Politics

The Democrats Are Wasting the Campus Protests

This could be a political opportunity. Instead, some are treating it as a threat.

Protesters in front of the encampment at Columbia University, the tents on the lawn in the background. Some of the students wear kaffiyeh; the center one, in a Columbia T-shirt, holds a sign reading "Columbia Funds Genocide."
Columbia University on Monday. Alex Kent/Stringer/Getty Images

The moment the clock struck 2 p.m. Monday, some three dozen members of Columbia University faculty and staff, decked out in neon-orange hi-vis vests, shuffled into formation in front of the entrance to the school’s West Lawn and locked arms. They braced for the impending threat of a police sweep of the now internationally famous anti-war encampment, a nucleus 70 tents strong, with a handful of students quietly, peacefully milling among them.

The faculty phalanx was not the only protective layer formed around those student protesters, who have, in recent months, been doxxed, threatened, suspended, attacked with a chemical weapon, and even hectored in person by the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Counterclockwise around the perimeter of the quad filed an uninterrupted procession of students, including undergraduates and grad student members of the United Auto Workers, chanting familiar pro-Palestinian refrains. “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” And in the middle of this strange atomic structure was press from everywhere: Japanese TV, Swedish newspapers, American magazines, more.

Some six hours earlier, Columbia President Minouche Shafik had put out a statement, then hastily revised and put out another statement, declaring that negotiations between student protesters and the administration had been broken off. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student group behind the protests, alerted the public that the university had instructed students to vacate the encampment or else face removal, possibly at the hands of the NYPD, by 2 that afternoon.

Just as Shafik’s first NYPD sweep—a move of such profound anti-aplomb it will literally be studied in history books—had done absolutely nothing to quell the protests, the news of a second impending sweep brought renewed attention to the pro-Palestinian campus protests.

It seemed to be the biggest turnout of the 10 days of protest since that raid, despite enhanced security measures to keep all non-Columbia students, faculty, and staff out.

What was striking, frankly, was the one group that really wasn’t present. Here were all the elements of the modern Democratic constituency—young people, the college-educated, rank-and-file union members—demonstrating on behalf of a policy, a cease-fire in Gaza, that polls have over and over again shown is overwhelmingly supported by Democratic voters, exercising core liberal values of free speech and free assembly at an institution, the liberal university, that is a cornerstone of the Democratic project. Even the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights had come out in support of the student protesters.

It could have been a prime opportunity for Democratic politicians—to show face and wrest the issue of “free speech” away from Republicans who have lorded that over so-called liberal snowflakes for years. But aside from a very small number of regular supporters—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar had visited in recent days—they were, and have been, nowhere to be found. And on Monday they weren’t just absent; many of them were busy actively making common cause with the most cynical and conservative of Republicans.

At the same moment that Shafik announced that the university was breaking off negotiations with her own students and returning to threat of retaliation, a cadre of 21 House Democrats unveiled a public threat of their own. Columbia’s trustees must “act decisively” to end the encampment or resign, they forewarned in a letter to the board. Those Democrats expressed “disappointment that, despite promises to do so, Columbia University has not yet disbanded the unauthorized and impermissible encampment.”

The message was spearheaded by representatives Josh Gottheimer and Dan Goldman, the latter representing New York’s 10th District, one of the country’s bluest enclaves (including NYU, where police have also roughed up protesters). Also on the letter was Ritchie Torres of New York’s 15th District, similarly one of the bluest districts in America; erstwhile Democratic presidential wannabe Dean Phillips of Minnesota; and California’s newest senator-to-be, Adam Schiff. Many of these representatives hail from districts with large Jewish communities, and no doubt sought in part to respond to constituent concerns about antisemitism at the protests. However, Reps. Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat, both from very Jewish New York City districts, were notably absent from the signatories. All of the letter signers are top recipients of money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

It was a massive provocation. Until that moment, calls for Columbia administrators to resign have been largely confined to the GOP. It was, per Axios, “a major escalation of Democrats’ rhetoric.”

That escalation was not lost on the faculty members on the phalanx. Many of the faculty and staff protecting their students had been trained in de-escalation, and yet here were their own Democratic electeds fanning the flames. Students, it should be said, are not immune to that either; early Tuesday morning, student protesters occupied and barricaded Hamilton Hall, a pointed reference to the 1968 barricade of the same building during Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War protests. Even the White House hasn’t been able to stop piling on—though each individual act of protest at one specific university campus might seem to be beneath the concerns of the president of the United States of America, it issued a fresh condemnation of the protesters after Hamilton Hall’s occupation. The College Democrats of America—a national organization that backs Biden and tends toward the official party consensus—in turn condemned the White House for this, writing: “Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party.”

