The campus protest got wall-to-wall media coverage. Hundreds held signs and chanted slogans. Many weren’t students, staff, or faculty members, but outside supporters of the cause — what some might call “agitators.”
Some camped out overnight. Others held up incendiary signs, and shouted intimidating slogans, including accusing the other side of being “baby killers.” Dozens of people were arrested. Protesters even managed to get inside the formal commencement event and cause a disruption.
Columbia? New York University? UCLA? Berkeley? University of Southern California?
Try Notre Dame in 2009 when President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address and anti-abortion protestors invaded the campus.
That event 15 years ago is a reminder that disruptive campus protests are not just the province of progressives. The incident highlights an often-forgotten reality: The slogans your preferred groups shout, and the tactics your favored causes employ, can also be used by those you oppose.
If dehumanizing rhetoric, name-calling, and insults to identity are hurled at a protest for a cause you believe in, they have just become fair game for a cause you might dislike. “Baby killer” is a prime example. It was a phrase shouted by pro-life protestors at the people they believe did not show sufficient support for their cause, and now it is shouted by pro-Palestinian protestors in much the same way.
That’s equal rights in a diverse democracy.
Many people in the nonprofit and professional social change world, including those who work at institutions with no obvious connections to the war in Gaza, are wondering whether to signal support for the campus protests.
My own view: I dislike war. I dislike violence. I think human beings need to find alternative ways to resolve conflicts. I have felt a despairing helplessness as I watch the ongoing violence in Gaza. I am glad that many young people are demanding that the war end. To the extent that the protests focus on that message, I appreciate them.
Effective Protesting
But protecting the right to protest, and appreciating some of the protester’s messages, is a far cry from idealizing disruptive demonstrations. Rather than romanticizing the campus encampments, those of us in the nonprofit field should help the budding social change agents leading those protests to think more rigorously about their approaches.
If you, like me, want the war to stop, the famine in Gaza to end, and the hostages to come home, then it’s not at all clear that encampments on elite campuses are the right strategy to achieve those goals.
In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof warns that the college protesters are making some serious errors: they are drawing more attention to their own disruptive actions than they are to the cause that they represent, and some protesters may well be misrepresenting the people they say they’re speaking for. Kristof notes that some have expressed support for Hamas — “a misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic terrorist organization that .. .has been a catastrophe for Gazans.”
David Brooks also points out in a New York Times column that those protesters creating chaos may be making the most serious error of all: instead of turning people against the war, they may be turning swing voters towards Donald Trump, in the same way that disruptive anti-Vietnam War protesters in the late 1960s helped to elect Richard Nixon.
And, as Zadie Smith writes in the New Yorker, “if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics …” then dismissing the fact that some Jewish students feel unsafe is “unworthy of this movement.”
There is an additional consideration for nonprofit leaders. Many of the institutions being disrupted are 501(c)(3) institutions that do important work. When Columbia University tells students, staff, and faculty to stay away from campus, it effectively means that cancer researchers can’t do their jobs. When Columbia and USC cancel their main-stage commencement ceremonies, it means that families can no longer see their children graduate, leaving potentially lasting feelings of disappointment and a reduction in donor dollars that fund scholarships for low-income students.
When we support a disruptive protest, we are effectively saying: the disruption you create in the name of your cause is more important than the regular work of the institution.
A reasonable question to ask then is this: If you support the disruption, do you not believe in the work of the institution? Or, more precisely, which causes justify disrupting a nonprofits important work?
Demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza may well qualify as important enough to prevent cancer researchers from getting to their laboratories for a few weeks.
But, as I noted at the opening of this column, when we allow one cause to disrupt the work of a nonprofit, it opens the door for a very different cause to do the same. And sometimes throwing a dozen issues into the vast basket of “intersectionality” or “colonialism” distracts from the goal rather than focusing attention on the dire need at hand.
Here is a statement by one of the student protest groups that shut down Columbia University: “all systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the people of Palestine, Kurdistan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”
A few weeks back, I missed a flight out of O’Hare and was unable to give a talk at a higher education conference because anti-war demonstrators shut down the airport. I was grumpy, but I understood.
Perhaps you would feel the same.
But if the airport was shut down because people were protesting (in 2024!) about the colonization of Korea and Ireland, I’d feel quite differently. My guess is that you would too.
So let’s protect the right to protest peacefully and elevate the constructive messages of those protests, even as we advise the demonstrators to have stronger links between their concrete actions and their hoped-for outcomes.
And if we are going to romanticize anything, let it be the daily work of nonprofit institutions, not the disruptive actions of protesters.
