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    Trump administration cancels $400m in funds to Columbia University

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    The Donald Trump administration announced on Friday that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The announcement comes after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and initiated its own investigations into students critical of Israel and its war on Gaza after Hamas’s own attack on Israel. That move by the university has alarmed advocates of free speech.It also comes at a time of widespread backlash to American universities by the Trump administration and conservatives more broadly who see the higher education sector in the US as dominated by liberals and ripe for a rightwing attack on its influence.Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed secretary of education, had warned on Monday that Columbia would lose federal funding if it did not take additional action to combat antisemitism on its campus.A statement issued on Friday by the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the US General Services Administration, states: “These cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.”“For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” McMahon said in the statement.The statement also refers to ongoing “illegal protests” on college and university campuses, a phrase Trump has used to refer to some student protests, though what makes these illegal remains unclear.Columbia was central to campus protests that broke out across the US over Gaza last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment there in April and inspired a wave of similar protests in many other colleges.The first amendment to the US constitution protects the rights of people to “peacefully assemble” and to petition the government for a “redress of grievances”.The extent that pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses can be considered antisemitic is still debated across political and academic spheres. Republican lawmakers viewed the protests as antisemitic, despite the fact many protesters denied the accusations or were Jewish themselves.Trump has threatened college students with imprisonment and deportation on Tuesday on his Truth Social platform, writing: “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”A Columbia University spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Columbia Spectator, that it was “reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and [pledged] to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding”.“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” the spokesperson wrote.It is not immediately clear what contracts or grants would be cut under the directive. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments, the GSA statement said.Katherine Franke, a retired legal scholar and former professor at Columbia Law School told the Guardian how she was “pushed out” of her role in January because of her pro-Palestinian activism. She had been with Columbia for 25 years.Franke says that the university was told “unless we as faculty and students take a pro-Israeli position, it [the university] will be sanctioned. And at the same time, the university is now committing itself to something it’s calling institutional neutrality.”She says that though not all the grants were cut, the Trump administration did “cut a significant part of them, and the important research that’s being done with those grants will stop”.Franke is highly critical of the way Columbia is responding to the threats from Trump, believing the institution could have done more to protect students, faculty and the pivotal role the university plays in a democracy.“If you grovel before a bully, it just emboldens the bully, and the bully has now become an authoritarian government with the capacity to act on a level that was unthinkable for us a couple of years ago,” she said.Columbia is one of five colleges currently under the new federal investigation, and it is one of 10 being visited by a taskforce in response to allegations of antisemitism. Others under investigation include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; and Portland State University. More

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      Trump administration quietly shutters online form for student debt repayment

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      The Donald Trump administration has taken down the online application form for several popular student debt repayment plans, causing confusion among borrowers and likely creating complications for millions of Americans with outstanding loans.Those seeking payment plans are unable to access the applications for income-driven repayment plans (IDR), which cap what borrowers must pay each month at a percent of their earnings, as well as the online application to consolidate their loans on the US Department of Education website.The quiet removal came after a federal appeals court decision earlier this week that continued a pause on Joe Biden’s Save program, an income-driven plan for loan forgiveness that would have forgiven debts after as few as 10 years of payments.Biden’s Save program has been on hold since last summer after a group of Republican state attorneys general brought forward a lawsuit against the forgiveness features. As a result, about 8 million borrowers who enrolled in Save before it was halted currently have their loans in limbo as the litigation is ongoing.It is currently unclear how borrowers who were already enrolled in income-driven plans are supposed to submit their annual paperwork to certify their incomes. It is also uncertain when or if the payment plan applications will be back up on the website.The continued setbacks in the path towards student loan forgiveness has caused concern among those with debt, and loan forgiveness activists. Critics also point out that removing payment plan options was not a part of the previous litigation.There is also criticism towards the DoE’s decision to quietly remove the applications rather than announcing it, with the department opting instead to post a banner on StudentAid.gov.The Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), a non-profit dedicated to eliminating student debt in the US, released a statement in response to the sudden removal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Shutting down access to all income-based repayment plans is not what the 8th Circuit ordered—this was a choice by the Trump Administration and a cruel one that will inflict massive pain on millions of working families,” the statement says.It goes on to say: “President Trump campaigned on lower costs, but once again has chosen a path that will ensure the greatest possible harm to the monthly budgets of everyday working families.” More

