What’s really happening on campuses across North America?

Jordan: When an American school makes headlines around the world, history would tell you, and it’s not usually good

News clip 1: Overnight. Protestors here in New York at Columbia barricaded themselves inside the school and now the university is taking more action

News clip 2: At Columbia University School officials telling demonstrators the administration won’t agree to divest from Israel and that they must leave the encampment by today or face suspension

Jordan: For the past two weeks. Now, it has been difficult to avoid stories out of Columbia, many of them showing scenes that make campus appear overrun with protesters or reporting on some ugly incidents of antisemitism. So it’s worth wondering then how students at Columbia, some of them Jewish others not, feel about seeing their school on the news or how those students would describe what’s happening on their campus.

Student 1: Honestly, I’ve been very frustrated with how much coverage has been about how a very, very tiny minority of Jewish students feel so threatened and unsafe. That’s been the vast majority of the press coverage in the United States.

Student 2: Every time I see Columbia and the national news, I die a little bit on the inside. I don’t like it when we make national headlines. I dunno. I think it’s not great. I don’t think it’s something that deserves that much coverage. I think it’s been blown way up.

Student 3: Students were really inspired by this history of protests that existed at Columbia. One of their signs early on in the encampment said liberation zone, which is direct reference to the encampment or the takeover of Hamilton Hall in 1968.

Jordan: Campus protests have a long history at Columbia, at other American schools and here in Canada too. Right now, as I record this, police are reportedly set to forcibly evict an encampment at McGill University in Montreal in Toronto. U of T is fencing off its large public space hoping to preempt any possible protest. Why have universities pushed back so hard against these protests despite lessons of history that would indicate that doesn’t usually hold up as the right approach. What do the protestors at Columbia and elsewhere actually want? What is it really like down there on the real campus, not the campus that we see on the news? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Justin Ling is a freelance investigative journalist. He writes the Bug-eyed and Shameless newsletter. He went down to Columbia for The Line, which is where he got some of those voices you heard in the intro to figure out what’s actually going on campus. Hey Justin.

Justin Ling: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jordan: You are most welcome. Why don’t you just start by describing what you saw. Take us there. What’s going on at Columbia?

Justin Ling: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really easy to get a sense from the media that it is a sort of lawless, anarchistic mess that students are running in terror away from campus, that the protestors are running the asylum as it were, and it’s just not the case. I showed up to campus, first off, from the outside, you’d never even know that it was the center of sort of an international media frenzy. Apart from the security at every gate. Journalists are allowed in for about two hours every afternoon, or at least they were up until I think yesterday. Maybe you get inside and you don’t even notice. Everything’s kind of a miss. Students are milling about, students are taking photos in their graduation gowns. Students are eating lunch, hanging out on the quad, going to class, grabbing coffee. It is actually hard initially to realize where the encampment is.

Jordan: That is not my impression.

Justin Ling: I know, right? And you’re going to hear I think in a minute why some of these protesters are sort of so deranged by some of the media coverage that they’ve gotten. But eventually you get onto the quad and those big steps, I think next to the library you overlook the quad. And in the far corner, actually, funny enough, behind a field of Israeli flags is the encampment. It’s smaller than a soccer pitch. There’s maybe a hundred, 150 protesters there maximum at any given moment. There’s nearly as many journalists, or at least there were when I was there. And it is pretty calm. Other students are milling about walking past sort of ogling it and rubbernecking, including I can tell you a lot of Jewish students. I saw a fair number of kippahs. I heard people speaking Hebrew, walking past the vibes are pretty chill overall. There is not the sort of public insurrection that I think you maybe glean from some of this sort of breathless coverage of it.

Jordan: Why is it being covered that way? And as you mentioned, the protesters at the center of all this feel about that. If you had have asked me to put a number on how many protesters were there, just based off of what I’d seen, I would’ve said a thousand. It’s always interesting to me even knowing how media can blow these things out of proportion to hear what it’s actually like.

