By Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.
We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.
They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.
Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.
Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.
If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.
Lawfare from the right
Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.
Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.
From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.
The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.
The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.
Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.
Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.
Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images
Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.
Cops on campus
Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.
In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.
With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.
In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.
Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.
State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.
President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.
Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.
For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.
But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.
Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.
The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?
Harvey L. Silver/Corbis via Getty Images
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is an Instructor at the School of Education, University of New Orleans.
The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
Pogo says
@Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
https://www.google.com/search?q=lauren+lassabe+shepherd+biography
You missed a spot.
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=spoilers+1968+us+presidential+election
Ray W. says
Thank you, Pogo. Being a Chapel Hill graduate (’82), I recall an open atmosphere on that campus.
Just about every night of the week had some speaker or other scheduled to present in one hall or other. If I got tired of studying, I could wander to the quad and find out who was speaking where. The hall hosting Dean Smith’s annual state of the basketball team presentation was filled to overflowing. Sometimes, a small gathering listened to a professor from somewhere talking about a new book.
One of the fraternities held a Friday afternoon kegger when the weather was nice. Anyone could attend. Beer was free, donations accepted. Have a beer, leave a buck. A couple of students from the college of music would usually hang out. Folk music was still big, and they were accomplished at their craft. Half an hour in the sun on a nice day and on with the rest of the day.
The story of my senior year was the campus police climbing to the top of the Clock Tower at noon one Friday to take pictures of various students who were participating in a tradition called “High Noon” while sitting on the field around the tower. Arrests were made. The crackdown made headlines all around the state. I don’t know if it made it to national news status, but the main library had papers from all around the state.
Certain “pestilential” partisan members of faction, as was their way then and still is their way today, tried to make the crackdown bigger than it was, but that might more be a reflection of my sanguine nature then and now. Either way, it was Big News! Front page, above the fold. I didn’t know much about the tradition until the arrests hit the news.
Early this morning, according to a Charlotte news outlet, some 30 protesters were arrested on Chapel Hill’s campus. “Several” were described as non-students. No violence to speak of, with reported instances of “shoving” as people tried to enter a building after the protest was dispersed.
Consistent with many of my earlier comments, I oppose and condemn anyone who advocates physically or vocally for acts of violence towards others, Palestinian or Israeli. The news piece about Chapel Hill protests did not contain descriptions of such actions. If they did, I oppose those protesters who crossed a line. Freedom of speech is one thing. Arguing, protesting, insisting, that the innocent should be harmed or killed another.
Ed P says
Kept looking for a factual head count of students vs “visitors “at these protests. No mention of why many of the tents are identical, or signs are professionally printed.
Zero mention of busing in people to maintain a visual sense for the cameras.
What about “students” who didn’t know what they were protesting or hid their faces and identities? Food was catered, but who paid?
My sense is mainstream America is not positively swayed by protesting. It’s a tool of the 60s and 70s that was effective then but has lingered beyond its useful life. I readily admit there will be blow back by those who will say protests have been around for ever, but my point is that it must be a grass roots effort instead of manufactured and manipulated.
I make zero claim of the cause, but rather the phoniness of their actions. These kids are pawns in someone’s real life chess game and their lives and careers could be negatively impacted by their foolish participation.
endangered species says
protesting is highly illegal in florida thanks to racist ron and his goon followers. I support the educated youth not supporting using our money and weapons to murder children. How else should they voice their opinion? You can say voting but we all know more votes doesnt necessarily win here so what gives?
If trump had removed us from nato wed likely already be in WW3.
Samuel L. Bronkowitz says
No, college administrators have not fallen for a right wing trap, and here’s why. I’ll use the local state college as an example.
The head of the college is the president. Below him, there are several vice presidents, and below them are associate vice presidents. Finally, you get to the people that have direct contact with faculty, the departmental chairs. Everything above departmental chair is organized like a business, because colleges are businesses.
The president of the college spends a lot of time on committees at the school and begging Tallahassee for money. “Good presidents” align their rhetoric with that of the state governor and legislature so they get noticed and the funds flow in.
There’s no “falling for.” They’re doing what politicians do.
Sherry says
@sb. . . College president, and many others, should NOT be politicians! They should NOT be doing what “politicians do”! Look at the local “school Board” for example. “Everything” is becoming more and more politized. The political/culture wars are ripping our country apart. . . much to the glee of Russia and China.
United we stand and divided we fall! But, our moral/cultural/political foundation MUST be based on scientific and credentialed FACTS in order to be strong. Misinformation/propaganda from the likes of TikTok and FOX are creating huge cracks in the very foundation of our democracy!
Skibum says
We have a very long, storied history of seeing constitutionally allowed peaceful protests in America, including on our college campuses. But what started out as peaceful protests on a few college and university campuses and has since blossomed into major disruptions, cancellations of classes, vandalism of buildings and monuments, harassment of and threats toward Jewish students, and other acts of violence on many campuses cannot and should not be allowed to continue. And those college administrators and professors who are enabling these disgusting student mob takeovers, protecting those who have refused orders to dismantle the sea of tents and go back to their dorms or other places of residence so classes and normal activities can restart need to be summarily suspended or expelled. I hope all college administrators find their backbones very soon and review their policies, putting in place more defined and strict code of conduct rules for both students AND school staffers, or at least adhering to current policies if they are sufficient to prevent the kind of madness that has overwhelmed our country’s higher institutions of learning over the past couple of weeks. This needs to end NOW!