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      Lessons for Elon Musk from the original Doge | Brief letters

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      As Elon Musk’s unelected “Doge” troops slash and burn US federal departments (Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent, 12 February), it is ironic to note that the Doges of ancient Venice were always elected, and by a process that was designed to avoid wealthy families taking too much power.John JacobsAlton, Hampshire I agree with your correspondents about the difficulty of hearing the lyrics in musicals (Letters, 13 February), but there’s little mention of the problem in cinemas, where conversations are drowned out by background music. In the recent film about Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet perfectly captured the musician’s mumble. What words he actually said remain A Complete Unknown.Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Re the letters on analogue photography (14 February), there is a good compromise. I use a digital camera, which means I can go “snap happy”. Then I can look at all the images, select what I want and get them printed.Peter ButlerRushden, Northamptonshire I’m not entirely convinced that the Guardian style guide does a lot for women’s rights in advising that actresses should always be called actors (Editorial, 14 February). Why not the other way around?John OwensStockport, Greater Manchester My school report read: “Angela has influence, unfortunately in the wrong direction.” I became a probation officer (Letters, 16 February).Angela GlendenningNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire More

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      The greatest scandal is individual power | Brief letters

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      Scandalous as Donald Trump’s actions may be, they do not constitute the greatest scandal (Trump’s foreign aid cuts could be ‘big strategic mistake’, says Lammy, 7 February). That lies rather in the fact that a system purporting to display democracy to the world allows so much power to be concentrated in one individual’s hands. The eventual departure of the individual person will do nothing to rectify that colossal democratic deficit.Keith GrahamEmeritus professor of social and political philosophy, Bristol “Robert works hard, not always with success”, a Cardiff secondary school teacher once wrote on my report (Letters, 6 February). Another noted that my essays “would be improved with the inclusion of facts”. Fair play.Rob SkinnerChalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire Isn’t hiding train departure times minutes before scheduled departure (‘So patronising’: rail bosses spark anger by hiding train departure times, 6 February) to avoid platform rushes rather like removing the last carriage to avoid casualties in rear-end collisions?Prof Alan AlexanderEdinburgh Re the assertion the Elon Musk put a chip in a man’s brain (Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed – or terrified?, 8 February), did he also put the engine in my neighbour’s Tesla? Please don’t exaggerate his superhero credentials.Caroline Newland-SmithStewkley, Buckinghamshire Yes, the PSA test probably does promote stress and anxiety (Letters, 5 February). But so does prostate cancer.Greg Shurgold(Radical prostatectomy 2017), Oxford More

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      ‘It gave me a new perspective’: student exchange program attempts to bridge divided US