Justin Ling: And listen, maybe their broader movement is more like a thousand. But like I said, at any given moment, it was less than 200 I would say. And I talked to some students who were not part of the encampment. I talked to one Jewish student who was just sort of sitting on a pack of what are metal beams that are getting ready for the graduation ceremony? And he was just sitting there journaling and me and him had a little chat and he says, every time I see Columbia on the news, I just cringe so hard because it’s never good stuff. And he says, listen, they have the right to be here. Do I necessarily love it? No. But this has been blown way out of proportion and the university has wildly overreacted, and that seems to be a really common sentiment from many of those both inside and outside the encampment. I spoke to another friend of mine actually who goes to Columbia and he said the same thing. He kind of said the administration just completely overreacted from the very beginning. It ended up galvanizing a lot of support for these protesters they sent in the NYPD. They sent in the cops in the first 36 hours of this encampment existing. It only helped inspire more to come out. I spoke to one Jewish student who’s part of the encampment who said, I only joined, I only became involved in pro-Palestinian activism after the university moved in and basically suspended a student group of Jewish students against the war. So there’s this real feeling like in its quest to sort of stamp out this fear or this panic around antisemitism on campus. The university has ended up inspiring more students to join it. And I think that’s kind of where a lot of the crux of this is. There has been, I’ll be really blunt about it. There has been a moral panic about this scourge of antisemitism on campus and it has been fed by Twitter accounts, posting videos nonstop of every single incident that has taken place without context, sometimes without details, without any additional information, has been fed by media influencers who have tried to make this the great threat of our time by politicians. House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson was there the day before I was, saying that Jewish students were literally running in terror from campus. It has been just completely detached from reality and a lot of people have made their name and have built their profile off of telling lies about what’s actually happening.

Jordan: What are they protesting for, what do they actually want?

Justin Ling: So they’re very much taking their cues from some previous protests that happened on campus in the sixties and the eighties, both a protest of the Vietnam War and a protest of the apartheid regime in South Africa. They’re calling on the university to disclose all if it’s relationships with the Israeli government, with Israeli defence contractors or American defence contractors working in Israel and all of its relationships with Israeli universities. And to basically cut all of those ties. It’s also asking for a statement from the university in opposition to the war in favor of ceasefire. And there’s some more nebulous things there about student participation in university decision making, but that’s basically it. I don’t even know enough about the administration of Columbia to tell you whether those proposals are good or bad or troubling or wonderful, but those are the demands they have made. And that’s the sort of sticking point for the university, which has thus far, I think, rejected basically all of those.

Jordan: How long has this protest been going on now? And did you get a sense while you were there of what comes next?

Justin Ling: Yeah, so I think we’re coming up on about two weeks at this point. And the university set a deadline of Monday afternoon for the students to clear out. And by that point they didn’t. So the university went in and started handing out notices of suspension. So these students, their academic careers maybe more or less ruined by this protest, and many of them have vowed to stay. I talked to students who were there, who had been arrested, who had been suspended, who risked total expulsion for continuing to do it, but they genuinely believe in what they’re doing and they’re clearly not going to be dissuaded. Just on, I think Monday night, many of the students actually kind of escalated. They broke into a couple of the buildings and have tried to occupy them smashing windows in the process. And I think people have already found those images quite stark. But the symbolism, I think is very apparent for these students because they know that the last time the police had been sent in to Columbia was 1968, to clear out an occupation of some of the same buildings by anti-Vietnam war protesters who were protesting many of the same things these students are. Their own university’s cooperation with the defence industry that is helping prosecute far off war, right? So they’re very alive to the comparisons one to the other. One student even said Columbia actually celebrates, it actually recognizes as historically significant, the anti-Vietnam protests that took place in 1968. And in the same breath, they’re sending in cops to beat us up. He goes, someday, 10 years from now, maybe our pictures will be hanging on the wall of one of these buildings commemorating our protest against this war. So they very much see themselves in that historical precedent. And I think the university has completely lost the plot about its own contribution to this protest at this point. And I think they may have stepped off the gas a little bit. The university has seemingly made no plans to send in the NYPD again, but who’s to say with this escalation over the last 24 hours, anything’s possible.

