What societal institutions, other than mosques, show a greater receptivity to the pro-Hamas message than the campuses?
Neither transgenders wearing keffiyehs nor the great number of students owning high-end glamping gear strikes as the strangest thing about the protests. Their location does. (READ MORE: American Universities Have Squandered the Public’s Esteem)
Martin Luther King did not march on Cambridge Common or Telegraph Ave. He demonstrated in Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, and points beyond where governments, businesses, and powerful people discriminated against African Americans. He risked hearing jeers rather than cheers because he wanted change, not an ego boost. He suffered not merely jeers but jail, hurled foodstuffs, a stabbing, the invasion of his privacy, and ultimately assassination so that others would not suffer.
Demonstrations generally follow this pattern of addressing grievances directly at the source.
PETA protests medical research facilities that perform experiments on animals, not vegan restaurants that serve sesame noodles. Strikers demonstrate outside of the factories that pay them less than they demand, not outside the union hall. Pro-lifers hold placards on the sidewalk next to Planned Parenthood clinics, not churches. (READ MORE: Squad Members, Defiant Amid Ouster Threats, Intensify Backing of Anti-Semitic Protests)
If PETA did make its case in a vegan restaurant, then one imagines many a customer might shout “Hear, hear.” This would make the PETA protestors feel good. But it seems unlikely to advance the group’s principles.
This hypothetical forces the question, for what purpose do the protestors make their voices heard in the very places where their voices dominate? Proximity seems the obvious and partly right answer. Other reasons pertain to the inability of many progressives to operate outside of their intellectual ghettos and the desire of many young people for affirmation. No explanation for why the campuses serve as the site of the protests involves the connection of the universities to the war, of which tangential seems too strong a word, or the grounds of elite schools serving as an effective platform to save Palestinian lives, which they are not.
The protests that canceled classes at UCLA, forced Columbia to move to remote learning, and closed Cal Poly-Humboldt for the semester look like a performance. It all probably felt exhilarating and cathartic. But in terms of propelling the cause of the Palestinians, the demonstrations proved entirely ineffective.
The situation evokes the peculiar thought process of an activist of an earlier age who did not solve the problem of poverty but did win the Nobel Peace Prize.
“We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties,” Jane Addams wrote in Twenty Years at Hull House. “They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily.” (READ MORE: I’ll See Your Charlottesville and Raise You Columbia)
The point of activism, at least in this telling, is to direct the energies of young people toward labors that provide them with a sense of usefulness and a boost in self-esteem. This seems, to borrow the terminology of Abraham Lincoln, bass-ackwards. Nevertheless, as the unproductive, non sequitur campus protests indicate, many still subscribe to the activism-for-the-activists mentality emphasized in those words from Addams.
The protests on campus feel cowardly. On one level, it follows that the most coddled generation in human history exercises its activism in what amounts to ivy-walled safe spaces. On another level, cowardice begets cowardice. Student activists celebrate the murder of unarmed people their age who, like them, slept in tents at the Nova music festival. At the University of Wisconsin, UNC-Chapel Hill, and DePaul, they do not grasp the irony.
The activism for activism’s sake on American campuses does not save a single Palestinian. It does salve the feelings of privileged American kids.
