Protests on College Campuses

Thoughts on free speech, why they're probably not helping anyone, and why they probably aren't really about Palestine anyway.

Recent protests at US college campuses have attracted much attention, renewing debates about free speech and where the lines between protected speech and illegal activity may be.  These can be complex, particularly for college campuses, because free speech rights of competing groups may come into conflict, and young people may not always understand the ground rules (neither, often, do the older adults in fairness).  People have a general tendency to be more concerned about free-speech rights for “their” side and less concerned for the “other side”.  As usual, the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, has an excellent guide on this.  But I think there is much confusion, and some interesting issues to contend with here.  So, below, is a listicle of my thoughts.  As ever, I welcome your responses (particularly if you’re a paying subscriber!)

First, though, throat clearing.  Although the current protests focus on the Israel/Gaza conflict, an issue of considerable passions on both sides, my comments should not be taken as favoring either side, nor being specific to this conflict.  I have thoughts about the conflict, by my main one is the hope that innocent civilians on both sides will have peace sooner rather than later. But for speech, one of the main issues of free speech is that it should be content neutral. 

1)      Students, faculty, and staff (henceforth just “students” for shorthand) should have fairly broad latitude to speak their minds on campuses, in class and in public spaces without fear of retribution from administrators, faculty (including unfavorable grading for “wrongthink”), or police.

2)      However, students do not have the right to prevent others from using community spaces, stop others from speaking, or create harassing environments that chill others from speaking. 

3)      Creating barriered encampments on campus (which are not new to the current conflict), or taking over buildings, or disrupting classes are not protected speech.  Yes, campus security or police can intervene and arrest people. 

4)      Students may decide to do such things anyway, and perhaps have passionate reasons to do so.  Just don’t be surprised when the cops arrest you.  That’s part of the package of civil disobedience (which is non-violent, but illegal protest activity). 

5)      Do not touch cops.  And I mean touch.  A professor who “lightly hit” (her words) a cop on the head seemed surprised to have gotten arrested.  If you “lightly hit” a cop on the head, you will get arrested too.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Stop telling people this is ok to do.  You’ll get people hurt.

6)      Related to the above, these kinds of civil breakdowns involve a lot of misinformation.  Initial coverage of the professor’s arrest, for instance, implied she’d been arrested only after verbally questioning the officer, failing to accurately convey that she’d hit him.  Take news reports with a grain of salt. 

7)      People often forget that bad behavior comes from both sides in a dispute.  Are most protestors peaceful?  Probably yes.  Have some engaged in violence, blatant antisemitism, intimidation, threats, assaults, etc....I think also pretty clearly yes.  But there are also pro-Israel provocateurs, police overreactions, the political right likely (and correctly) sees some political advantage to the chaos, etc.  Being willing to acknowledge bad behavior by those on “our” side often keeps these conflicts more sensible and helps to tamp down extremes.

8)      Because people are humans, most will ignore my advice from #7.

9)      Part of the problem for universities is that so many, particularly at elite and big state colleges, have absolutely shredded their credibility on free speech, happily canceling faculty, students, and staff for “wrongthink” on everything from gender identity to abortion to BLM.  Predictably, they’re now in a quandary on a complex issue (the nuances of which neither side will admit), caught from both camps without anything like guiding principles.  Even when they are correct to protect the speech of pro-Palestinian protestors, they still seem like hypocrites (which they are).

10)  If you are going to take over part of a building, it probably behooves you to plot in advance to include a bathroom in your takeover plans.  This will help you avoid looking rather silly when you realize you barricaded yourself in an area with no loo and end up crying about “toxic shock syndrome” to a 911 operator.  Planning, people, planning!

11)   A sudden wave of folks angrily protesting over an issue doesn’t mean they are right on the issue.  They could be woefully deceived.  But I think we may have learned from the 2020 “racial reckoning” (since largely canceled it appears), that a protest movement can be completely misinformed.  Just 4 years on, BLM’s public relations are underwater, both because people kind of realized that “systemic racism” narratives were mainly a nonsense moral panic, and BLM mostly blew their donations on mansions anyway. 

12)  Back to throat clearing…my point is not that pro-Palestinian (or pro-Israeli) protesters are necessarily wrong.  But I’m skeptical that protests…any protests, by any group, are a good means of discerning what is factually true.  Just as BLM was often basically wrong about the facts of race and policing, that can be true for other issues as well.  In many cases, such as a long-term conflict like Israel/Palestine, the underlying issues can simply be complex, nuanced, and knotty.  Inevitably, protests try to cut through these with simple, moralistic, and often misleading slogans. 

