The Struggle Continues

Students across the country called for justice. They got pepper spray and riot gear instead.

A protestor holds the Palestinian flag as police officers stand guard at Columbia University in New York on April 19, 2024.

Lev Radin / Shutterstock

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S8 E10. The Struggle Continues

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At colleges across America this spring, thousands of students and many faculty called on their institutions to recognize Israel’s war in Palestine as a genocide, and to disclose their interests in arms, oil and violence. Administrators did not take kindly to the students’ demands or their tactics, and called in the police instead. Today on the show — our final episode for now — historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd says these events fit a pattern of campus conflict going back decades to the Vietnam War.

Demonstrators at Columbia University established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the school’s South Lawn on April 17. Police dismantled it after 13 days.

Lev Radin / Shutterstock

The tumultuous 1960s saw huge protests erupt on U.S. campuses over civil rights, social justice, Vietnam and democracy itself. While historians have long told the story of that countercultural movement as driven by the New Left, Shepherd’s work traces a parallel reaction led by young conservatives and their wealthy benefactors. Together, she argues, they captured outsized political power and shaped policy toward a neoliberal agenda for decades. The contemporary practices of universities themselves are, in many ways, a product of that historical process. In that sense, Shepherd says, university presidents paying lip service to free speech while calling in the cavalry and cops donned in riot gear to beat and arrest their students should be no surprise.

Also on this episode, we bid farewell to our faithful listeners. Democracy in Danger is suspending operations as our funding winds down. But with the rule of the people still very much in danger, at home and abroad, we will each in our own way continue fighting the good fight. We hope you do, too. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your support.

We must also thank some friends and colleagues who have been huge supporters of the show and collaborators in our work over the years, especially: Rebecca Barry, Emily Burrill, Jennifer Ludovici and Stephen J. Parks.

Meet

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). She teaches in the School of Education at the University of New Orleans and is a community scholar at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Shepherd’s essays and op-eds have appeared in the Atlantic, Politico, Slate and the Washington Post. Follow her @llassabe.

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Resistance from the Right looks at conservative activists in the 1960s and how they established a powerful campus-based coalition even as the antiwar activists caught the national spotlight.

Recent congressional calls for taking a hard line against student activists echoes conservative counterattacks during the campus wars of the counterculture movement, Shepherd argues in an essay for the conversation published in April.

She has also said the right-wing panic over critical race theory amounts to a bad-faith assault on perceived liberal bias higher education.

Taking issue with the “anticommunist” education rhetoric of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Shepherd argues that universal public schooling — while conventionally associated with progressive policies — was historically rooted in conservative, white nationalist ideals about American society.

State police in riot gear tackle a protestor at the University of Virginia on May 5, as they move in on a pro-Palestinian encampment.

Video clip / CNN

DeSantis has appointed archconservative allies to the board of New College of Florida, the state’s premier liberal arts institution, which has since plummeted in national ratings. Shepherd sees this as part of the long and tortured history between higher education and reactionary forces in American life.

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In 1960, conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. helped found Young Americans for Freedom, a student group that has proved highly influential in American politics, shifting from critiques of communism during the Cold War, to denouncing the “radical left” on college campuses, to contemporary gripes over identity politics. It has also used lawsuits to silence critics.

In this iconic photograph, runaway Mary Ann Vecchio cries out in shock after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student demonstrators at Kent State, on May 4, 1970.

John Filo / The Post-Crescent

During the Vietnam War era, high school and college students held sit-ins and burned draft cards to protest a conflict they saw as unjust — and unjustly burdensome for working class people. After national guardsmen shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio, in 1970, demonstrations spread to more than 1,300 college campuses.

New York University historian Robert Cohen describes this year’s protests as “nonviolent and tactically tame” by comparison. And yet the backlash has been harsh, including pressure on federal officials to investigate pro-Palestinian protestors.

Shepherd predicts on this episode that students railing against Israel’s war machine will be vindicated by history. It wouldn’t be the first time. In the mid-1980s, American college students led the way in challenging apartheid in South Africa and calling for their institutions to boycott a social regime built on racism and ruthless segregation.

Columbia University in New York City was a focal point in that movement, as it has been today. On April 4, 1985, some 150 students at Columbia blockaded Hamilton Hall for 21 days, renaming it “Mandela Hall.”

This year, students occupied the same building for nearly 24 hours before police forced their way in and made arrests. (Prosecutors later dropped most of the trespassing charges against them.)

Experts interviewed by USA Today say that while demands to divest from Israel have had zero-to-mixed results, the push for responsible investing on the part of universities may have lasting impact.

At the University of Virginia — as in many instances across the country — officials cited mysterious “outside agitators” as a reason for violently shutting down a student-led pro-Palestine encampment near the school’s architectural centerpiece, the Rotunda.

Gaza residents search for survivors after an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Rafah, on Oct. 12, 2023.

Anas Mohammed / Shutterstock

Police in New York went so far as to call one activist who joined the Columbia protests a “professional agitator.” Lisa Fithian describes herself as a trainer who supports nonviolent direct action. The trope of blaming outsiders for co-opting peaceful protests is not new, writes AP reporter Graham Lee Brewer, suggesting the moniker has long been a convenient excuse for cracking down on movements from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.

Much like their countercultural predecessors, student protests have not been especially well received, according to national polls. What’s more, a Gallup survey last year showed that the public’s trust in higher education has reached a historic low. The same can be said of America’s political institutions.

For some solid research on whether and to what extent there is ideological bias among faculty in higher education, turn to this synopsis of the literature from Inside Higher Ed. Short version: It’s complicated — but self-selection and lower incomes relative to educational attainment play a big role in shaping the political landscape of academia. The data also show that conservative students and faculty alike thrive at colleges and universities — with most students’ views in any case largely unchanged during their college years.

Israel’s war in Gaza against the militant Palestinian group Hamas has taken an enormous toll on the civilian population, displacing some 2 million people, according to Amnesty International. The death toll in the conflict approaches 40,000. Last week, Israeli forces launched artillery fire on a refugee camp, killing no fewer than 25 people and wounding 50 others. The Associated Press documents how the war “has wiped out entire Palestinian families.”

Heard on the show

Album cover: A Luta Continua

Big Youth

At the top of this show you’ll hear news clips on the pro-Palestine protests of spring 2024 from three sources: The New York Times, NBC News and Fox4 Dallas–Fort Worth.

And… we walked off stage with a little help from Big Youth, with the Jamaican band’s 1984 anti-apartheid anthem “A Luta Continua” — Portuguese for “the struggle continues.” Onward!

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Transcript

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