The Assault on Academic Freedom
The violent crackdown on student protests has thrown universities from New York to Amsterdam into a deep crisis.
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Last week, I wrote about the student protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against Western complicity in the Gaza genocide. What motivated me to launch The Rift on this note was the condescending tone and widespread vilification with which our students have been treated by leading political figures, influential media commentators and senior university administrators on both sides of the Atlantic.
What I did not write about was how this demonization campaign has in turn been weaponized to justify a violent police crackdown on the mostly peaceful student movement. This repression is ongoing and appears to be spreading as I write these words. It has already had a chilling effect on academic freedoms in North America and Europe alike, and threatens to deepen a long-standing rift between students and university managers that goes to the heart of the higher education system.
It all began in New York City last month, when the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, ordered a forceful eviction of the peaceful solidarity encampment in Morningside Heights. Eager to please powerful pro-Israel donors and far-right members of Congress who stirred up a tempest in a teapot over the supposed antisemitism of the student protesters, Shafik rode roughshod over the opposition of her own faculty to make a highly authoritarian decision to clear the encampment.
Shafik’s subsequent justifications for calling the cops on her own students clearly did not stand up to scrutiny. As the Columbia law professor David Posen points out, the legal basis for the crackdown was flimsy at best. If the student protesters truly engaged in antisemitic harassment and created a hostile environment for their Jewish peers, then why did so many Jewish students at Columbia and elsewhere participate in the demonstrations? And why did so many Jewish faculty turn out in their support?
In a normal world, the shambles of Shafik’s approach would have served as a powerful warning to others on how not to handle a peaceful student protest. Yet the Columbia crackdown actually set the tone for everything else that was to follow. Since mid-April, more than 3,000 students have been arrested on college campuses all over the United States. That’s more than at any other point since the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Many students have been suspended from their degree programs and banned from campus; others—including faculty members—are now facing disciplinary or legal action for the unforgivable crime of standing up for human rights.
In the process, university administrators have not only gravely violated the trust of their own students and staff, but also put them at grave risk of bodily harm. We’ve all seen the images of snipers on the rooftops of U.S. campuses and phalanxes of heavily armed riot police using assault weapons to round up a handful of peacenik college students armed with nothing but books, protest signs and a few sleeping bags. This wildly disproportionate use of force—including the deployment of teargas, mace and rubber bullets—signals the bankruptcy of the university as a place of reasoned debate.
The hard-handed police repression is all the more appalling as the student protests themselves have been overwhelmingly peaceful. A recent analysis of 553 campus demonstrations between mid-April and early May found that 97% of them were entirely non-violent. In its study, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found only 20 cases of interpersonal violence or property damage. During the same period, they counted at least 70 instances of violent police intervention. It’s clear which side the violence is coming from: mostly from management and the police.
Meanwhile, some public officials and university administrators in Europe have been particularly eager to repeat all the same mistakes that had previously been made in North America. At the University of Amsterdam, for instance, which has seen some of the largest demonstrations on the continent, the authorities used a bulldozer to clear the barricades surrounding the student occupation of a university building, while an army of riot police assaulted students along the city’s historic canals. In Berlin, Paris and elsewhere, riot police also forcefully disbanded peaceful student encampments.
Until recently, universities in the UK mostly distinguished themselves from their US and EU counterparts by their relatively restrained approach to the protests. Citing the importance of free speech, the vice-chancellors of the fifteen or so UK institutions with ongoing student occupations actively tried to resist pressure by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the right-wing press to crack down on the solidarity encampments.
In recent days, however, there are signs that the situation in the UK may also be moving in the wrong direction. Last week, seventeen students were arrested at the University of Oxford after staging a loud and disruptive but non-violent sit-in at their vice-chancellor’s office. The president of Queen Mary University of London is now refusing to meet with student protesters until they disband their protest camp. And management at my own university, the London School of Economics, has sent an email to students and staff threatening to take action against the student encampment.
This managerial response—stonewalling the students and resorting to violent arrests and thinly veiled threats—goes against everything the modern university is supposed to stand for. As academics, we are expected to teach our students to engage in critical thinking. We urge them to ask difficult questions and challenge entrenched ideas. In class, the process of learning about and debating different points of view exposes students to opinions and interpretations that some may find uncomfortable. Yet this is precisely the kind of training that fosters a critical and open-minded attitude, enabling students to navigate a diverse society in which viewpoints often diverge.
The fact that university administrators are now openly repressing their own students simply for putting this academic training into practice and translating critical thinking into collective action marks a brazen violation of the right to free speech and peaceful assembly. But it does more than that: it also challenges the very mission of the university as an institution of higher learning. It cuts to the core of what we do as educators, researchers and public intellectuals. It undermines everything the system of higher education in the social sciences and the humanities pretends to be. If all we care about are obedient, unquestioning citizens, why bother with universities anyway?
Given this dismal state of affairs, we should not be surprised that the ongoing crackdown has already provoked a deep crisis in the rarefied world of academia. At Columbia, a large majority of faculty members recently passed a vote of no confidence in Shafik for her anti-democratic posturing and her ham-fisted handling of the protests, accusing the university president of violating “the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights, [which] warrants unequivocal and emphatic condemnation.”
Meanwhile, staff at the University of Amsterdam released the following statement:
This breakdown of trust between students and faculty, on the one hand, and university management on the other poses a serious threat to the future of the university as an institution. Yet it need not be like this. Not all administrators have drunk the Shafik Kool-Aid. I was pleased to see the president of my alma mater, Patrizia Nanz at the European University Institute in Florence, take a principled stance in defense of academic freedom and the right to protest in The Guardian yesterday. Elsewhere, in places like Dublin and Ghent, university administrators have done the right thing by agreeing to the protesters’ demands or at least entering into negotiations with them.
If only other universities would follow this commonsensical approach and allow students to stage their peaceful protests undisturbed, we would finally be able to focus our discussions on the truly important issue at hand: the question of Western complicity in the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people. In the wake of the latest Israeli atrocity—the bombing of a tent camp in Rafah that killed at least 45 refugees, mostly women and children—it’s crucial that we keep our eyes on Gaza.
This is why, in the next weeks, we’ll be leaving the university campuses behind for now to ask a bigger set of questions about the political and historical connections between settler colonialism and indigenous genocide. The accumulated experience of 75 years of Israeli apartheid and five hundred years of Western colonialism teaches us that European and North American responsibility for the current crisis in the Middle East runs much deeper than our leaders are comfortable to admit.
To truly understand what’s happening in Gaza today, we need to unearth that ugly history anew. This will be the theme of my next editions of the newsletter.