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      For Baltimore native Jessica Osei-Adjei, a week-long trip to Anchorage, Alaska, last summer was more than just her first time traveling solo.“I went hiking on a glacier, camping and paddleboarding for the first time,” she says. “I’m not really an outdoorsy person but doing that was definitely worth it.”Osei-Adjei’s trip to Alaska was organized through the American Exchange Project (AEP), a non-partisan initiative founded in 2019 to facilitate high school seniors’ traveling to and meeting with youth from differing sociopolitical backgrounds in an attempt to help unite what Tuesday’s elections have made clear is an increasingly divided US.“We saw that emerging adults were perfect because they were malleable – we could put them through a shorter, easier-to-scale experience, and have it go much further than if we worked with adults,” co-founder and CEO of the AEP, David McCullough III, said.“And teenagers were also perfect because they were a very quick way into their parents’ hearts. So we thought: ‘Let’s have an exchange program right here in America.’”Over the past six years, the AEP has organized close to 1,000 student exchange trips, with students traveling to 70 towns in more than 40 states across the US.Funded by organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation, and other groups, students typically spend a week in a host family’s town free of charge, before hosting a student in their own home or community.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “Most kids haven’t made up their minds politically. They have issues they care about, but they don’t really know the Democratic party or Republican party platform,” McCullough said.McCullough believes that the political divide that’s so entrenched in US politics – and which is likely to be amplified after Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday – is in part down to Americans not experiencing life or meeting people from a different geographic region or background.A 2022 YouGov poll found that one in five people Americans had visited fewer than six US states. A 2016 study of 2,000 US adults, meanwhile, found that the average American had visited just a quarter of US states and that 10% had never traveled outside their own state.For Olmert Hirwa, a student from Maine, one of the biggest takeaways from his visit to Longview in east Texas centered on the issue of guns. Before visiting Texas, he had never held a gun – but after spending a week in Longview, he found a new understanding for why people carry weapons.“What I learned is that people have guns because everyone has guns, and that guns are not the problem,” he said. “It’s the environment that people are in. It gave me a new perspective.“I also thought [Texas] would be less accepting of people of color – that was probably the biggest misconception I had going over there. For a small town, [Longview] has a lot of things going on.”Hirwa said he was still in touch with several fellow students he met during his time in Longview.Still, the challenges facing initiatives like the AEP are not inconsiderable in today’s polarized society.The rise of smartphones and the internet has further contributed to a sense of isolation among America’s youth, with researchers suggesting in 2020 that “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization poses a threat to democracy”.Divisive rhetoric at the political level has forced many to take sides, creating a sense that the country is more divided now than in the past. In most states, one party or the other controls the governorship and entire legislature.Some reports suggest Americans are increasingly moving to states that better fit their social and political views, further embedding a sense of division within the US. A report published by the real estate company Redfin in February found that one-third of real estate agents had clients who said they moved primarily because of state or local laws or politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are, at the moment, faced with some really challenging issues and we are talking about them in all of the wrong, most divisive ways,” McCullough said.“I’m wary that our country is doing two things that are really problematic – too often Americans would prefer to be right than to be effective. And [second,] national conversations are so frayed and divisive in a country that is enormous, incredibly diverse and prone to individualism.”He says some of the main challenges the AEP faces surround securing funding, and finding and recruiting more host families.“We have tons of interest across the country, but it’s going to be a lot of work to see all this through,” he said.Still, the program continues to grow.In 2023, about 475 students took part in exchanges. The AEP is planning to recruit 625 for next summer.For Osei-Adjei, the learnings of her 3,000-mile trip to Alaska went both ways.“I think that some people assumed that Baltimore was some extremely dangerous place,” she said. “People [in Alaska] were asking how often do I witness crime.“I told people I pretty much live like a normal citizen; I don’t fear for my life. I think them being here too can make them see that it’s just a normal city.”When other exchange students came to Baltimore, she said they were surprised by the city’s waterfront and the array of activities.Next up for Osei-Adjei? A trip back to Alaska next summer.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      in US Politics

      ‘Malicious’ texts sent to Wisconsin youths to discourage them from voting

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      The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has called on the Department of Justice to investigate text messages they say targeted and threatened to discourage young people from voting in the November election.The League of Women Voters says it initially learned of the alleged text campaign on 10 October, when the group received numerous complaints from voters who had received the text. Two people in their 20s who work with the League of Women Voters also received the message, which reads: “WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.” The rules governing voter eligibility for college students are no different than for any other Wisconsin residents, who are required to have lived at their current address for at least 28 days before the election to vote there.Some Republican-controlled states have sought to clamp down on student voting, drafting legislation to restrict the use of student identification cards as a form of voter ID and close campus polling places. Most lawmakers justify the measures as a means of preventing voter fraud. Others have openly complained that voting is too easy for college students – who tend to favor Democratic party candidates.“They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed,” Trump’s former attorney Cleta Mitchell told donors at a retreat in April 2023. During the meeting Mitchell reportedly emphasized the importance of limiting campus voting.In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers proposed a bill in 2024 that would have required University of Wisconsin campuses to provide information to students on how to vote from their home state.Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said she hoped for “some accountability for trying to intimidate these voters” and that the apparent mass text was unusual.

