No Israeli hummus allowed
Protestors on college campuses bully weak administrators with inane demands. Their victories, however, will prove Pyrrhic.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The freaks are running our politics.” —Steve Hayes, The Dispatch Podcast, Trump or Baby Hitler?
“Are you at all concerned about your daughter going to UT,” asked a friend last summer. “Austin is super liberal. I’d be very concerned—heck, I would be flat out against sending [either of my kids] there.”
Let me first answer that in one word, I said: “Nope.”
I continued…
“My daughter is going to college to learn and grow and prepare herself for a bright, fruitful career. She is not going there, or anywhere else, to be indoctrinated. Whether from the right or the left. All of politics is hugely flawed, largely because it’s man-made. So, my daughter, who is as principled as any eighteen-year-old I’ve ever met, is going to college to prepare for what’s next, not get caught up in the vagaries of divisive political rhetoric, whether from the right or the left. In my house, the book we lean into has neither a donkey nor an elephant on it.”
College isn’t simply a time of discovery
Lest I sound pollyanna-ish, I’ll admit that learning and growing isn’t all I expect my kids to do in college. I hope they have fun, meet and make friends that’ll last a lifetime, seek to explore new opportunities they never before found interesting and, yes, grab onto to a chosen field of study that pays dividends in perpetuity. As I tell them, “Keep the main thing the main thing. Your goal—that of having a bright future—doesn’t change no matter the circumstances.”
Watching the protests on college campuses over the last few weeks made me wonder if enough kids are hearing that message. In late April, my daughter asked me about the signs she was seeing on her college campus: “Not my Texas.” She was preparing for exams and I told her generically what the signs were about.
I also said, “Focus on your exams; these protests are a distraction to many kids, but they do not meet the threshold of earning your attention.”
At home, as I read the news about the protests taking place on campuses nationwide, I kept saying the same sentences over and over:
“These kids have no idea of the folly of their ways. I certainly understand being empathetic to the plight of the residents of Gaza, but your cause cannot yield healthy fruit if it’s reliant upon violating hate speech laws, threatening and assaulting fellow students because of their ethnicity, repeatedly ignoring numerous campus protocols, and otherwise disrupting activities for myriad students and staff.”
I couldn’t help but think of all of the unintended consequences the students would incur in the coming days and months:
Arrests and arrest records,
Difficulty finding employment after graduation,
Anger and resentment post-graduation from fellow students,
Political fallout at the state and national level,
Etc.
They lost the narrative.
Like many across the country, I was tolerant of the idea of protests right up to the point of the blatant hate speech we witnessed each day against college’s Jewish students. This was in addition to the pro-Hamas, antisemitic vitriol being spewed. That was a bridge too far for me and others. Sure, gather in the quad with hundreds of your fellow students to protest Gaza residents’ mistreatment, but the moment those words and actions turned hate-filled, violent, and disruptive, college administrators should have issued an edict with a strict timeline for dispersal, and then engaged in a speedy, deliberate process of removal. Not just from campus, but from the school entirely.
Instead, colleges made hollow threats and then chose to negotiate. Of course, even after these so-called negotiations, the emboldened protestors didn't keep their word and continued to spew bile and disrupt on-campus activities. A friend’s son asked me what I thought of the protests and what I thought the protests were about.
I take them at their word, I said. Apparently, they mainly want universities to cut all ties with Israel, which apparently includes the removal of the Jewish hummus from the cafeteria, according to Sarah Isgur of The Dispatch Podcast, The Cult of The College Protest: Unforced errors of cultural stupidity.
“The overall medal (goes to Northwestern). They negotiated with the students. They acceded to several of their demands, including but not limited to, a full ride for Palestinian students, a commitment to hire Palestinian faculty, allowing a student from the protest on the investment board to vote on where Northwestern spends its money, and my favorite, of course, the dining hall. … The protestors demand that Sabra hummus be removed from the dining hall because it’s made in Israel. The Jewish hummus is gone, y’all.”
Not the sort of thing that confers good will from your fellow students.