13)  However, it is not my point that we should ignore protests.  They can at least inform us who are upset and offer hypotheses to be empirically tested (indeed, that is why I became involved in some research on race, policing, and violent crime).

14)  News media often do a crappy job covering protests.  This can go both directions, in some cases unfairly casting them negatively, or as seems more common recently, failing to inform the public of their more unsavory aspects.  This was true of the BLM protests/riots (the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” caption will live forever) and appears to be true as well for some of the recent protests as well.  I think news media could do a more authentic job in separating good actors from bad in these often-complicated movements.

15)   Protestors aggressively inciting an overreaction from authorities in order to portray themselves as victims is often part of their strategy, particularly when well-organized groups are involved.  Becoming keen to that and not falling for it emotionally may actually help improve the safety of future protests.

16)  I think there are interesting questions about whether protests such as these work.  I suppose first we should ask…who are they really meant to work for.  The BLM protests ostensibly were about police shootings, but neither BLM nor the protestors seemed to do much about that, eventually shifting mainly to inventing new acronyms like BIPOC, or making a big show about being on the “right side of history” by having the correct views (and ignoring poor black people dying from homicides).  As I often say, if we assume most human motivation is selfish, things begin to make more sense.  Naturally we expect protestors with Palestinian or Israeli backgrounds to protest for their side (that’s just human nature and probably the best use of protests).  For others…the underlying motive may be more cynical, even if unconsciously so.  NGOs get donations, students get to have an adrenaline rush screaming at or pushing around some cops, etc.  People feel morally puffed up by being on the “right side of history” without ever needing to be actually informed by the complexities of the actual issue or the downsides of the policies they may be bluntly advocating (such as with BLM and the resultant spike in homicides or the “Just Stop Oil” people and the devastation sudden oil divestment would unleash on the world).  A good chunk are probably just bored, or want to give a big middle finger to daddy.  They can convince themselves what good people they are, then go back to their cushy lives and let others deal with the consequences of their actions.

17)  But ignoring my cynicism about the motives of most protestors who aren’t directly impacted by the issues at hand…are these protests helping actual Palestinian civilians on the ground in Gaza (or the West Bank for that matter)?  Honestly…I doubt it?

18)  As a general rule, protests are most influential when protestors come across as the sane adults in the room.  Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement certainly had their extremists, but mainly both movements were defined by their sane elements and were successful as a consequence.  Protests tend to benefit from overreach by authorities (which undoubtedly has happened on some campuses) but lose out when they appear aggressive themselves (which, despite the best efforts of some news media, I think is the picture the public is getting of the protests).  The general public really doesn’t like it when protestors are a nuisance.  Just as the “Just Stop Oil” type climate groups seem to be figuring out that gluing selves to roads or throwing soup on paintings isn’t a great strategy, campus protestors are going to have to learn that coming across as a group of entitled lunatics is bad optics on any issue.  I talk about protest and advocacy strategy a bit in my book Catastrophe! How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse, so this is a good time to pick that up!

19)  Nancy Pelosi recently suggested that protestors should not only protest the actions of the Israeli military but also Hamas and how hiding behind Palestinian civilians is a purposeful strategy to deliberately increase death counts (which is absolutely true).  This is great advice and would, indeed, boost the credibility of the protests.  But the protestors won’t take the advice (nor thank her for it), as that’s just not how protests work.  Nobody is interested in nuances or “both sides”.  “What do We Want?!!  We Want a Calmly Negotiated Settlement Where Both Sides Give Up Some of What They Demand to Find Compromise So Everyone Can Live In Peace and Acknowledge There Are No Clear Good Guys or Bad Guys, Only People!!!  And When Do We Want It?!!  We Want it When a Reasonable Coalition of Neutral Third Actors, Maybe the UN, or Perhaps Regional Gulf States Other than Iran, Who Are Instigators, Can Outline a Mediation Strategy That May Take Months or Years, But Hopefully Will Lead to a Livable Solution That Will Last Generations!!!”

20)  My suspicion is that many protests, particularly by those who don’t have a direct involvement in the situation at hand such as students, often reflect problems that are more local than they do actual geopolitics.  In other words, there is something going on in the US and Europe which is causing agitation…things like BLM or Palestine or perhaps even Vietnam are just a catalyst point around where more personal dissatisfactions have coalesced.

21)  The real risk here is for universities, which must thrive on free speech.  Universities are sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.  On one hand government led crackdowns on protestors run a large risk of depriving students of their speech, but so do caving to the most aggressive protestors.  Unfortunately, universities have a terrible track record now for managing these issues.