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      “We have been planning as voting rights organizations, as national organizations, for many, many different scenarios of things that could disrupt our election,” said Cronmiller. “I think because we were as prepared as we were, is why we could respond so very quickly to this particular threat.”In their letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and the non-profit organization Free Speech for People claimed that the text message had “targeted young voters aged 18-25” and “reached many voters who are part of the University of Wisconsin system”. Now, the letter alleges, “many students and other young voters are fearful that they will face criminal prosecution if they register and exercise their right to vote – because of a malicious, inaccurate text sent by an anonymous party.”The groups asked the attorney general’s office to investigate and publicize the person or group behind the text messages. More

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      Could young voters in Michigan hand the state to Kamala Harris?

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      So few students wanted to join the campus Republican party when Abigail Sefcik began studying at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) that she was rapidly voted in as its president.“The group was only four or five people. Nobody else wanted to do it,” she said.Four years later, Sefcik has turned her back on the Republicans and is supporting Kamala Harris for president.“In 2020, I voted for Donald Trump. I was being sucked into his void and I said some really disparaging things about other people. I did some things that I would just really call shameful when I think of them,” said the political science student in her final year at university.“But after a couple of years, I decided that there wasn’t a lot that the Republicans stood for that I really cared about.”Rejecting Trump and the Republicans was one thing, but Sefcik found little to inspire her in Joe Biden’s run for re-election. Then the president dropped out the race in July and Harris rapidly became the de facto Democratic candidate.“I couldn’t identify with Joe Biden as a good leader. When we were looking at a ticket with Biden and Trump, of course I was going to vote for Biden. But I would do so unwillingly because we know what the alternative would be,” she said.“Kamala Harris provides a way out for a lot of voters. Her youth, for one thing, has inspired a lot of young people.”A recent Harvard Kennedy School poll gives Harris a two-to-one lead over Trump among voters aged 18 to 29. Harris has the support of 64% of younger voters to 32% for Trump principally because of significantly higher approval ratings on the issues of the climate crisis, abortion rights and healthcare. Harris also scores much better with younger voters on empathy, reliability and honesty.View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy School polling director, John Della Volpe, said the findings showed “a significant shift in the overall vibe and preferences of young Americans” in favour of Harris compared with Biden.“In just a few weeks, Vice-President Harris has drummed up a wave of enthusiasm among young voters. The shift we are seeing toward Harris is seismic, driven largely by young women,” he said.The challenge for the Harris campaign is to translate that enthusiasm into votes where it matters.SVSU is one such place. The university has about 7,000 students. The vast majority can vote in Michigan, a battleground state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016.With polls showing the former president and Harris closely tied in Michigan, student votes potentially carry significant weight in a state that the vice-president’s campaign sees as a key part of her clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Leah Craig is campaigning for Harris on campus and registering her fellow students to vote. She did not volunteer for Biden’s campaign even though she would have voted for him. But Harris prompted Craig to get involved.“It was reinvigorating, to say the least. When Biden was the candidate, I wasn’t really passionate about it and it just felt like I was going into another election of the-lesser-of-two-evils kind of a thing. But the Harris campaign brought a new level of attention to a lot of issues that people of my generation are really passionate about,” she said.“We now have an easier candidate to embrace, an easier candidate to advocate for, an easier candidate to appeal to young people.”Many students at SVSU talk about Harris’s relative youth. Although at 59 she is old enough to be a grandmother to the students, they see a sharp contrast in energy and spirit compared with Biden and Trump. Noah Johnson, president of the SVSU Democrats, also credits a determined social media campaign for drawing in younger voters.“A lot of it is due to a big initial social media push. I saw it definitely resonate with some people, like Charli xcx when she tweeted out the Kamala brat thing. That was effective with young people. And similarly, like the coconut tree meme,” he said.“It’s like a permission structure. It wasn’t cool or popular to be a fan of Biden. Students were like: ‘Sure, I support his policies.’ But it was very rare to find a young person that was actively a fan of him. It was more: ‘I’ll vote for him, especially because I like him more than Trump.’ But I’ve definitely seen, especially from my less politically engaged friends, they’re actively excited to go out and vote for Kamala even if they’re not doing anything else.”Still, the Harvard youth poll found a significant gender gap, with the vice-president garnering 17% more support among young female voters than those who are male, although a majority of young men say they will vote for Harris. Sefcik said she saw that at SVSU, where the small membership of the campus Republican party is mostly male while a majority of the college Democrats are women.Trump held a rally at SVSU last week but said little to directly address younger voters or their concerns, perhaps because relatively few students attended and the former president failed to fill the 4,000-seat sports hall.A student who did attend and said he supported Trump didn’t want to give his name. Asked why not, he replied: “There’s no problem at SVSU. I feel like people are respectful of each other’s views. I have friends on both sides. But it’s not like that outside. Saying you vote for Trump could cost you a job.”Many of SVSU’s students come from rural and small-town Michigan, and grew up in Republican neighbourhoods and homes. Sefcik’s disillusionment with Trump went hand in hand with questioning her upbringing in a religious and politically conservative family. But she also became more dismayed with the Republican party as she experienced it from the inside.Sefcik said that as president of the campus Republicans, she would attend fundraising events where the donors expected to hear how she was suffering at the hands of “woke” students and liberal professors.“They want to hear about how hard it is to be a conservative college student and how the system is just not benefiting you anymore. And so you sort of learn these two or three talking points to reinforce that. But in my experience, it wasn’t hard, because people who identified as Democrats were kind and most welcoming people I ever met,” she said.The SVSU Republicans declined a request for an interview.Two days after Trump’s rally, a different student crowd turned out to hear Bernie Sanders speak in support of Harris on the campus.Sanders hit all the right notes for a young audience. Abortion rights, the housing crisis, the US moving ever closer to becoming an oligarchy. He gave a discourse on the dangers of electing Trump again, warning that if he is returned to the White House the world will have “lost the struggle” against the climate crisis.But Sanders also illustrated the gap with Harris as he called for universal public healthcare – “Medicare for all” – in contrast with her much weaker proposals for drug price controls and greater regulation of medical providers.Some of Harris’s more active supporters on campus say that she falls short on some policies but they see other strengths. Although Harris has avoided putting her race and gender at the fore of her campaign, Craig said it was important to some students.“From what I’ve observed around campus, it makes people of our demographic feel more heard and seen and that’s a really big thing, too,” she said.Several students see Harris as a break with being raised in an age of apprehension. Sefcik said people her age “grew up with the fear after 9/11 and have never known a world where we were sort of safe”. She said Trump exacerbated that with his attacks on minority groups and by packing the supreme court to strip women of control over their bodies.Craig described students who recently began at university as spending their teenage years living in the “Trump era of American carnage”.“This is all they’ve ever known. The Biden years are pretty much scrambling to undo what had been done and fix things. I feel like there’s a certain level of despondency whereas, as Harris herself said, she is about bringing joy to people, making it a little more positive and upbeat as compared to the same old. It’s a new approach,” she said.Still, the challenge of making sure students actually vote remains. There are reasons for the Democrats to be optimistic on that score. Four years ago, a historic high of 66% of American college students voted in the presidential election, a huge leap from 2016, when just 52% turned out.The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education called the increase “stunning” and attributed it to a range of factors, including student activism on “racial injustice, global climate change, and voter suppression”. Revulsion with Trump also drove a lot of people to the polls.Harris’s supporters also note that nearly half of SVSU students voted in large numbers in the midterms two years ago, just months after the US supreme court threw out the constitutional right to an abortion by overturning Roe v Wade – a larger turnout than in the rest of Saginaw county.Craig is pushing a widely heard message among Democrats that Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by 10,704 votes is equivalent to just two ballots in each of the state’s election precincts.“We are telling them, all it takes is taking a couple of people with you. Talk to your friends, reach out on social media. You don’t have to go knocking door to door, you don’t have to be standing out here with a clipboard. You don’t have to go do anything terribly crazy. You just have to get two people to vote,” she said. More

