How college protests against war in Gaza compare to demonstrations of the past

As protests of Israel’s war in Gaza spread to campuses across the country, some see parallels between today’s demonstrations and college protests of the past. Amna Nawaz discussed that with University of Texas history professor Steven Mintz and professor and historian at the City University of New York, Angus Johnston.
Amna Nawaz:
One of the biggest developments of this week has been the expansion of college protests and encampments. Encampments continue to pop up, including today at the University of North Carolina.
Meanwhile, protesters at Columbia say they can’t reach an agreement with the school and intend to keep theirs going indefinitely. Hundreds of students have been arrested, and charges have been brought against some students as well during clashes.
Overnight, more violent clashes between pro-Palestinian protesters and police, this time at Ohio State University. Officers moved to disperse a crowd after an hours-long demonstration, citing rules banning overnight events. More than a dozen people were arrested.
Protesters:
The people united will never be defeated!
Amna Nawaz:
The latest wave of protests and encampments follow demonstrations at Columbia University last week. Similar scenes have popped up at scores of other colleges over the last several days and have led to hundreds of arrests.
Video from Emory University yesterday shows officers pinning a protester to the ground and Tasing him. Some demonstrators are calling on their universities to cut financial ties with.
Vincent Doehr, UCLA Student:
We came together to make demands on the university, to divest the endowment from corporations that profit off of Israeli genocide, to disclose where our money is invested in the first place.
Amna Nawaz:
While others want to bring attention to the war in Gaza.
Mohammad Khalil, Columbia University Student:
We want to be visible. The university should do something about what we’re asking about the genocide that’s happening.
Amna Nawaz:
Many say today’s demonstrations echo college protests movements of the past, including against the Vietnam War.
Protester:
What people in this strike are trying to tell the United States people, the American people, is that the country shouldn’t function, the country shouldn’t function while this war is going on.
Amna Nawaz:
That includes a historic demonstration at Columbia University itself in 1968. Students occupied campus buildings demanding the university cut ties with a think tank involved in Pentagon weapons research. It was met with a heavy police response.
Other Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and ’70s led to clashes with authorities and mass arrests, but over time they helped to shift public opinion leading up to the eventual U.S. withdrawal. In the 1980s, a similar movement popped up at universities nationwide, calling for divestment from South Africa to end apartheid.
Today, some students say they’re taking lessons from those very protests.
Catherine Elias, Columbia University Student:
Our core demands are financial divestment. That’s been a demand from student staff and faculty dating back to the anti-apartheid divestment movement here at Columbia.
Amna Nawaz:
As the school year comes to a close, there’s no sign yet that this wave of protests will end before classes let out.
Protester:
No more hiding, no more fear!
Protesters:
No more hiding, no more fear!
Amna Nawaz:
As protests of Israel’s war in Gaza spread to campuses across the country, some see parallels between today’s demonstrations and college protests in the past.
Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angus Johnston is a professor and historian of American student culture at the City University of New York.
Welcome to you both.
Professor Johnston, let’s just start with what the protesters are calling for here. What is their focus? What do they want as a result of these demonstrations?
Angus Johnston, Assistant Professor, City University of New York: Well, it varies campus by campus, but primarily what we’re looking for — looking at is, they’re looking for a divestment of the universities’ financial relationships with Israeli companies, a disentanglement of the universities from relationships with the Israeli government or military, and transparency as to the nature of those relationships where they currently exist.
Amna Nawaz:
Professor Mintz, how do — what do you make of the demands, as Professor Johnston had laid them out? Is that something you think colleges can achieve?
Steven Mintz, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin: I think they’re very unlikely to be achieved.
The protests of the 1960s, it was possible to achieve some kind of accommodation. First of all, one of the demands, an end to the military draft, received widespread support throughout society, and Richard Nixon’s administration would make that happen.
But on campuses themselves, there were some practical goals, like studies programs, women’s studies programs, coeducation at the elite private universities, an end to parietals and in loco parentis regulations. There was a lot of ground for accommodation and compromise.
And I don’t see that much right now.
Amna Nawaz:
Professor Johnston, what do you make of that? Do you agree?
