By Ross K. Baker
As I walked by the statue of William the Silent on the quad at the Rutgers campus in 1969, I noticed a group of students holding placards protesting the war in Vietnam. A few weeks ago, as I was packing up my office to prepare for retirement, I found the stairwell in my office plastered with flyers calling for demonstrations to protest the war in Gaza. The symmetry was perfect: my 50-year academic career was neatly bracketed by student uprisings.
The slogans of 2024 were different from those of 1969. Over the years, they had mutated from “hell no, I won’t go!” to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and they serve as the mood music for the sit-ins and calls for divestiture of university funds in unpopular companies and causes and for the resignation of university officials who, they feel, are unsympathetic to their demands. Hell hath no fury than a 19 year-old who feels that his demands are being ignored.
The origins and course of student demonstrations are not mysterious: their inspiration often comes from younger faculty members—typically in the humanities and social sciences—rather from the undergraduates themselves. Demonstrations rarely involve large numbers undergraduates in engineering, the business schools, or among pre-meds or those studying to be pharmacists.
One notable feature of these demonstrations is that although they originate in among the undergraduates and graduate students, they quickly pick up support from the community outside the university. This is especially true of urban campuses such as Columbia, NYU, Penn, and the University of Southern California. It’s a safe bet that many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia and NYU are augmented by the substantial Arab American populations in the New York area.
College demonstrations also attract hangers-on: locals who lurk around the fringes if university campuses and find themselves swept up by the passion and excitement of the protest events. They can bring a volatile element to the protests that can head events in unpredictable directions.
These demonstrations are also contagious and spread from the urban campuses in the East and on the West Coast to schools located in smaller communities in the interior of the country. This is where the iron Law of Emulation comes into play: If the cause is being embraced by the elite schools, students at lesser provincial colleges don’t want to feel excluded. Student protests that go national are unlikely to originate at the University of Nebraska or Grinnell College in Iowa.
Demonstrations are exhilarating, and infuse somnolent post-pandemic campuses with a sense of connection with the problems of the wider world. The doldrums of winter are left behind, the weather is perfect for outdoor activities that don’t pose uncomfortable weather conditions for the participants.
The issues that give rise to demonstrations inevitably prompt counter-demonstrations and this increases likelihood of violence. There is nothing more infuriating to people who are confident of the rightness of their cause than to have it challenged by dissenters. Hecklers are unpopular and run the risk of being attacked by the inflamed majority. This has happened at more than one campus, and the targets are supporters of Israel or kids who just happen to be Jewish.
There is a natural life cycle to campus demonstrations that is governed by the academic calendar. So long as classes are in session and can be either boycotted or attended, the demonstrations have fuel. The end of classes and the graduation of a fourth of the student body diverts both attention and passion from the cause that gave rise to the demonstrations.
For the hard-core demonstrators who have an intellectual or emotional stake in the cause, the protests will endure for a time and, in some cases, will mature into a lifetime commitment to the issue that gave rise to them. For most, however, the time will have been well-spent and imbued with a lofty sense of having embraced a cause and given voice to it.
But as with all battles, there are casualties.
University presidents have lost their jobs or have had to confront hostile congressional committees. Counter-protestors have been assailed and marginalized, and there has been a small amount of property damage. But little has changed in the lives on whose behalf these demonstrations have been waged.
Most troubling to me has been the uncritical embrace by students of a terrorist organization whose depredations ignited the conflict in the Middle East.
As a teacher, I find it frustrating that students cannot sort the difference between the origins of the conflict and its outcomes.
Ross K. Baker is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University
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