Campus protests & police violence
Photo by Amir Hanna on Unsplash
The Worst Type of People
On May 4, 1970, 28 Ohio National Guardsmen fired dozens of bullets into a crowd of anti-war protesters at Kent State University. The troops killed four students and wounded nine others. Thousands of students gathered to protest President Richard Nixon’s April 30 invasion of Cambodia, an escalation in the U.S. war of aggression in the region, and a betrayal of his campaign promise to wind down U.S. involvement. The U.S. had been bombing the region for over 15 years, and would go on to kill approximately 1.5 million South Vietnamese by the war’s end in 1975.
One day prior to the campus shooting, Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes addressed his constituents with the students protesting across the state in his sights, saying, “They’re worse than the ‘Brown Shirt’ and the communist element and also the night riders in the Vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people we harbor in America.” There had been clashes between protesters at Ohio State and Kent State that weekend, and property damage in the town of Kent itself. City, state, and university officials were in alignment on the necessity of the 1,000-man occupying force.
There’s a violent amnesia spreading among politicians and college administrations these days. Even though student takeovers of university property are one of the oldest, most frequent forms of student protest–who among us could forget the University of Paris student strike of 1229?–they are now being framed as unique threats that must be stamped out. Perhaps that’s why, with no sense of the historical irony, they called in local police forces and even Border Patrol, to crush campus solidarity encampments and other pro-Palestinian protests. That’s one way to mark the anniversary of one of the great crises in the history of American higher education.
College students, like millions of others across the globe, have been protesting the American-Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. The encampments and building takeovers, however, started after Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified before a Congressional panel in April when Shafik urged New York Police Department leadership to break up the solidarity protests.
That was all New York City Mayor Eric Adams needed to move in, fearful as he was that, “Outside agitators were on their grounds, training and really co-opting this movement.” In a citywide sweep, the NYPD arrested nearly 300 protesters at Columbia University and the City College of New York, many on felony charges. The April 30 operation kicked off a nationwide spate of police raids. According to the Times, more than 2,800 students have been arrested or detained on campuses nationwide as of May 13.
The Function of Police Violence on Campus
The debates over students’ right to free speech are important. However, I am more interested in the university’s assertion of its right to violence. As I watched cops once again bodyslam elderly professors and concuss coeds, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why does the university remain such an important site of police violence?
Contrary to the paternalistic drivel faculty and staff spew at students, the university is the “real world.” It’s just different. The university is an open-ended, in-between space: Students are adults, but still developing; it provides an early taste of professional life, but it’s not a job; and so on. As such, it is more permissive of experimentation than other sites of life can be – certainly much more than the workplace. Sure, students are confronted with plenty of conformist pressures there, as they would be in any other institution. Norms are imposed everywhere; that’s just social life. Nevertheless, there is an overriding sense of openness, of possibility, and that folks are just trying to figure out stuff.
And that’s the rub.
Working class people living in the West have a fraught relationship with liberation work. In some respects, we often benefit from the extractive relationships our national governments and corporations have with the poorer nations of the world. It takes moral and political education to see that the terms of those relationships are not just wrong, but that ultimately, those benefits are often fleeting and our interests are more closely aligned with the poor and working class people of the global south. Anti-war protests, both on and off campus, teach that lesson.
College is a site of young adult formation. It’s where you are politicized by the things that don’t always feel like politics: relating to governing bodies and their regulations as an adult, gauging the boundaries of independence. Most importantly in this case, it is where the impulse toward egalitarianism is either cultivated or disciplined out of you in favor of something more “realistic” and “mature.” Violence is pedagogy, and the police are the ultimate bulwark against wayward ideas like equality.
In solidarity,
Dwayne