Student protesters lack the courage of their convictions

As college students across the country protest the war that has taken a devastating toll on Gaza residents, one of their demands risks undermining the others.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest wants to “End the targeted repression of Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes.” The USC Divest from Death Coalition called for “full amnesty to all students, staff, and faculty.” Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine wants the university to “drop all charges against students for their organizing and activism.”

These demands are a mistake. It’s one thing to object to violence against students from riot cops sent in to clear encampments on college campuses. But, within reason, student protesters should accept the possibility that their universities will sanction them: Doing so is one of the best ways to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose and to put pressure on their institutions.

My own credentials for offering this advice? In 2005, I was one of 15 students who occupied my school’s admissions office to push the university to offer more generous financial aid. We were cited for trespassing, paid $92 fines and got hauled before the school’s disciplinary committee. While we and our faculty advocates argued strenuously in our own defense, it didn’t seem shocking that the university would bring us up on charges. That was the whole point: to show university leadership that we believed so strongly that the aid policy needed to change that we were willing to disrupt business and take consequences for doing so.

It’s true that college disciplinary procedures can be opaque and capricious. But the point of camping out on public property or refusing to leave a public building is to break the rules. Calling for amnesty undercuts the tactic these students have chosen.

An essential point of civil disobedience is to force a reaction, and sometimes even an overreaction: That’s how you make the point that administrators would rather arrest their own students than make it easier for poor kids to afford college, or kick kids out than let them speak out about a war from tents on a university lawn.

That’s not to say students need to let universities create more draconian rules without a fuss. Right now, for example, universities are suspending activist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and legal challenges to these suspensions and bans are underway. Students should absolutely push back against administrators’ efforts to narrow the scope of allowable speech and protest.

Also, of course, some students will feel the sting of campus discipline more keenly than others. Students without a welcoming family or friends may have nowhere to live if they are suspended and locked out of the dorms, even as some of their other classmates return to comfortable homes for the rest of the semester. International students may not be able to risk losing their visas if their enrollment is suspended.

But a key part of organizing for a major campus campaign is sorting out who can afford to take those chances and who cannot. I joined the group of students sitting in at the admissions office in part because I was less vulnerable to discipline than some of my peers. There’s no shame in a movement distributing risk strategically, say by assigning students who can’t risk their housing or visas to stay within the bounds of the law and college rules by talking to the press, spreading the word on social media or making food runs. That’s just planning for the long haul.

For those who are able to take the risk of civil disobedience, demanding amnesty risks sending the message that the students’ commitment to Gazans is rather shallow. Is it really worth standing against the maiming of Palestinian kids and the eradication of entire families only so long as doing so doesn’t result in a warning letter or a suspension?

Once student discipline – and thus self-interest – becomes a negotiating point, these subjects risk eclipsing other demands, turning the student struggle into something more focused on, well, the student struggle.