It has been a tumultuous time on college campuses across America. Students at dozens of schools have set up encampments to protest the ongoing war in Gaza, the United States' role in arming and supporting Israel and their universities' policies and investments that pertain to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. The nature of these protests is a matter of fierce debate: To some, including me, they are peaceful if boisterous expressions of moral outrage over a war that has killed more than 34,000 people, a majority of them women and children. Others see them as, at best, deluded and blinkered opposition to a regrettable but necessary war to safeguard Israel from Hamas or, at worst, a manifestation of virulent antisemitism. Things came to a head this week, when many administrators decided to send in the police to break up the camps, sometimes violently. Thousands of students and faculty members have been arrested. And inevitably in this heated election year — with control of the presidency, the House and the Senate up for grabs — politicians are expressing outrage and jockeying for advantage as campus politics roil the nation, even as the fighting in Gaza grinds on. This week on the "Matter of Opinion" podcast, Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat and I talked through the motivations, meaning and likely ramifications of a protest movement that spread with stunning speed, prompting crackdowns of equally stunning ferocity. Did university administrators overreact? Or were they right to act in the way they did, given that some students said the protests made them feel unsafe? And more broadly, what is the purpose and character of the university as an institution in American life today, amid all of the fights over free speech, diversity and inclusion and safety? We get into that and much more in the episode.
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Saturday, May 4, 2024
Opinion Today: Untangling the campus protests
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