Sometimes it seems as if we just can’t learn, even when we’re talking about America’s centers of higher learning, its colleges and universities. In mid-April — the day after being grilled and intimidated by House Republicans — Columbia University’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik decided not to listen to, or even negotiate with, her own students. Instead, she called in the police to dismantle a peaceful tent encampment protesting the horrors then underway in Gaza. For anyone who remembers the past history of on-campus antiwar protests, it was almost ludicrously predictable that, in doing so, she would launch a set of remarkably peaceful protests on more than 500 campuses nationwide that, despite the arrival of so many police on campus and nearly 3,000 arrests, have yet to end (and, in fact, have spread elsewhere on the planet).
And talking about not learning, imagine this: Last October 7th, the Israelis had a thoroughly grim set of war crimes committed against them by Hamas. Their response would prove to be a set of crimes so staggering that they’ve left Hamas’s horrors — and they were horrors of the first order — in the shade, removing almost all sympathy for Israel globally.
Sound familiar? And the thing we so often forget, whether the subject is Israel and Gaza or student protests in this country, is that when such horrors occur, there’s always a history that has, in some grim fashion, prepared the way for them.
With that in mind, consider Michael Gould-Wartofsky’s latest piece on the all too many increasingly armed camps that now pass for colleges and universities. Such campuses, barricaded, walled off, and sometimes occupied by local police, don’t come out of the blue either. In fact, Gould-Wartofsky has been writing about the creation of just such a “homeland security campus” for TomDispatch since 2008 — about the creation, that is, of what, by 2012, he was already calling Repress U.! Tom
Repress U., Class of 2024
How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven More Steps
The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.
In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.
Be seeing you
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