Columbia University calls upon NYPD to clear pro-Palestinian activists from an occupied building, as adversarial leftist protests return to American campuses

The events reflect the decaying alliance between activists and university administrators, and portend an important shift in leftist dynamics both on and off campus.

In April, pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University began spreading to campuses across the United States. The protestors demanded that their universities “divest” either from Israel itself or from companies that are thought to be supporting the Israeli war in Gaza. Yesterday, in a move that has made international headlines, Columbia called upon the New York Police Department to clear protestors from an occupied building. Over 100 demonstrators were arrested, many of them students. As I write this, riot police have been summoned to intervene in clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists at UCLA, and other schools are contemplating their own separate crackdowns.

What we are seeing here is a shift in the relationship between the campus left and their administrative patrons. Campus protests are formative for leftist movements well beyond universities, and so these events are very important. They threaten a tenuous, thirteen year-old alliance that has prevailed between the left and their erstwhile enemies among the political and economic elite. It is this alliance that bears primary responsibility for that phenomenon we know of as Wokery.

Most university campuses are home to a semi-institutionalised activist scene, which I like to call the permanent protest. Students of the permanent protest are always demonstrating on behalf of various causes. In this they are supported by student activity funds, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity administrators, a subset of the more radical faculty and very often also by off-campus organisations, with whom the students make common cause over perennial issues like “gentrification.” The activities of this permanent protest generally fall into two categories:

1) There are the more traditional adversarial actions, directed against the university and its administrators, which the students attack as representatives of hated and unjust geopolitical or economic forces. The 2015/16 University of Missouri demonstrations, which culminated in the resignation of despised upper administrators, is a classic adversarial protest.

2) Somewhat harder to notice, because they almost always masquerade as 1), are collaborative protests, managed by a subset of administrators and faculty for their own purposes, and directed against the middle tiers of the university – most of the time faculty and departmental leadership. The notorious 2017 actions at Evergreen State College are an almost archetypal example of the collaborative protest, albeit one over which the administrators ultimately lost control.

Leftist activism in theory is a revolt of the underprivileged and the exploited against their oppressors, but in practice (and to be successful) it must assume the form of a de Jouvenelian high-low alliance. That is to say, the underprivileged must forge a common cause with some faction of elites at the top, and reconstruct their oppressors as those in the middle. Leftist movements with high-side allies can be very powerful; leftist movements without them often go nowhere.

Traditional, adversarial campus protests have historically lacked high-side allies, however much they may look to specific elite factions for support. They take aim at the upper university administration, who sooner or later find a way to get rid of them. Collaborative campus protests are much more immediately successful because they have a clear and immediate high-side ally in the form of the administration itself. They are also less significant, because these collaborative protests end up being little more than pageantries conducted for the benefit of the Studies departments and the deanlets of the DIE industry. Here and there the student and junior faculty protestors get thrown a few scraps too.

The American press are falling all over themselves to draw comparisons between the present campus protests and 1968. The New York Times, for example, notes that the Columbia crackdown has unfolded “exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation of Columbia University was violently cleared by the New York Police Department.” While the chronological coincidence is interesting, the Occupy Movement from 2011 provides a much more directly relevant parallel. Campus Occupy protestors, like those of Occupy Harvard, attacked the political connections of leading administrators and faculty, and rehearsed classic leftist themes with their complaints about pay disparities and their demands that the university divest from corrupt financial institutions. In the end, the Occupy protestors were defeated because they lacked powerful sponsors to defend them and implement their programme.

After 2011, the campus left – and slightly later, the left more broadly – switched strategies, inaugurating the long Era of the Collaborative Protest. The Occupy economic agenda disappeared; in place of corrupt bankers, overpaid university presidents and politically connected economists, activists ushered a new set of political evils onstage. These were things like structural racism, white privilege and colonialism. The product was the entire Woke phenomenon, which is basically a leftist programme adjusted to be less noxious to reigning political, economic and administrative elites. Now, it may be tempting to imagine that the Occupiers, after their 2011 defeat, sat down and dreamed up a better strategy for future success, but what really happened was something more like selection. Traditional leftists within the Occupy movement were discredited by the failure of their approach, and ultimately replaced by their more racially and culturally obsessed rivals. You could say that the leftist idealists lost out to leftist opportunists (always a very important division within leftism). Woke therefore did not begin in 2011; the post-Occupy era is simply when it became a dominant force within the permanent protest and eventually the left writ large.

The alliance that defined the Era of the Collaborative Protest, on and off campus, was an uneasy one, because the idealists never went away. Since last October, the Gaza war increasingly has endangered that alliance, pouring energy into the idealist pro-Palestinian cause. Characteristic demands for divestment have returned; the enemies are once again the institutions themselves, which the activists see not as allies in the project of rooting out internal injustices, but as the most immediate incarnation of hated oppressors in the broader world.

University administrations – who would’ve been better advised to find a way to demobilise the student body, but who have spent years eagerly organising them for the Collaborative Protest instead – are eager to save the situation. Columbia has asserted that the protestors they had arrested were “led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university” and restated their commitment to “responding to the actions of the protesters, not their cause.” They have also emphasised that “Columbia University has a total student population of almost 37,000,” while “those in the encampments and the lawns and … occupying Hamilton Hall number in the dozens.” These are indirect messages to the permanent protest that the administration wishes to continue their prior arrangements with activists. If this 26 April editorial in the Columbia Daily Spectator is any indication, however, the students themselves identify with the protesters and are in no mood for reconciliation.

There are broader, geopolitical reasons to think that we are looking at the first signs of a deeper shift in the internal dynamics of leftism. The later 1960s were the heyday of adversarial campus protests; an important ingredient appears to have been not only Vietnam but also the Cold War, and specifically the existence of a clear alternative to the Western liberal order in the form of the Soviet bloc. Importantly, the Occupy Movement drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, which also represented a kind of alternative political possibility for the activists. The Palestinian cause, championed by many countries outside of the sphere of American influence, presents a similar promise. Whereas collaborative protesters look to high-side allies for direction and inspiration, adversarial protestors looks beyond them; they must have some external target for their aspirations – some allies real or imagined in the broader world.

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Because some will be eager to read the above as evidence of my alleged genocidal Zionism, I want to emphasise that this post is not about the war in Gaza or the Palestinian cause; it merely comments on the political significance of one strain of pro-Palestinian activism. I think an objective metapolitical perspective is very important, and I try to provide it on many issues, including those that I feel passionately about myself.