The Downside of Force

Campus Upheavals in America

One sunny April afternoon in 1970 I was sitting on the lawn in front of Butler library at Columbia University leading a seminar of Columbia College undergraduates. So much had happened. Nixon and Kissinger saw fit to bomb and invade Cambodia that Spring, expanding the war. The “authorities” in Ohio had called out the national guard to deal with demonstrators at Kent State. Frightened, the young guardsmen fired on unarmed students, killing four of them. The use of force had the opposite effect than intended; student demonstrations spread across the country.

The Cambodia invasion demonstrations and the authoritarian response echoed the anti-war demonstrations of two years earlier, when Columbia President Grayson Kirk invited the NYC police to clean out students who had occupied buildings, including his office, leading to expanding demonstrations on hundreds of campuses.

I was a young assistant professor of political science at Columbia then. As we sat on the lawn discussing the Cambodia decision, a graduate student passed by and invited me to come speak at a rally in front of the physics building. Why Pupin Hall? Because some of the physics faculty were participating in the Jason Group, a consortium of scientists providing, among other things, technical advice to the government. Their work had been examining how to build an electronic fence along the Ho Chi Minh trail to allow the US military to target the North Vietnamese with bombing raids and prevent infiltration into South Vietnam. Graduate students had occupied the building, protesting the university for its complicity in allowing the faculty to support the war.

I had already spoken out at a faculty assembly against the war, the invasion, and the Jason Group, not a welcome intervention in the opinion of a number of my colleagues in the political science department. I had no hesitation in agreeing to speak again. Two years later, after my faculty mentor had died, that speech cost me my job, thrusting me into the school of hard knocks that is the work world most people live in – aside from civil servants and tenured professors.

Frightened university and college administrators are making the same mistake today they did in 1968 and 1970. Force was not the answer to student demonstrators then; it is not the answer now. The weakness of deterrence through force is that it exacerbates the tension; it does not calm it. Columbia President Minouche Shafik may be a good economist; she is a lousy historian, having learned nothing from the decisions and failures of her predecessor.

The students and faculty are learning a lesson in the unjustified use of power, even armed force (Kent State), seeking to deter. Academic careers are being terminated, faculty are being muzzled and fired, the kind of arbitrary career change I went through 52 years ago.

Under the guise of preventing hateful speech (and for sure, there have been instances of clear and unacceptable anti-Semitic speech and action), speech itself is being shut down. We can debate forever the meaning of “Palestine shall be free,” and “anti-Zionism.” But neither is axiomatically anti-Semitic (incoming rhetorically violent responses anticipated here --- that is the process of debate and discussion.)  Some Jewish student feel threatened – understandably. Others conduct seders in the Columbia lawn encampment, supporting Palestinian rights, freedom, and an end to the slaughter of innocents Israeli military operations have brought to Gaza as they try to eliminate Hamas.

What is troubling to me is less the sometimes excessive rhetoric – MAGA Republicans get away with much worse – than the excessive response. I see here a mirror of what has happened in Gaza itself: emotion has overwhelmed reason; revenge has trumped over good judgment.

Emotion at years of repression has clearly overwhelmed good judgment for Hamas, whose horror-laden strike in Israel exceeded the bounds of humanity by a long distance. Emotion, fueled by sad historical memory, fuels the Israeli war plans and actions, leading to a cruel, crushing display of military power far in excess of the injury, with more than 34,000 Palestinians paying the price.

All in the name of injustice, deterrence, and revenge. The hatred, military overkill, and revenge is what, I think, has brought students here to encampments and sit-ins. And now the university administrators, themselves, have yielded to the false god of deterrence strategy – hammer them hard and they will back off.

The predictable response has been to broaden the protest. Mayors, college presidents, and police have learned nothing. Better the billy club than reason and empathy.

Some of you are going to call me hopelessly naïve.  If so, it is a naïveté built on years of working in the non-profit, government, and academic worlds, where disputes and disagreements are the meat and potatoes of learning and growth. We grow through mindful discord and contradiction, not by living in safe little boxes populated by people who only agree and provide comfort. 

Universities and colleges should be the incubators of growth through disagreement and exchange, not the enforcers of particular speech, but not other speech. That is their core practice. In my judgment, college presidents across the country, starting with Minouche Shafik, have been making a fatal mistake the last couple of weeks – by reaching for deterrence and force, rather than shaping a learning opportunity.

Naïve it may seem to you, but these are the institutions that can and should incubate learning – on the sunny spring lawns if necessary, through encampment seminars, open classrooms. They are the place anti-semitism can be dismantled through dialogue, where injustice and repression for Palestinians can be examined and understood. And, yes, there will be some excessive rhetoric, some misunderstanding, some anger, some walkouts. That is the fire that promotes growth and change.

Excessive force, whether on campus or in Gaza, is never a recipe for change.  It is a recipe for regression, hatred, and future confrontation. It saddens me that college administrations have abandoned the core mission, lack the leadership and imagination to forge the difficult path, and have simply had recourse to force.