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      Curriculum restrictions in US public schools hurt teachers and students alike | Stacey Abrams and Randi Weingarten

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      Students across the country are settling into the new school year, connecting with friends and developing new knowledge and skills. Teachers are also hard at work, but in many places, their lesson plans will be far more complicated than they were last year.An alarming number of states have passed laws forcing educators to navigate terrifying legal and professional minefields – laws that restrict forthright lessons about history and current events, policies that make it illegal to discuss identity in our schools, and bans on books written by or about people from diverse backgrounds. More than 30 states have passed or introduced more than 100 anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bills, and 20 states have passed bills banning the discussion of race and gender in the classroom. In these polarizing times, many teachers are racked with anxiety about whether teaching in ways they know to be appropriate could subject them to discipline, harassment or even termination.Access to strong, supported public schools is one of the key pathways to the American dream. By attempting to shape public education to reflect their worldview and punishing educators for teaching a diverse and inclusive curriculum, reactionary legislators are looking to impose their specific ideologies over educational institutions that serve a broad public.And they disregard the value of free speech that anchors our democracy. The first amendment is often viewed as an individual right, namely the ability to say and think what you want without government interference. But our nation’s founders understood that the primacy of the amendment stems from the collective nature of the right: it is our ability as a people to speak and think freely that ensures we remain a free people.No group of people better illustrates how the first amendment functions to protect us all as a society than public school teachers. Our teachers bear the tremendous responsibility of shaping our future leaders. They are charged with educating our children about the importance of our nation’s complex history, engaging in civil discourse with people with whom they disagree and thinking clearly and independently about the world they inhabit.To do so is a monumental job, and teachers necessarily surrender some of their first amendment rights when they agree to take on these responsibilities. They must defer to the state curriculum. Their job is to educate, not indoctrinate. But teachers do not surrender all of their first amendment rights upon entering the profession. They could not serve our children otherwise.Guidance to teachers must be clear and unambiguous, especially if their jobs are on the line. Bans on the teaching of our nation’s complex history – and its complicated present – degrade the ability of teachers to do their jobs. These vague bans are unconstitutional, unnavigable and undermining to our core narrative as Americans. The government should support teachers to carry out their vital role, not create a chilling effect on speech and force people to guess at what is permissible to teach.Bans on entire subject areas are so broad that they impede the ability of teachers to perform their most essential duty. Educators must be permitted to teach the required curriculum – including all the subjects our children need to compete in a global economy and to acquire the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life.Cynical, narrow-minded schemes to censor and skew what is taught and learned in our nation’s classrooms hurt our efforts to help all children get the best education possible. In a pluralistic society such as the United States, that includes helping students to bridge differences with people with different beliefs and backgrounds. There is no better place to do that than in our public schools.

      Stacey Abrams is the founder of American Pride Rises and former minority leader of the Georgia house of representatives

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      The Protests Help Trump

