It’s Not Only Kent State That Today’s Campus-Protest Crackdowns Remind Me Of

As the student-run, pro-Palestinian protest encampments at Columbia University spread across the country, they have drawn increasing scrutiny from politicians and media figures who want to see them crushed. Most recently, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley made a ludicrous call to send in the National Guard to disperse the protestors. Though absurd, the idea was very much in keeping with the far right’s lust for using violence against dissent. But if we take a step back from this immediate controversy, we should see that what is unfolding on campuses is nothing new. It’s merely the latest iteration of a battle over who can say what about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And you do not have to endorse every strategic or rhetorical move of the protestors to recognize that the right has dramatically escalated its effort—which stretches back more than two decades to the immediate post-9/11 period—to use public pressure to shame, silence, and destroy critics of Israeli and American policy.

I started a Ph.D. program focusing on Middle East politics a week or so before 9/11. It didn’t take long before the patriotic fervor that enveloped the United States in the aftermath of those horrific attacks turned into calls to fire professors who violated the new codes of nationalist correctness that were informally imposed in the years following the disaster. What conservatives now decry as “cancel culture” was standard operating procedure in the early 2000s for right-wing organizations. In 2005, for example, University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill became the target of a nationwide campaign calling for his dismissal after an essay he had written after 9/11—which used needlessly incendiary language to make a bog-standard argument about the attacks being blowback for U.S. foreign policy—went viral. Churchill was later fired for plagiarism, allegations of which would never have surfaced without the preceding national media firestorm.

The right put real weight into this effort, including creating the organization Campus Watch, started in 2002 by Daniel Pipes (who has been arguing for more than 20 years that the path to peace runs through ruthlessly crushing the Palestinians and then forcing them to “lose hope”), then the director of the Middle East Forum. While apologists said that they were merely documenting what gets said and written about the Middle East on American campuses, anyone who directly experienced being targeted by the group can attest that the ultimate goal was to build pressure on universities to fire or refuse tenure to high-profile critics of Israel and American foreign policy.

If you can make tenuring someone a big enough headache, then colleges might ultimately prefer to pay one-time settlements to aggrieved faculty members rather than deal with complaints about them, particularly from deep-pocketed donors, for 30 more years. Campus Watch compiled lists of professors, by institution, with short articles documenting things that they had said or written about Israel or the “War on Terror.” Once a few well-known professors met professional doom as a result of these efforts, it had a chilling effect on the willingness of scholars at other institutions to speak out or even to publish certain kinds of research. That was the point. The relentless unpleasantness of dealing with such people was a major motivation behind my decision not to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict professionally.

This was not an abstract fear. One of the first classes I ever taught was a discussion section for a large International Relations of the Middle East course at the University of Pennsylvania that was taught by my eventual dissertation adviser. On the first day of class, he asked everyone why they were taking the course, and one student said, “I want to see how the Middle East is taught.” That person ended up in my discussion section and made everyone’s lives a living hell for four months, not because his beliefs were particularly unusual but because he refused to let any kind of discussion unfold without aggressively advancing the Israeli far right’s position, to the point where he repeatedly left other students in tears. He eventually told me that he had been asked to do this by Campus Watch in an effort to document whatever the professor—a prominent liberal, Jewish supporter of the two-state solution—was saying in class. As a second-year graduate student with no professional power, I very much did not want to end up in the crosshairs of Campus Watch, so I bent over backward, in retrospect perhaps too far, to ensure that this student felt like he could say whatever he wanted in my section.

This effort was far from limited to Penn. And Columbia in particular is not a newcomer to being at the center of national controversy about free speech as it relates to Israel and the Middle East. Twenty years ago, the David Project produced a documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which attacked several Columbia professors, including Joseph Massad (also at the center of controversy today), accusing them of racism and bias against Jews and other students who disagreed with them in class. Cancel-culture warrior du jour Bari Weiss was heavily involved as an undergraduate, and while she denied calling specific professors racist or seeking to have them dismissed, it would take a willful suspension of disbelief to think that the purpose was neither to silence them nor to harm their career prospects.

Massad’s tenure application became a national controversy, and while he received his promotion, efforts to get him fired have begun anew after he published an article last year for Electronic Intifada that critics argued painted the Hamas attackers in a positive light. (The name of that publication has perhaps contributed to the controversy.) Massad naturally disagrees with that assessment of his piece. Others, like DePaul University political scientist Norman Finkelstein, were denied tenure or saw job offers rescinded. Steven Salaita’s position in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was withdrawn after some offensive tweets of his surfaced. In both cases the universities were forced to offer substantial financial settlements. These were extreme examples, but for every national news story like them there were likely countless instances of universities quietly passing on someone whose positions on Palestine might have ruffled feathers.

Today, efforts to intimidate aren’t limited to faculty. The explosion of social media has made it possible to target individual students participating in protests or other actions. To choose one example, the New York law firm Davis Polk rescinded offers of employment to several Harvard and Columbia law students for signing a letter that placed blame on Israel for Oct. 7. Harvard donor and repeat Twitter main character Bill Ackman led the call to blacklist students who committed anti-Israel thought-crimes, an effort that was applauded by a number of other titans of industry and commerce. Today, this crowd is calling for Columbia protestors to be ineligible for loan forgiveness, expelled, arrested, or to meet the wrath of the National Guard. One gets the sense that they would not be terribly unhappy if another Kent State unfolded in New York City, because assaulting, maiming, and running over protestors has become a shared dream on the American far right. And if this is not cancel culture, then the term genuinely has no meaning.

The goalposts have also moved significantly. Today, students and faculty are the subject of a national pressure campaign to redefine antisemitism to include things like “anti-Zionism” and slogans with complicated and contested meanings like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And while I am troubled by the way that Zionism has become a pejorative on the left, the effort to effectively outlaw or even criminalize opposition to Zionism is outrageous and extremely dangerous. That also includes the asymmetric bans of campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace at Columbia and elsewhere. And it is very hard to watch people who not long ago turned J.K. Rowling into an international martyr for free speech celebrating the destruction of lives and careers of people who signed a problematic statement or who don’t believe in or support Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the occupation, the settler movement, and similar projects that subjugate and immiserate Palestinians.

The real issues involved in the campus speech battles are actually much more complex than anyone in this debate would like to admit. Colleges and universities are not just giant free speech zones where anything goes. They are also workplaces for faculty and staff and literal homes for hundreds of thousands of students. I would not want to be the administrator tasked with navigating the often incompatible demands of employment law, academic freedom, free speech rights, and community standards, especially not in the midst of a heated controversy that places all of the unresolved tensions over campus speech front and center.

But let’s be clear: Most people who have turned Columbia into a national lightning rod couldn’t care less about the human beings who live and work there or the very real challenges of making everyone on campus feel safe, heard, and free. They are heaping scorn on the encampment not because they oppose civil disobedience but because the protestors represent the leading edge of a generational change in attitudes about Israel. And I can guarantee that most critics calling for the heads of Columbia students for the terrible crime of camping out on their own university’s lawn were enthusiastically in favor of, for example, trucker convoys laying siege to major cities in 2021 to protest vaccine mandates. The bottom line is that to forestall the coming reckoning with 40 years of failed, unjust policy, Israel’s defenders want to criminalize it, to cast Palestinians out of the public sphere and hound them until—despairing of the impact of their activism on their life and career prospects—they give up.

And the message from the protestors is and should be very clear: That’s not happening.