Jordan: You mentioned the media frenzy around this. How have these protests been characterized? I know there’s been a lot of talk about threats about explicit antisemitism.

Justin Ling: Yeah.

Jordan: Does that compare to what you experienced in your time there? Did you see any of that stuff?

Justin Ling: No. No. So here, I think I’ve come to a relatively useful way of breaking this down. So for starters, there have been images and videos of individuals, some of them students chanting really horrific things. Like there’s one video that went really viral of a march saying that they would have, I think 10, a hundred, a thousand October 7ths if that’s what it took. You’ve heard people calling for another Intifada, you heard some saying go back to Poland. You’ve heard just all sorts of really horrific things. And I think the occasional, I think there’s even videos out there from New York of people see screaming like death to Jews, things like that. So lots of really genuinely horrific antisemitic and in some cases violent stuff. Now we know from some further reporting, some of those people were not students. In one case, one of the most violently antisemitic rhetoric came from a guy who has long wandered around New York City looking for opportunities to scream death to Jews in front of news cameras. There are instances where these students are using obscene and upsetting rhetoric because they’re 20 years old, they’re 21 years old. Out of curiosity, I went back and was reading. I’m also working on a book about riot policing. So this is kind of a really useful bit of research happening right now. But going back and reading some of the reports from the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention from Kent State, from other big anti-war protests, you know what those students were chanting? They were chanting ho, ho, ho Chi Minh. They were waving the Viet Cong flag. They were screaming, kill the cops. Students always end up in these radical spaces saying and chanting ridiculous, offensive, sometimes borderline violent things. Now does that mean it’s okay? No, but this has been true since the dawn of time. And I think we have to really put some of this stuff in context. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these students are a threat. If there are students who are genuinely making appeals to violence, I think you can deal with that on a one-to-one basis. It doesn’t necessarily necessitate sending the cops in to crack everyone’s skulls, right? As many students pointed out to me, that’s actually escalating the violence. You’re meeting a hypothetical, maybe general appeal to violence with actual violence. Is that appropriate? Especially in the context. Part of the point of university is to help moderate people’s views, help introduce new ways of thinking to them. And I think that’s what these students need, not a baton to the face of a suspension from school. And beyond that, a lot of things that have been identified as being violent to antisemitic aren’t right. I think we have a real problem, especially in this sort of moral panic around this issue of conflating a lot of things, right? There are those who will aggressively argue that the chant from the river to the sea is in itself antisemitic or violent.

Jordan: Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Justin Ling: There’s been a lot of debate about that, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a fair comparison. And other people will say that even saying what’s happening in Gaza right now, calling it a genocide, is anti-Semitic. And again, I don’t think that’s actually a really defensible view considering the death toll in the human suffering happening in Gaza right now. I think you can debate the specifics of that, the legality of that fine. But I don’t think you can sort of justify removing these students’ free speech rights because you don’t agree with their conclusions. Right?

Jordan: Yeah.

Justin Ling: And finally, I was actually at a protest later on that evening when I was there. It was led by three evangelical Christians and it was called the United for Israel march. And it was there to denounce antisemitism and to denounce the students. And what I heard in that protest was I saw some of the protestors screaming and orthodox Jews who are Zionists and against the war, I saw them screaming fake Jews, you’re disgusting at them. That struck me as vaguely antisemitic. I saw some of these protestors harassing students on their way into class that struck me as a problem. I saw one person with a sign that said, from the river to the sea, this is the only flag you’ll see. And it was a picture of the Israeli flag. That strikes me as troubling as well. So it seems to me that we’re always holding these pro-Palestinian students to a standard to which we don’t hold others. And it strikes me as deeply hypocritical. It strikes me as deeply unfair. We have to create space here for people to say uncomfortable, maybe even unpleasant things without necessarily using the force of the state to beat them up.

Jordan: When you talk about the historical context of this and what protesters back in the sixties were chanting, I can’t help but think that so much of the frenzy around comes from the everything is content now world that we live, and I don’t know how old you are, Justin, but I was at university around the time that we were protesting the Iraq War and sometimes violently protesting the free trade agreement of the Americas. And I can’t imagine what those protests would’ve been like if all the worst moments that I experienced at those were published in video on Twitter in real time.