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      These days, I think a lot about Donald Trump. When the monthly economic reports come out, I think: Will this help elect Donald Trump? And, I confess, I’ve started to ask myself the same question when I look at the current unrest on American college campuses over Israel and Gaza.Now, I should say that I assume that most of the protesters are operating with the best of intentions — to ease the suffering being endured by the Palestinian people.But protests have unexpected political consequences. In the 1960s, for example, millions of young people were moved to protest the war in Vietnam, and history has vindicated their position. But Republicans were quick to use the excesses of the student protest movement to their advantage. In 1966, Ronald Reagan vowed “to clean up the mess at Berkeley” and was elected governor of California. In 1968, Richard Nixon celebrated the “forgotten Americans — the nonshouters; the nondemonstrators” and was elected to the presidency. Far from leading to a new progressive era, the uprisings of the era were followed by what was arguably the most conservative period in American history.This kind of popular backlash is not uncommon. For his latest book, “If We Burn,” the progressive journalist Vincent Bevins investigated 10 protest movements that occurred between 2010 and 2020 in places like Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine and Hong Kong. He concluded that in seven of those cases, the results were “worse than failure. Things went backward.”In Egypt in 2011, for example, about a million protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, thrilling the world with their calls for reforms and freedom. President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, but democracy did not replace his autocratic rule; the Muslim Brotherhood did.In June 2013, millions of Brazilians took to the streets demanding better schools, cheaper public transportation and political reform. But, Bevins laments, “just a few years later, the country would be ruled by the most radically right-wing elected leader in the world, a man who openly called for a return to dictatorship and mass violence” — the über-Trumpian figure Jair Bolsonaro.Why do these popular uprisings so often backfire? In his book, Bevins points to flaws in the way the protesters organize themselves. He notes that there are a few ways you can structure movements. The first is the Leninist way, in which power is concentrated in the supreme leader and his apparatus. Or there is the method used by the American civil rights movement, in which a network of hierarchically organized institutions work together for common ends, with clear leaders and clear followers.Then there’s the kind of movement we have in the age of the internet. Many of these protesters across the globe are suspicious of vertical lines of authority; they don’t want to be told what to do by self-appointed leaders. They prefer leaderless, decentralized, digitally coordinated crowds, in which participants get to improvise their own thing.This horizontal, anarchic method enables masses of people to mobilize quickly, even if they don’t know one another. It is, however, built on the shaky assumption that if lots of people turn out, then somehow the movement will magically meet its goals.Unfortunately, an unorganized, decentralized movement is going to be good at disruption but not good at building a new reality. As Bevins puts it, “A diffuse group of individuals who come out to the streets for very different reasons cannot simply take power themselves.” Instead groups that have traditional organizational structures, like the strongman populists, rise up vowing to end the anarchy and restore order.Today’s campus protesters share this weakness. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t control the message. The most outlandish comments — “Zionists don’t deserve to live” — get attention. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t be clear on basic positions. Does the movement, for example, believe in a two-state solution, or does it want to eliminate Israel and ethnically cleanse the region?Worse, the protests reinforce the class dynamics that have undermined the Democratic Party’s prospects over the past few decades. As is well known, the Democrats have become the party of the educated and cultural elite, and the Republicans have become the party of the less educated masses. Students who attend places like Columbia and the University of Southern California are in the top echelons of cultural privilege.If you operate in highly educated circles, it’s easy to get the impression that young people are passionately engaged in the Gaza issue. But a recent Harvard Youth Poll asked Americans ages 18 to 29 which issues mattered to them most. “Israel/Palestine” ranked 15th out of 16 issues listed. Other issues like inflation, jobs, housing, health care and gun violence were much more pressing to most young Americans.Especially since 2016, it’s become clear that if you live in a university town or in one of the many cities along the coasts where highly educated people tend to congregate, you can’t use your own experience to generalize about American politics. In fact, if you are guided by instincts and values honed in such places, you may not be sensitive to the ways your movement is alienating voters in the working-class areas of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. You may come across to them as privileged kids breaking the rules and getting away with it.Over the past few decades, many universities have become more ideologically homogeneous and detached from the rest of the country. As my colleague Ross Douthat noted recently, Columbia students who study 20th-century thought in the “core curriculum” are fed a steady diet of writers like Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault from one ideological perspective.Writing in The Atlantic, George Packer quoted a letter that one Columbia student wrote to one of his professors: “I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in ‘decolonization’ or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief.”These circles have become so insular that today’s progressive fights tend to take place within progressive spaces, with progressive young protesters attempting to topple slightly less progressive university presidents or organization heads. These fights invariably divide the left and unify the right.Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learned that when you’re covering a rally, pay attention not just to protesters; pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving. If you were covering the protests of the late 1960s, for example, you would have learned a lot more about the coming decades by interviewing George W. Bush than you would have by interviewing one of the era’s protest celebrities like Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was more photogenic in the moment, but Bush, and all those turned off by the protests, would turn out to be more consequential.Over the past few days, the White House and Senator Chuck Schumer have become more critical of lawbreaking protests. They probably need to do a lot more of that if we’re going to avoid “Trump: The Sequel.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More