‘Understanding and nuance’ at protests?

The demonstration on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday was a relatively modest affair. More than 500 people, mostly students and faculty, gathered on the South Mall in the shadow of the UT Tower to hear speeches, shout slogans and express their support for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

The affair paled in comparison to demonstrations in decades past on and around the UT campus — in support of civil rights, against the Vietnam War, against apartheid in South Africa and corporate greed on Wall Street and, more recently, support for women’s rights and against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.

This week’s impassioned assembly, though, was big enough for an edgy university president, at the behest of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, to sic the cops on the demonstrators. There were no reported signs of violence before authorities armed with batons intervened, handcuffing students and pushing protesters back. More than 100 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers were at the scene, in addition to officers from university and Austin police departments. Some of the DPS troopers were on horseback; those on foot were in riot gear and some carried assault weapons.

Authorities arrested 57 individuals, including a Fox News cameraman who said he stumbled into a DPS trooper. Most of the criminal charges were dropped on Thursday morning, according to the Travis County attorney’s office, but the university has barred those charged from returning to campus.

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell defended his decision to call for outside police intervention as a preventative measure. He said in a statement Wednesday night that the university “held firm” against organizers who had vowed to “occupy” a university lawn and expressed his gratitude to law enforcement. “Breaking our rules and policies and disrupting others’ ability to learn are not allowed,” his statement said.

The university’s Faculty Council Executive Committee said it was “gravely alarmed” by Hartzell’s decision to call in the state troopers. “Across the generations, our University has been home to protests of every shape and size, and to a tradition of meeting those protests with understanding and nuance — not with police bonds and shields,” the faculty group wrote in a statement Thursday. “Needless to say, we don’t believe that President Hartzell’s message to the community Wednesday night comes close to providing a justification for the University’s conduct.”

Neither do we. We stand with UTAustin law professor Stephen Vladeck, responding on X to a question about whether the university should allow an encampment similar to the one that sprang up on the Columbia University campus. He took issue with the premise:

“That’s a false dichotomy,” Vladeck wrote. “There was no encampment planned; the students ended up doing exactly what they had planned once

DPS left, which was both peaceful and non-disruptive — and which only underscores how much the University overreacted.”

Palestinian-American student Yara Bitar, a third-year philosophy major from Houston, was on campus on Thursday and told a member of the Chronicle editorial board she wasn’t aware she was breaking any rules when she joined the demonstration the day before. “We weren’t that frightened,” she said, “because we weren’t doing anything illegal. We were just peacefully protesting. We were just marching, none of us had weapons. We weren’t even allowed microphones, we didn’t bring any sound equipment.”

So far, protests at campuses across the country have been largely peaceful, but, as at UT-Austin, they’ve been big enough for opportunists, most of them elected officials like Abbott, to jump in with provocative language and posturing.

“These protesters belong in jail,” the governor said on social media. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period. Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”

Of course antisemitism can’t be tolerated. School authorities at UT and everywhere else must investigate anyone making real threats. They should be ever vigilant, making sure that legitimate protest does not devolve into violence or intimidation against Jewish students (some of whom are taking part in campus protests). Every Jewish student has a right to feel safe on every campus. Every Palestinian student has the same right. And, yes, those who violate that basic right should face serious consequences.

That being said, it’s dangerous for politicians or anyone else to conflate true antisemitism, which is strictly the prejudice against or hatred of Jewish people, with protests against the Israeli government and its policies. There’s certainly some overlap but blurring the distinction doesn’t just invalidate the concerns of activists trying to save innocent lives in Gaza but it needlessly exacerbates fears in the Jewish community, still shaken and traumatized by Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack that killed 1,200 and disappeared 250 hostages, many of whom remain missing.

In equating these protests with antisemitism, we’re in effect telling Jewish students that they should fear not only actual threats, violence and other hate crimes, but also, it seems, just about any impassioned gathering of people calling for Palestinian safety and freedom. The Jewish people joining the pro-Palestinian protests know the difference. Our leaders should, too.

Demonstrations are by their nature messy and disruptive. They’re designed to capture attention, perhaps change minds. At times, pro-Palestinian protesters have crossed a line, to the detriment, we believe, of those they’re trying to help. Even those of us who share their desperation for peace can’t condone the chanting of antisemitic slogans, harassing of a Jewish professor at his private home, or acts of violence, such as the one reported by Yale Free Press Editor-in-Chief Zahar Tartak, a Jewish student who said a protester jabbed her in the eye with a flagpole. Protest organizers must do their utmost best to reject anyone embracing violence and to seek dialogue.

The point is to build a bigger, stronger, more popular movement. Not a smaller, more radical one.

It’s easy to argue that today’s demonstrators are naive; they’re not going to force universities to divest their holdings in Israel or in weapons manufacturers, in large part because universities are unlikely to have direct ties to companies that are Israeli-based or that manufacture weapons.

And yet, we can only hope that the protesters have some influence on efforts to force the Biden administration to moderate its continued enabling of Israel’s war on Gaza and to demand a negotiated cease-fire.

These student-led protests, when peaceful, are vital and necessary. They are among the few things reminding average Americans that innocent Palestinians are still dying and starving at unconscionable levels: the war has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, around two-thirds women and children, the Associated Press reports, citing the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

If any place was made to confront such brutal realities and agitate for a better world, it’s our universities.

Richard Hofstadter, a Pulitzer-winning history professor, told his listeners at the Columbia University commencement in 1968 after weeks of unrest, “The university is the only great organization in modern society that considers itself obliged not just to tolerate but even to give facilities and protection to the very persons who are challenging its own rules, procedures and policies. To subvert such a fragile structure is all too easy, as we now know. That is why it requires, far more than does our political society, a scrupulous and continued dedication to the conditions of orderly and peaceable discussion.”

May it be so at UT-Austin these days and at Rice and the University of Houston. May reason and good will prevail at every college and university campus across this great state.

Arrests on campus undermine free speech at universities