Justin Ling: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a big part of it too, right? There’s this one particular example. There’s a student named Kimani James, and he’s one of the lead organizers, one of the spokespeople for the encampment. I actually saw him on Thursday. He was giving a press conference where he was putting the stated objectives of the encampment on the table and said, this is about the people of Palestine. This isn’t about us. This is about trying to stop the war that’s going on. And in the 24 hours after that, a video surfaced of James on a livestream making a frankly ridiculous and fallacious sort of philosophical argument about how in order to protect humanity, some people have to die. And he sort of says Hitler had to die to protect society. And he sort of says, well, Zionists are in that ambit, right? Zionists are white supremacists and therefore I don’t care if they live. And the video is horrendous, it’s offensive. And in the ensuing aftermath, James was suspended, he issued an apology, and his academic career is almost certainly ruined at this point. He’s 20 years old. Can you imagine what ridiculous things were being said at the anti NATO or anti WTO protests among some of those more hardened organizers, the anti Iraq War protests? I think it is really unfair, and they’re doing it to themselves. You can’t have all the sympathy for them, but it’s really unfair that these students are being held accountable for really dumb half-baked radical ideas that they’re espousing before their brains have fully formed, before they’ve had a chance to live in the real world before they’ve had a chance to really have their preconceived notions challenged. Again, this is the point of university, right? We’re trying to make fully rounded adults. We’re trying to get them to think seriously about the Che Guevara t-shirt they’re wearing, right? We’re trying to get them to think seriously about the sort of ideas they’ve held really close to their chest and to become more critical thinkers. And we can’t do that if we’re holding them accountable as though they’re an elected representative. It’s just so manifestly unfair. Now, again, that doesn’t mean we have to coddle them, right? They don’t get to whatever they want just because they’re young. We still have to set standards. Of course, they don’t get to take over the university and run it themselves, but it does mean that we probably shouldn’t use the full weight of the state against them.

Jordan: Beyond Columbia, how far have these protests spread and maybe Columbia was the match, the fuse or the cops going in there perhaps encouraged other protests. How far have they spread? And you’re in Montreal right now. There’s one going on at McGill right now. Tell us about that.

Justin Ling: Yeah, that’s right. And listen, sending the police in spreads these things like wildfire. It’s like blowing a dandelion over a field. It is unavoidable that if you send in the state to beat people up to pepper spray them, to arrest them for exercising their free speech rights for doing civil disobedience, it is a natural outcome. It happens every single time that solidarity strikes and solidarity protests are going to pop up. So we have the police to thank probably for there being as many encampments as there are, and they have been all across the us. You’ve probably seen images, police in Austin and state guard have been sent in now twice to beat up and arrest protesters so that the governor can look tough. You’ve heard Senator Tom Cotton who is vying for Trump’s vice President slot, who’s called the National Guard to be sent in all across the country. This is going to probably get worse as the charlatan politicians try and bolster their own credentials. So that’s not great. Here in Montreal, the McGill encampment, which was just set up I think on Sunday, Monday, is already facing a threat of police intervention from the university administration. The SPVM is being called in, I gather as we speak. I’m trying still to get some details about what happens next. I’m hoping to go down later on today. I am told the university is already kind of fenced off and no one’s quite sure what happens next. This is again, a wild overreaction. The students at McGill were camped on the ample space on the quad. They had not broken into any buildings, had really done nothing apart from assemble and protest. And yet now they face the possibility of arrest and faced the likelihood of tear gas, pepper spray, who knows from one of Canada’s most aggressive and violent police forces, which has a real penchant for overusing force to clear peaceful demonstrations. No matter how you feel about these encampments and these protests and these protestors, I don’t think we should be cheering on this,

Jordan: And that would in turn probably spark more protests. And I will note here in Toronto where I am, the University Toronto has preemptively fenced off their big quad in the hopes of not allowing any encampments to begin. Which again, if I was a 20-year-old student, I would take that as a challenge.