Joe D says
Talk about flashbacks! I am a “child of the sixties”…although a young one (8th grade in a Catholic school in 1968…do the math)!
Back then, even PEACE protests were considered UNAMERICAN…and the protesters were called “pinko COMMUNISTS!” The nightly TV news (there was NO SOCIAL MEDIA back then) brought actual on the ground “imbedded” journalism on the war….you saw battles in REAL time, you saw dead and wounded being carried off the battlefield. You heard PROPAGANDA from BOTH sides (2024 has no monopoly on Political RHETORIC)… it was an ANGRY time!
So here we are, generations later in a similar situation. The current disaster in the Middle East is horrendous for both sides (regardless of who “started” it)…innocent civilians on BOTH sides have been subjected to devastation, not seen in GENERATIONS.
Unfortunately the US is caught in the middle of TRYING (unsuccessfully at the moment it seems) to support a long term ally (unfortunately with a Radical right wing returning president….I’m old enough to REMEMBER him from BEFORE…so does President…then “Senator”…Biden).
The current conflict runs the risk of spreading WAR to the ENTIRE region, unfortunately pulling the US into the conflict whether they want to be or not.
FREE SPEECH (however distasteful we find it sometimes) is a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT given to ALL Americans (whether we agree with that speech or not…sometimes you just have to take a DEEP BREATH )…of course THREATS and LIES have other legal consequences.
We’ve seen across the globe (Russia/China/ Former Burma/Thailand) what happens to citizens, journalists and even tourists don’t “tow the company line” …speaking out about government oppression, corruption or violations of human rights. They are jailed, “disappeared,”…assassinated or formally EXECUTED for speaking their TRUTH (whatever that happens to be).
However, protests need to be peaceful, and recent incidents of encampments, threats, intimidation, and physical violence cannot be allowed under the GUISE of FREE SPEECH.
“Those that fail to LEARN from the past, are Doomed to REPEAT IT!”
Sherry says
Thank you, Joe D., for your excellent comment. You are “right on”, sir!
Anthony Watkins says
The protests are primarily peaceful until violent counter protesters, show up with bats, knives and fireworks, and when armed cops enter the areas and violently arrest peaceful protesters.
Oh, by the way, there was plenty of violence in the student movements of the 1960s, though, again, more often the violence was started by the cops, but not always.
ASF says
I am old enough to remember particpating in protests in the late sixties and early seventies. I did not break the law. I did not feel entitled to interfere with the Constitutional rights of others nor did I feel entitled to abuse certain groups on the basis of where I judged them to stand (or fall) on my own personal “oppression scale”. Nor did I assume that wearing a mask while protesting for causes that I felt were just entitled me to conduct myself anyway I wanted to, consequences be darned.
Kennan says
I will say this. These students are adults and can negotiate their college lives while protesting peacefully under the umbrella of the 1st amendment. If they fail to do so,then they by de facto kick themselves out of school.
The narrative of Israeli victimization has been crumbling rapidly. Many counter offences have been used by Benjamin NETANYAHU and Israel, in desperation i might add, to call college protesters of a GENOCIDE Antisemetic. Netanyahu evenwent so far as calling them ‘1930’s era Nazis’. Utter nonsense!
In the last couple of days the IDF has raided Al- Jazeera headquarters in Jerusalem in order to continue to try to eliminate reporting, lest we forget the 100 plus journalists killed in Gaza. More than any other war; however, this is not a war. This is a targeted GENOCIDE. An ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity campaign worse and different than Bosnia and Rwanda, because it is perpetuated by the Biden administration and billions of U.S. dollars. Our tax dollars to initiate the murder of PALESTINIANS.
The college students speaking up against Genocide and in support of Palestinians in Gaza, are simply initiating their 1st amendment rights. Protests are not supposed to be convenient. There some ‘Bad Players’ out there, but the vast majority are peaceful protesters, supported i might add by thousands of anti- zionist Jews. The problem that every American should have is watching police and security officers beat the shit out of college students as well as faculty. That’s a glaring abuse of power!! I’m sorry to inundate everyone with all this recorded visual factuality.
Counter protesters for Israel have been the provocateurs of violence against peaceful ‘Pro- Palestine protesters as well as so many other Jews marching and sitting with them.
All anybody wants is a fair assessment of what is happening. As well as un- fettered reporting. Not gonna get that from FOX news,CNN,or MSNBC.
Journalism and ultimately decency dies when it is run by lobbies like AIPAC and other pro-Israel ZIONIST organizations for purely political reasons. The Netanyahu run Israel is the most un- democratic nation in the region, at least for ‘NON JEWS’. What Netanyahu is doing to his own people in regards to indecriminately bombing, killing Israeli hostages as well as everyone else in Gaza is ANTISEMETIC ON IT’S FACE. These are just a few of the every mounting facts against Netanyahu, the IDF, and the blind unfettered support Israel is getting from the U.S.