Many of these kids are about to get a lesson in cost-benefit analysis. Some will find it hard to get jobs. Others will find it tougher to make friends in school and earn connections thereafter. Worse still, I think the greater threat is the longer-term consequences, that of making a newer, younger generation of their peers more open to stronger immigration laws.
This is what non-accretive causes look like. Instead of engaging in activities that foster coalition building, they choose activities that ensure they’ll not only increase animus from the millions of folks who support Israel, but they lose folks who might otherwise be sympathetic to Israel’s botching of the conflict. After all, more than 70% of the Israeli public is calling for Netanyahu’s ouster for his administration’s handling of the attack and the battle that’s been waged thereafter.
I say this because a large part of the argument being made against Israel by protestors relates to the country being a colonizer like to the U.S., which some protestors were quoted as saying. Not only do most Americans feel that Israel was justified in their response to the October 7 attacks against Hamas, the rampant hate speech has re-opened old wounds about people who enter this country but come to hate it.
Actions have consequences. I was hardly surprised to see a recent article in The Wall Street Journal titled Trump Allies Draw Up Plans for Unprecedented Immigration Crackdown. Those plans include, not surprisingly, “an effort that would deport asylum seekers to other countries.” I have a sneaky suspicion that should former Pres. Trump get elected, he’ll encounter far less opprobrium from Americans on the topic of immigration. The protests didn’t help; Pres. Biden certainly knows this.
Students get a lesson in FAFO
But not all schools handled the protests with kid gloves. For example, Arizona State University warned the students via loudspeaker over several days, apprising them that the consequences for inaction would be severe. Despite being threatened with arrests and suspensions nearly two dozen times to end their encampment, ASU students failed to heed administrators' warnings. Then they paid dearly for it. They were banished from campus, which meant many students preparing to graduate had to have some difficult conversations with their family members.
One student, Breanna Brocker, gave a teary-eyed interview to a news station. She said she was “disappointed” at ASU's reaction to the protests. And, she said, despite the numerous warnings to disperse, "I didn't expect to be [punished] for first standing up for something that I believe in." She broke down when describing how she'd have to contact family members, some of whom were en route, to tell them she wouldn't be graduating.
(The students sued, but a U.S. District Court Judge upheld the decision.)
My bias is showing
Candidly, I mentally labored over writing about the protests. I openly admit to having read enough articles and listened to enough podcasts to come away somewhat hard-hearted. I don’t deride kids for using their voices to support what they deem a worthy cause. However, given that I’m resentful of antisemites and knowing that I have one daughter on a college campus and another on the way in a year, I couldn’t help but think of how thousands of protestors—many of whom have no idea what they are protesting—would place their goals above those of my kids’ desire to get an education.
Having grown up in rural South Mississippi, where opportunities were anything but around every corner, I am known to be quite preachy when it comes to my kids’ education and the success I expect them to work toward.
“You’re growing up at the best time in the history of the world and in a country where there are no limits to your opportunities. Don’t let anyone or anything cheat you of your blessings.”
I suspect many parents from similar upbringings share such messages. A recent New York Times article exploring why protests haven’t flared up at Black colleges and universities echoed my sentiments when it shared the words of an administrator at school in Louisiana.
“Your student body at Columbia is very different than the student body at, say, Dillard,” said Walter Kimbrough, who spent a decade as president of Dillard University, a historically Black institution in New Orleans. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t concerned. But they understand that they have some different kinds of stakes.”
The most apropos example of how I, as a Dad, feel about the protests comes from a recent Saturday Night Live skit, which included fictional parents whose kids are going to Ivy League schools where protests were rampant. The Black Dad couldn’t have nailed my thinking any better than he did.
“I’m in favor of y’all’s kids protesting. Not my kids. My kids know better.”
You might also like…
I wrote the following piece shortly after the October 7 attacks.
College and university presidents' reticence on the Israel-Hamas conflict results from the False Dilemma Fallacy: As public figures, you not only speak for yourself. You represent your constituents, and within that group are folks with competing interests. But, morality must trump cowardice.
When disagreement equals demagoguery your goals aren't accretive: The first rule of leading worthwhile endeavors: Do not repel individuals or organizations who might help you accomplish your goals.