University administrators are falling right into a tried-and-tested right-wing trap

Interrogations of university leaders led by conservative members of Congress. Calls from right-wing senators that troops intervene in campus demonstrations. hundrets of Arrests of scholars and teacherswith non-violent dissidents thrown to the bottom, tear gassed and insulted.

We've been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America“I explain how conservative activists within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies led a counterattack against antiwar and civil rights demonstrators on campus by demanding motion from college presidents and police.

They made quite a lot of familiar claims about student protesters: that they were concurrently pampered elites, out-of-state agitators, and violent communists sowing discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests disrupted the flow of university activities and that the administration had an obligation to make sure each day operations funded by student fees.

Back then, university presidents routinely gave in to the demands of conservative lawmakers, offended taxpayers and other sources of anti-Communist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today they’re university directors get knotted to appease offended donors and lawmakers. But as Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD They were hit to suppress protests a transparent rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won't be any easier for faculty presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the fitting

In the Nineteen Sixties, students organized quite a few peace and civil rights protests that conservatives labeled communist.

The students spoke out against American involvement within the Vietnam War, the draft and mandatory ROTC participation. They demanded protection of civil rights and racially representative curricula. The intervention of the police and the National Guard often escalates Peaceful protests was violent riots and complete campus closures.

From 1968 through the Nineteen Seventies, conservative lawyers coordinated a nationwide lawsuit campaign “indecisive and discouraged” College presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was too lenient, in response to conservatives.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom Blow 32 universities with lawsuits including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, in addition to public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that the presidents had reneged on their end of the tutoring agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up protests. Young Americans for Freedom desired to set a legal precedent in order that students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” could force private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students also demanded that their allegedly communist fellow students be indefinitely expelled, arrested for trespassing, and prosecuted.

Of course, expulsions in these years had an impact on conscription. A running joke amongst right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters were a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referring to Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists pursued college leaders with public pressure campaigns, collecting signatures from students and alumni calling on them to finish demonstrations on campus. Conservatives also called for donors to withhold financial support until the administration overwhelms protesting students.

Police officers on campus

Below the Kent State massacre in 1970When the National Guard fired on students, killing 4 and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges temporarily closed, sparking a nationwide wave of youth outrage. With only per week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes, and even some Opening ceremonies.

In response, Conservatives launched a brand new wave of injunctions against these universities to force them to reopen.

Given the continuing protests — and continued calls from the fitting to crack down on them — many university administrators resorted to using and dealing with police and the National Guard to clear student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment marked the birth of modernity Campus Police.

Administrators and lawmakers, fearful that local police wouldn’t have the opportunity to handle the sheer variety of student protesters, arranged for campus police — who prior to now had acted as parking enforcement officers and to implement curfews in dorms — to have the authority was entrusted with making arrests and carrying firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further suppress student dissent with quite a few laws. In 1969 Legislatures in seven states passed laws Punish student activists arrested during protests by withdrawing financial support, expelling them, and imprisoning them.

President Richard Nixon, who had heavily criticized campus disruptions during his successful run for the White House in 1968, encouraged college presidents to follow the law and applauded them for carrying out the expulsions.

Is “anti-Semitism” the brand new “communism”?

As the US presidential election approaches, I might be monitoring how the Trump and Biden campaigns reply to the continuing student protests.

For now, Trump described the recent protests as “anti-Semitic” and “Much worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden also condemned “the anti-Semitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both repeat the false framework laid out by Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House investigations because the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

They actually existed anti-Semitic incidents in reference to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx got 4 presidents to endorse the fitting's politicized portrayal of the protests as filled with anti-SemitismThis leads the general public to imagine that individual incidents are representative and widespread.

Like their association of civil rights and peace protesters with communism in the course of the Cold War, politicians on either side of the aisle today largely achieve this too Hurling claims of anti-Semitism against anyone who protests Israel's war in Gaza, lots of them are Jews.

The purpose then, as now, is to intimidate the administration into making the improper policy decision: Will they protect students' right to show or be seen as condoning anti-Semitism?