressional hearing on antisemitism last December, in which Republican politicians grilled three flustered presidents of Ivy League universities on the allegedly antisemitic protests at their campuses. Afterwards, far-right activists intensified their accusations of antisemitism and plagiarism and with success: two of the three university presidents that testified – Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania – resigned nearly a month after the hearing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEncouraged by this success, another congressional hearing was organized in April, in which Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, president of Columbia University, did not even try to defend her faculty and students. In fact, she threw several faculty under the bus. The lead of her antisemitism task force said they believed that student slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “long live intifada” were antisemitic. Outraged students responded by intensifying their protests, which again increased rightwing pressure to “act”, to which Shafik quickly responded by inviting the NYPD onto campus.As so often, state repression of a relatively small and localized protest gave rise to the rise of a much bigger and broader protest movement that spread across the country – from New York to California and from Michigan to Texas. Moreover, given that graduation season is only weeks away, university administrators are going into full panic and repressive mode. The University of Southern California has already canceled its main graduation ceremony, which was supposed to feature a speech by a Muslim valedictorian, out of “security concerns”.Let there be no doubt that the current attacks on US universities are a major political victory for the far right. Not only do they mobilize and unify the conservative base, they also divide that of the liberal opposition. But there are also major lessons for liberal democrats in the country. First, neoliberal universities are no match for illiberal politics. Second, no university is safe: this is not a private versus public university or red state versus blue state issue. And, third and finally, the current attacks are just a small prelude to what the return of Trump will mean for liberal democracy in general and higher education in particular.
      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More