The Challenges of Campus Activism
The Challenges of Campus Activism
Neither progressives nor conservatives seem to understand the complexities of protest culture in higher education
I’ve enjoyed writing these weekly reflections, but I’ll admit there are some topics I’ve avoided because they hit a little too close to home. Today I’ll tackle one of them: protest culture in higher education. This is a live issue on college campuses like mine. But its consequences are too often overstated by conservatives and understated by progressives.
As a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, I am surrounded by smart colleagues and students who are rigorous thinkers and open to being challenged with new ideas. Most of the time, I feel incredibly fortunate to participate in this teaching and learning environment, which includes protests and student activism. But sometimes student protests spin out of control.
I have mixed views about these protests. I teach and write about the history of protests and the importance of the right of assembly. I often find myself advising or advocating on behalf of protesters, and I recognize that protests inevitably cause disruption and discomfort. As I wrote in an earlier post, not every protest means cancel culture run amuck.
On the other hand, I find aspects of campus protests more performative than change-oriented. The students I encounter are often sincere, but sometimes they channel their anger and passions in misdirected or even counterproductive directions.
In the News
I have been caught up in a few of these student protests. One unfolded at Sarah Lawrence College, where my friend Eboo Patel and I had been invited to dialogue about the importance of religious pluralism. Unbeknownst to us, the students were in the middle of protesting the campus administration over a range of issues including perceived racial and class inequities. They had decided to use our event to platform their concerns.
Eboo recently wrote about our experience in the Chronicle of Higher Education. As he noted, after our dialogue ended and we turned to invite questions from the audience:
[T]here was a rustle in the balcony and a discernible shift in mood. Sixty students stood up as a collective, raised their fists in the air, and declared that they were taking over the space. One by one, they began reading statements of protest from their smartphones. Each statement followed the same formula. A typical one went like this: “As a person who benefits from white privilege but is oppressed by heteronormativity, I call out Sarah Lawrence College for further oppressing its already marginalized students and call on [Sarah Lawrence] to immediately agree to all demands issued in our manifesto.”
Eight students read statements, many of which began with a ritual confession of white privilege (a pattern which served to underscore the fact that most of the speakers were white). After each statement, the students chanted, “No justice, no peace,” waving their fists in the air.
As an invited speaker, this was an incredibly awkward experience. After the protest began, I remember quickly deciding to stay on stage until our official hosts ended the event. It felt like a very long time. During the protest, Eboo and I received a few hostile questions, and I tried my best to deflect with humor and honesty. When one of the students accused us of having delivered more of a monologue than a dialogue, I quipped that, in fairness, Eboo bore most of the blame for the monologue. Jokes do not always land in the middle of protests.
In My Head
The most significant protest in which I was involved occurred in 2020. It started when, as reported in the Washington Post, a Stanford law professor read a historical quote containing the n-word in one of his classes at Stanford Law School. The professor, who is white, preceded the quote with a warning and followed it with a condemnation. He intended to show how this nation’s founders were not unblemished heroes but also embodied deeply racist attitudes that have been part of our country’s history since its inception. In other words, the professor was making an anti-racist teaching point.
Some students were nevertheless upset by the professor’s decision. After talking with those students, the professor said he would not use the n-word again. Still dissatisfied, students at Stanford initiated a series of protests against him. These protests spilled over to our school because the professor had written an article that was about to be published in our Law Review as part of a symposium I had organized on law and religion. Some of our students on our Law Review learned of the protests and decided to join in solidarity. Their initial plan was to have the Law Review withdraw its publication offer to the professor. Our law school dean prevented this action after consulting with the university’s general counsel but authorized the students to publish a statement of condemnation in the symposium.
The students published their protest statement, and some of them also removed their names from the masthead of our Law Review in an additional act of protest. They chastised the professor for his classroom decision and apologized to readers who were hurt by the article they had published.
I published a short response. I made four main points: (1) the protest did not belong in a symposium on law and religion; (2) there was no clear consensus that the Stanford professor had violated an academic norm; (3) the protest created ambiguities for current and future classroom norms, such as whether a professor could assign a reading or show a video clip with the unredacted n-word, or what other words are off limits; and (4) because the Stanford professor had already committed to changes in line with what the protesters presumably demanded of him, the protest appeared more punitive than change-oriented.
With more than two years’ distance from this protest, I continue to think it was misguided for the reasons above. I am still unclear about what change the students were seeking through it. And I worry about the unintended consequences on future classroom teaching, leaving professors guessing which unwritten standards or norms might generate this kind of backlash.
I concluded my response to the protest statement with these words:
A decent society should be committed to racial justice. That work remains an urgent matter for this country and for this law school, and I hope that the zeal behind this expressive protest carries over into concrete action to alleviate inequities and injustices. But I also hope that this kind of punitive protest—and the lack of grace for those with whom we work, and from whom we learn—will soon pass.
In the World
I asserted earlier in this post that conservatives too often overstate the challenges of protest culture in higher education and progressives too often understate those challenges. The extremes in both directions make it more difficult to discuss the actual challenges confronting faculty and students.
A good example is John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Its clickbait title and cutting tone were lauded by conservatives and dismissed by progressives. But despite his snark, McWhorter makes serious arguments and lands some punches. He specifically critiques what he calls “Third Wave Antiracism”:
First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and ‘80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, white “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.
In my view, Third Wave Antiracism is more complex than McWhorter’s description. And some of the serious critiques advanced by Third Wave Antiracists are too often met with knee-jerk dismissals by conservatives. But McWhorter is right to note that some proponents of Third Wave Racism treat it as a religious identity whose claims and liturgies (including protests) are not to be challenged. He’s also right that “no one can know just when or how Third Wave Antiracist proselytizing may blindside them while they are going about their business.” That rings true with my own experiences, at Sarah Lawrence and with our Law Review. These are important and worrisome dimensions of campus culture today. If progressive academics disagree with McWhorter’s assessments, they should defeat his arguments with better ones, not ignore or dismiss them.
Most days, I love the university. I love the passion, intelligence, and yes, even the activism of our students. Most days.