Justin Ling: Oh, absolutely. And I think you’re going to see a lot of them feel exactly that way. And I think the conclusion I came to leaving Columbia, is that the best possible thing we can do overall is just leave the kids alone. We don’t have to cover it like this. Whether you fervently agree with them and you think the focus should be on Gaza, great. Make the focus on Gaza. If you fervently disagree with them, great, ignore them. They’re not really affecting your day-to-day life questions of safety and security for Jewish students on campus. I think that could be better managed by the universities themselves. They don’t need the full weight of the entire country or the entire world in some cases, peering over their shoulder and turning this into a political referendum on Joe Biden or the war or whatever. These issues can be handled fully adequately at a local level. They don’t need international involvement. And so I think no matter where you are in the spectrum, I don’t think you could be cheering on us sending in the cops. I don’t think you should be cheering on trying to scrutinize each of these protesters, every utterance they’ve ever said in public or in private, right? No one benefits from this. No one comes out ahead because we’ve spent so much time and energy putting these students under a microscope. It’s time to move on. There are bigger issues facing the world right now. Then whether or not these students chanting from the river to the sea is a danger to anybody. It’s not, right. It is time to leave them alone. And I think fundamentally, the more you can sort of just have a hands off, back away, maybe set some standards about where they can and can’t go on campus, whatever, the more we can give them space, I think the more you’ll see that they’ll shrink and eventually go away on their own. That’s what protests eventually do. The more we overreact, the more they’re going to escalate and the more we’re going to spiral into another kind of summer of unrest as we saw in ’68, ’69, 1970, culminating in Kent State. I don’t think that’s the path we want to go down.

Jordan: I’m sure the students themselves wouldn’t take this analogy kindly, but as you say all that, I am the father of a 6-year-old and six year olds have big feelings and throw tantrums and turning that into a power struggle with them never works.

Justin Ling: I mean, sure, they probably would not take carely to that. No. And listen, I think there are certainly some protesters who are acting like spoiled children and who are just saying outlandish and ridiculous things to get attention.

Jordan: Yeah, I’m not trying to characterize the content of what they’re saying is childish so much as I am, if you want this to go away as a university, as a police force or whatever, the way to go about it is not by escalating it.

Justin Ling: Well, exactly, and listen are, like I said, there are students who are acting like complete brats, but there’s also, I think the majority of these students, many of those I spoke to were PhD students or graduate students. They were a bit older. They were kind of the spokespeople, I think, for the crew. But for a lot of these protesters, they don’t want to escalate. They’re not trying to get make international headlines. They’re not trying to necessarily turn this into the biggest news story in North America. They see this as a way of using local action to enact a local change that will have an international effect. And so I think sometimes we characterize them as trying to earn news coverage for their cause. But in this case, they’re really frustrated. They’re talking to me, they’re like, why is this one little encampment capturing international attention? All we’re trying to do is get our university to change some policies, to break some relationships and to change course. And again, you can agree, disagree about that. I think that’s kind of up to the students and the administration in Columbia to decide for the best. But this is not, they’re not trying to show off for the cameras, right? They’re actually, they forbid journalists are entering the encampment. They’re trying to manage the number of journalists who are there because we are many and we are aggressive. They’re not here necessarily, not all of them anyway. They’re not there to try and show off. So I think we should give them what they want. We should get them. I think we actually want, and just kind of stop paying so much attention. And instead, let’s keep talking about the fact that there is a war in Gaza, and whether you are for it or you’re against it, I think there is a debate to be had about our own country’s involvement in it. And I think that is where the conversation ought to be.

Jordan: Justin, thank you so much for this.

Justin Ling: Thanks for having me.

Jordan: Justin Ling, author of The Bug-eyed and Shameless newsletter reporting for The Line. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can offer us some feedback on this episode or any other episode by emailing us hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca or by calling us and leaving a voicemail 416-935-5935. The Big Story is in every single podcast player and on every single smart speaker, you should know that by now. If you don’t or if you just got a smart speaker, try asking it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.