There's no middle ground with populists

Higher ed has suddenly changed its approach to protest, and it's not going well

Columbia President Minouche Shafik testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee earlier this month

I’ve been pretty stunned and disappointed with institutions of higher education in recent weeks as they’ve sought to address rising campus protests over the Israel-Gaza War. Whether you agree with the protesters or not, it’s hard to see any of these schools having reacted in a way that is admirable or exemplary, or will look good years or decades from now. My impression is that what’s going on is an ill-crafted response by academic leaders to a widespread attack on higher education and thinking, wrongly, that they can appease a conservative populist movement that sees them as the enemy.

Conservative populism is a topic I’ve been writing about a lot recently and is central to a book project I’m writing on the 2024 Republican nomination and the direction of the Republican Party over the past few decades. There’s some disagreement among scholars and political observers about precisely what populism means, whether it’s really a distinct ideology, and more. But generally, it describes a set of beliefs and rhetoric depicting politics as a struggle by “regular people” against some entrenched set of “elites” that does not have their interests and heart and is even anti-American.

For progressives, these “elites” are concentrated wealth — billionaires, large corporations, etc., that exert disproportionate and secretive influence over the government. For conservative populists, the “elites” are usually cultural figures: the entertainment industry, the mainstream media, unelected bureaucrats, and, yes, professors and administrators at top universities.

There is a long history to conservative populist politicians slamming colleges as warping the brains of kids, turning them against America, steering them away from useful and profitable careers, and worse. This dates back at least to the Vietnam War era, when two important things were going on — it became possible for a broad swathe of Americans to afford and attend college, beyond just the sons of wealthier white families, and many students started exercising political opinions that were hostile to the political establishment. Vice President Spiro Agnew stated this anti-academia world view succinctly in 1969: “The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Also, here’s California Governor Ronald Reagan chastising UC Berkeley faculty in 1969 for tolerating or encouraging campus protests: “Some of you who know better and are old enough to know better let young people think they had the right to choose the laws they would obey, as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest.”

(You can hear echoes of this kind of rhetoric over the years from the likes of Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and others. Donald Trump is interesting in this regard — he seems to welcome the anti-academic hatred among his supporters, but he doesn’t actually engage in it all that much, and occasionally brags about his own Ivy League education and about his uncle, who was an engineering professor at MIT.)

Police crackdowns on student marches ramped up during the Vietnam War, especially at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and then finally, horrifically, at the Kent State shooting in 1970. Campus protest reduced substantially following President Nixon’s ending of the draft, and campus leaders and police seemed to come away with the idea that the crackdowns were looking worse than the demonstrations were. The rough peace that followed from that era seemed to generally follow the pattern of allowing student demonstrations, even for unpopular causes, so long as they weren’t hurting people or damaging facilities, knowing that students would eventually become interested in something else or go home for the summer. As Dave Karpf writes, the usual university approach of doing literally nothing has generally served the institution well over the years.

The last few weeks have seen a sharp pivot away from that consensus. To wit:

• Columbia University welcomed NYPD officers onto campus to arrest more than 100 demonstrators and suspend the students, kicking them out of their campus residences.

• Taking a page from “Minority Report,” the University of Texas at Austin’s president, at the urging of Governor Greg Abbot, invited state troopers onto campus to arrest demonstrators who “clearly intended to break our protest rules.”

• USC cancelled the valedictory speech of Muslim student Asna Tabassum, citing an anti-Israel link on her Instagram bio. When this only seemed to produce more pushback, the university cancelled its school-wide graduation ceremony.

• Atlanta Police Department and Georgia State Patrol arrested demonstrators at Emory University. Among the detained was Noëlle McAfee, chair of the Philosophy Department and the incoming president of the faculty senate.

There are plenty more. These all strike me as massive overreactions that will a) encourage more and larger demonstrations, rather than de-escalate the situation, b) result in substantial lawsuits against police for brutality and wrongful arrests, c) harm the reputations of the schools at a time of declining enrollment, and d) impair university fundraising, particularly for this class of graduating seniors.

Importantly, as Dan Drezner notes, the displays of state force here to shut down nonviolent protests are not even close to what prominent Republican politicians are demanding. Gov. Abbott publicly called for the expulsion of demonstrators and said they belong in jail. House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the deployment of the National Guard to end demonstrations.

But this moment should really be seen not just in the context of the Israel-Gaza War or even of youth activism, but also the larger conservative populist assault on higher education. We’ve been watching versions of this ramp up over the past few years, including in efforts to end tenure in states like Florida, Ohio, and Texas, to curtail or end diversity, equity, and inclusiveness programs at public universities, and to forbid the teaching of various topics (including critical race theory, intersectionality, gender studies, and more).

The recent Congressional hearings interrogating the (female) heads of various elite universities is entirely about this conservative populist attack. Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik (Harvard ‘06), who has leaned heavily into this version of modern conservatism, was the leader of the interrogations, which led to the presidents of both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigning over their legalistic responses to concerns about campus antisemitism. Columbia president Minouche Shafik, appearing at a later hearing, clearly tried to learn from the earlier one and thought she could blunt the attacks on higher ed by sounding tough on student demonstrators and showing a willingness to bash students and even have them arrested or expelled. Clearly, that didn’t work — Shafik is now under widespread criticism from students and faculty at Columbia for overreacting and from Stefanik et al for underreacting. Speaker Johnson has demanded her resignation.

In a recent e-mail fundraiser, Rep. Stefanik claimed, “I believe every violent student harassing their Jewish peers should be expelled. Every faculty member involved should be fired. And the NYPD should move in to restore order.” [emphasis added] Yes, she’s calling for every faculty member somehow involved in protests to lose their jobs.

My point is, this is not a faction interested in bargaining. They are not looking for a marginally better behaved leadership at America’s elite universities. They despise America’s elite universities (even the ones they attended) and want to be seen as bringing them low.

I definitely do not view myself as campus leader material and don’t presume to know the best way to navigate a fraught moment in national politics and in higher education. But I would generally discourage administrators from voluntarily participating in a series of show trials designed to humiliate them or end their careers, and I would suggest they take another look at the post-Vietnam idea of not escalating campus confrontations any more than needed.