The widespread protests against the war in Gaza across dozens of US university campuses, and the unprecedented crackdowns are a sign of a triple crisis: Of liberal democracy, of the university, and paradoxically, of anti-war protests as well.
The protests are a sign of the crisis of liberal democracy in three ways. First, we should not forget that these protests have been occasioned by the fact that the American political system has been virtually immune to the catastrophic horror that is unfolding in Gaza, since Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israel. Both America, which has the greatest leverage on Israel, and the international community, have met the horror of Gaza with moral abdication. The protests are a product of that suffocating sense of thwarted political agency that a lot of young people feel. They are also a consequence of the larger failure of a democratic system that has closed ranks allowing atrocities to unfold in Gaza, often even in the face of public opinion. The students are, perhaps inchoately, attempting that work of moral repair.
Second, it is a crisis of liberal democracy because it has exposed the fact that free speech, even in a country with such strong first amendment protections, can be so easily immobilised or subject to partisan considerations. The US Congress might have humiliated the presidents of universities, but more ominously, it sent out a message on the future of free expression. Third, if the risk in India is political authoritarianism, the risk in the United States is deep polarisation. The reactions and the political use of these protests will deepen that polarisation.
The protests also signal a crisis of the university. Over the last few years, higher education has increasingly become a political target. While universities ought to be accountable in relevant ways, the political attention to universities is not about restoring pedagogical excellence or depoliticising the university. In fact, it is an attempt to hyper politicise the university by attacking its legitimacy from the outside. In particular, the Republican Party’s concerted effort to delegitimise the university predates this crisis: Using critical race theory as a pretext to exercise control over universities is of the same piece as using criticism of Israel to make a case for control. The agenda is to produce an exaggerated moral panic about universities. This is not a universe in which legally correct defences of freedom of expression, academic freedom, or even imagining what it means to be an 18 year old coming to political consciousness cuts any ice. In fact, those arguments are used as fodder to delegitimise the university.
Second, the university itself is now on shakier ground. Having abandoned the principle of institutional neutrality, the university now finds itself in the crossfire of which groups and conflicts command more power and attention. Vocal trustees and visible alumni, whose power was always present in the governance structure, but with less consequence in less divisive times, are now beginning to define the character of the university. Faced with a political assault from outside, and the assertions of a few visible donors from inside, university presidents are panic-responding by violating the basic norms that govern the university, appearing to worry more about their accountability to a small group of donors and the political class than faculty and students. The use of police in so many universities, most visibly Columbia, has been on grounds that are patently absurd and repressive. And it has been counterproductive, because it radicalised the protests.
Third, in many instances, the university’s own selective enforcement of “time, manner and place rules of protest” has produced diminishing confidence in the administration’s impartiality. The use of indeterminate standards like “safety” has been stretched to a point where even the articulations of political arguments are seen as threatening. It completely immobilises the university from making the necessary distinctions between genuine threats of anti-Semitism and political critique. As teachers, the first thing we tell students is learn to make fine distinctions; the universities seem to revel in blunt instruments. And they are struggling to convert this into a pedagogical moment, rather than a moment they fear and need to manage.
But it is also a crisis for the protests. The students have been, for the most part, restrained and stayed away from aggression or even the scale of disruption you might expect. The administrations have been more threatening. But the larger discourse has made it into a war of groups: Anti-Semitism versus islamophobia, students seen as threats to other students. Politicians and administrations have an investment in this division. A protest that gets construed not as a protest on principle, but a potential conflict between two groups risks losing its moral lustre. The universalism of the principles underlying the protest gets obscured.
Second, the protests are struggling to find an appropriate target. One of the oddities of the protests is that so many of them are directed against university policies and administration — the pressure to divest, or, for the university, to signal support. At one level, this is understandable: The students are in a university and given an obdurate political climate, think this is an institution they can move. The protests also keep the cause visible. But both in symbolic and real terms, the university is less consequential in stopping the war, or even affecting America or Israel through its actions. Nonetheless, it lets the heat off the political class. The protest, if deemed necessary, ought to be better directed against the state and elected representatives, and ought to be more political in a conventional sense. In an election year, the mobilisation of the young in politics ought to have more leverage.
And finally, there is the predictable consequence — the object of discussion has become the university, not the war in Gaza. Most university students are serious and have at least as good or better a moral compass than the elders who judge them. But, as this column had argued (‘The Paradox of Palestine’, December 22), the war has become the pretext to litigate every issue (wokeness, donor power, the intellectual excess of academia, freedom of speech, resentment over DEI) but the nature and conduct of the war itself. The discussion that is now dominating the world is the discussion about alleged limits to freedom in American universities, never mind the fact that every university in Gaza has been reduced to rubble. The only one laughing right now is Benjamin Netanyahu — the world where students are seen as a threat is a far safer world for him, than a world that actually cares about stopping a brutal war.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
A University of Southern California protester is detained by USC Department of Public Safety officers during a pro-Palestinian occupation at the campus. (AP Photo) 
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