Reinhold Martin, a professor of architecture who stood front and center in the faculty perimeter, told me he was alarmed by the Democrats’ letter. “This ‘rampant antisemitism’ notion is a MAGA message,” he told me. “It’s a clear political attack, and a MAGA project. And yet Democrats are running scared.

“The letter from those 21 Democrats, it’s worse than anything we’ve heard out of Elise Stefanik,” Martin went on. “What world is this in which Democrats can’t defend institutions of liberal learning? They should feel proud. This is a direct conservative attack to disable political speech, specifically anti-war speech. It’s what they did with CRT [critical race theory], and we’re next.”

Indeed, Republicans don’t seem to be under any confusion as to whose side they’re on. Attacking universities has been a staple of the Republican playbook for years in the party’s assault on institutions that are perceived as not supportive of its agenda. Going after universities was the spear tip of the Ron DeSantis approach to governance in Florida, using ginned-up, dubious controversies about critical race theory to crack down on the institutional independence of the state’s higher education system and to put the squeeze on its teachers unions. Nor does the NYPD, in the midst of its own conservative media blitz, seem confused about its allegiances.

Two p.m. turned to 2:30, then to 3. Some NYPD officers in riot helmets gathered outside campus, on Broadway and West 116th Street, but it became increasingly clear that the optics of an attempted sweep in the animated, densely packed quad would be basically insuperable for the already-maligned administration.

Past 3, I ran into Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate. He was the only elected Democrat I encountered. After crossing onto campus, he first stopped to talk to two counterprotesters waving colossal Israeli flags. One of the counterprotesters showed Williams a video on his phone—it seemed that this might feature evidence of the much-condemned antisemitism, behavior that nonetheless is hard to spot when physically on the campus—yet when I tried to shimmy closer to watch it over Williams’ shoulder, I was pushed away. “He doesn’t want press around him,” someone, presumably in the counterprotester’s orbit, said.

I then talked to a Jewish student named Jared, who stood nearby and held a tiny Palestinian flag. “I don’t like it when people speak for me,” he said. “I don’t like it when the response to protest against genocide is to call it ‘antisemitic.’ That suggests that genocide is Jewish.” Of course, not every Jewish student feels that way, with some saying they feel unsafe, a sense no less legitimate even if those threats have come from individuals outside the student groups.

Not long after that, the University of Texas at Austin put on a display in the style that those 21 House Democrats seemed to be clamoring for. With hundreds of students demonstrating against Israel’s war in Gaza in a manner similar to that of Columbia’s protesters, UT unleashed a militarized, multi-agency police sweep of an encampment.

Texas, a one-party Republican redoubt run by a superstar GOP governor with his own appetite for cruel and excessive shows of state force, displayed the exact Republican vision for dealing with peaceful protest and political speech of an unfavorable political nature.

For the second time in three days, cops raided a peaceful, student-led protest at the state’s most prominent university. This time, the Austin Police Department descended on the students in lockstep with state troopers equipped in riot gear, who dragged students out forcibly. They used pepper spray and arrested scores. (Slate’s Dan Kois was on hand and reported from the scene.)

Clear the encampment by any means necessary, including force, free speech be damned. Tighten the clamps on the university. For Gov. Greg Abbott, it was just the next phase in a sustained assault on the independent university system that last year came shrouded in the clothing of an anti-DEI blitz. It was undeniably a version of what those House Democrats were calling for in their letter: Disperse the encampment immediately or face political retaliation.

The first police raid of UT, a few days ago, resulted in 57 arrests. All the charges were subsequently dropped, except one: The Texas Department of Public Safety filed an elevated felony assault charge against credentialed photojournalist Carlos Sanchez, who is plainly seen on video being tackled by the cops and not fighting back, all despite being clearly identified and holding a camera. Texas Republicans have shown the same contempt for the media that they’ve shown for the liberal university.

New York, of course, is a one-party Democratic redoubt. In previous days, with police roughing up students at Columbia, NYU, and elsewhere, you could scarcely tell the difference between it and a place like Texas. On Monday, if a number of its Democratic House reps had gotten their way, it would have been indistinguishable.