Angus Johnston:
Well, I think that the easiest, simplest demand that they’re making is a demand for transparency in their universities’ relationships with Israeli institutions, and I think that that is something that is certainly winnable on a lot of campuses.
I also think that, in a lot of ways, the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and ’80s is a much better analog than the mass student movement of the late ’60s in some ways. And I think it’s important to remember that, in the case of the anti-apartheid movement, the calls for divestment on campuses began in the mid-70s.
And it was a very, very long and slow process, by which students were adjusting people’s views of the crisis itself.
Amna Nawaz:
What do you make of that, Professor Mintz? Could these protests now start what could be a long chain of changing people’s minds when it comes to how they see this issue?
Steven Mintz:
The context today is very different than in the 1960s or 1970s, when higher education was growing and the federal and state investments in higher education were increasing. Today, the situation of American higher education is extremely precarious.
Public support has diminished. Funding is hotly debated in many of the states. There are threats in some state legislatures to tax endowments, to tax university property, to tax university income. Donations to many of the leading universities have declined.
This is a very treacherous moment, especially for the most well-endowed and highly selective institutions.
Amna Nawaz:
Professor Johnston, do you agree with that? I mean, is there a chance here that protesters run the risk of losing support the longer these protests go on, because of this scenario, as Professor Mintz has laid it out?
Angus Johnston:
Well, I think it’s important to note that the protests themselves so far have largely been pretty moderate in their tactics.
We’re not seeing, as we did in the 1960s, rioting, rocks being thrown at police, even buildings getting burned — being burned down. The protests themselves have been pretty moderate. The thing that is inflaming the situation right now — in terms of their tactics, the thing that’s inflaming the situation right now is bringing in the cops and using the police not only to engage in mass arrests against students, but in arresting and in some cases beating and abusing faculty as well.
I think it’s really important to point out that there are a number of campuses at which the university has decided to take a hands-off approach to these encampments. MIT is one. Berkeley is another. And at these, the encampments have been proceeding with very little issue and very little drama.
Amna Nawaz:
Professor Mintz, what about that? Because we have seen some pretty heavy-handed tactics in some cases. At your campus, at the University of Texas in Austin, dozens of people were arrested. Police in riot gear were called in to disperse the crowds. Is that necessary?
Steven Mintz:
Right now, we have many brand-new presidents, unseasoned senior administrators making decisions.
One suspects that administrators who were more knowledgeable about past history, had more experience dealing with students, had better rapport with their student populations, that this would be playing out extremely differently.
What we need to see on the part of senior administrators is a real willingness to step out of their offices, communicate with the students, and try to achieve some kind of accommodation.
Amna Nawaz:
Are you saying that you don’t believe that the police should have been called in some of these circumstances?
Steven Mintz:
Absolutely not. And the lesson of history could not be clearer that this only escalates the situation, it worsens the situation, and it results in a degree of alienation that’s very difficult to overcome.
Amna Nawaz:
So, given all that, Professor Mintz, I will ask you, and, then, Professor Johnston, if you would follow, I will just ask you both, where do we go from here? How do you see this unfolding in the weeks ahead?
Professor Mintz?
Steven Mintz:
I think the conversation needs to be made more productive.
In this country, if you want political change, you build coalitions. And what I’m not seeing on campus right now is an effort to have effective protests that will bring people together. When people hear anti-American sentiments, they are radically turned off.
The demonstrators, in my view, should be calling for peace, for the release of the hostages, and an American foreign policy that will really result in a two-state solution.
Amna Nawaz:
Professor Johnston, I will give you the last word here.
Angus Johnston:
I’m really heartened by the fact that, despite what Professor Mintz has said, a lot of faculty have been turning out in support of these students, some of them turning out in support of the students’ goals, but others turning out in support of the students’ right to protest without being harassed and without being abused by cops.
I think we are seeing the development of a new coalition on the campus. And I’m very heartened by that. And I hope that administrators take heed of that and do their bit to de-escalate the situation as well.
Amna Nawaz:
That is Professor Angus Johnston from the City University of New York and Professor Steven Mintz from the University of Texas at Austin.
Thank you both for joining us tonight.
Angus Johnston:
Thank you.
Steven Mintz:
You’re welcome.