Reflections on the protests in America
They won't last. They never do.
It’s the early 70s and at the bottom of my school report my form master has written “he has a remarkable lack of sympathy with those whose job it is to run the school.” I was rather pleased, though there was nothing remarkable about it. I was a teenager in a period where rebellion was obligatory. He might just as well have written “David is really cool”.
Now it’s very different. Now almost all my sympathy goes to someone like Minouche Shafik, the former head of LSE and current President of Columbia University in New York, who on the 22nd April – after much agonising and consulting – announced that teaching at the University was going online and at the same time called in the police to clear an encampment that had been set up five days earlier and that she considered was making normal life on the campus impossible.
Under fire from donors and politicians for supposedly failing to protect Jewish students from intimidation and from protestors and their supporters among the academics for authorising the police presence, Shafik attempted to find a sweet spot where some protest could go ahead without badly disrupting the work of the institution. These two latest statements from the last week tell you how that went:
https://president.columbia.edu/news/statement-columbia-university-president-minouche-shafik-4-29
https://president.columbia.edu/news/message-president-minouche-shafik-5-1-24
In summary, not well. Some of the protestors then forced their way into Hamilton Hall, which houses the college administration, and took it over. On the 30th the NYPD in turn forced their way into the Hall and took it back.
There is a certain dynamic to student protests which is familiar to me, even at some years distance, and that I’d like to share here.