Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them ‘safe’ should scare America about what’s next

The moral insanity of America’s long war in Vietnam — protested by 1960s kids who were on the right side of history, even if the grown-ups didn’t see it in real time — came to be defined by the unnamed U.S. major who told journalist Peter Arnett after the particularly deadly 1968 battle of Bến Tre that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, gratingly. As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they’d sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world.

They are destroying the American university in order to keep it “safe.” In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony.

At the University of Texas in Austin, right-wing authoritarian Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a large helmeted brigade of state troopers to march through the heart of his state’s flagship campus and shut down a pro-Palestinian protest that he’d branded as violent and antisemitic even before the event had actually started. Prosecutors later dropped all criminal charges against 57 UT students and others arrested by Abbott’s army, saying the arrests “lacked probable cause.” The riot cops were photographed marching past a UT promotional sign, “What starts here changes the world …”

Students at two large Midwestern schools — Indiana and Ohio State Universities — who grew up on active shooter drills were shocked to look up during their campus protests to see what appeared to be trained police snipers aiming long guns at the action. IU officials stayed mum about what seemed to be photographic proof. In Ohio, where the volley of National Guard shots that killed four students at Kent State University at a May 4, 1970, protest still echoes today, OSU officials called the rooftop officers just spotters before admitting they’d “switched to long-range firearms” at night “once the troopers began using force on the students.”

Apparently “using force on the students” wasn’t a problem for them.

Some of the most shocking footage came from Atlanta, involving police and the state troopers who in 2023 had shot and killed a protester against the police training center known to foes as “Cop City.” Multiple videos from Emory University showed a string of violent arrests, including a young Black man who was shot with a Taser even though officers had immobilized him on the ground. When an Emory economics professor, Caroline Fohlin, saw a cop violently arresting a student and screamed, “What are you doing?!,” a second officer grabbed her and slammed her hard to the ground, her head against the hard pavement, as she screamed, “I’m a professor.” Fohlin, who was shown on video doing no more than raising her voice, was charged with “battery” against a police officer.

One of the most chilling videos from Georgia, ironically, shows no violence at all. In it, Noëlle McAfee, chair of Emory’s philosophy department, stylishly dressed, handbag slung over her shoulder, is led away in handcuffs by a masked officer. She later told a faculty meeting that, like Fohlin, her supposed crime was questioning an officer making a violent arrest of a student.

In her regular life as a distinguished academic, McAfee wrote a book, Democracy and the Political Unconscious, which argues that America’s untenable “global war on terror” showed a need to keep reliving the trauma of the 9/11 attacks — a concept that must have crossed her mind as a militarized cop led her away. She turned to a videotaping student and asked, “Can you call the philosophy department and tell them I’ve been arrested?”

I’d kind of like to call the philosophy department myself, in the hope that some beautiful mind there can explain to me how college presidents can morally justify calling armed police officers against their own students to clamp down on free speech, beyond their desperation to stay employed. Or maybe someone in Fohlin’s economics department could pick up the line and do the math for me on why America’s best universities value their biggest donors over their students’ free expression.

The most tumultuous week on U.S. college campuses since May 1970 resulted in at least 600 arrests at 15 different schools as of Saturday, with more surely on the way. It’s going to take even longer to tally all the students facing suspension and in some cases expulsion for speaking out on the bloodshed in Gaza, or the now-ruined careers of principled professors who stood between their students and a nightstick.

Not to mention the lasting psychological scars for young people who saw their dream college summon cops to arrest them or even fire rubber bullets or canisters of tear gas at them, which would be considered a war crime if used in Ukraine but is apparently OK in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown of Atlanta.

The notion of college as the American dream — fostering not just upward economic mobility but a nation of informed citizens taught to think critically — has been steadily dying since the original right-wing backlash against student protest in the 1960s triggered the end of taxpayer support for low tuition, which caused a $1.75 trillion student loan crisis. The maelstrom around the war in the Middle East has given the enemies of higher education — and they are many — a chance to move in for the kill.

Their ammunition is the complicated relationship between student protests for Palestinian liberation and against Israel’s current conduct in Gaza, where its more-than-six-month assault has killed at least 33,000 people — the majority of them women and children — and the constant scourge of antisemitism. Even though some advocates lump political criticisms of the state of Israel under an overly broad definition of antisemitism, there’s no question that the despicable harassment and assaults on Jews on or around college campuses have risen since the Oct. 7 start of the war (as they also have for Muslims).

A few of the claims linking the worst antisemitism to the student protests have been disingenuous, such as when some journalists cited a nonstudent and well-known antisemite stationed a block from the Columbia University main gate as an example of protester hate speech. At Boston’s Northeastern University, administrators sent in police Saturday who detained 100 students based on a shout of “Kill all the Jews!” that veteran journalists on the scene said came from a Jewish demonstrator waving an Israeli flag, apparently seeking an escalation.

But there has also been some instances of antisemitism that are indeed the fault of pro-Palestinian student protesters. In the most egregious example, an encampment leader at Columbia posted a video in which he said “Zionists don’t deserve to live!” He’s been banned from the Manhattan campus, and rightfully so. Just as it was a relief when the Cornell student who made vile antisemitic threats was arrested. It shows that the tools to single out and punish the perpetrators exist. So why instead blow up the entire ivory tower in a cloud of tear gas and paranoia?

» READ MORE: Fear and loathing on America’s college campuses as free speech is disappearing

The biggest driver is right-wing authoritarianism. Red-state governors like Abbott in Texas or Georgia’s Brian Kemp have watched the new hero of U.S. conservatism, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, make crushing his homeland’s once freethinking universities the centerpiece of his strongman governance. Now they are importing the strategy. The Gaza protests have given governors and their fellow travelers on Capitol Hill a golden opportunity to squelch the notion of a liberal education while squeezing out a few more tax-cut dollars for their billionaire donors, and creating a nightly Two Minutes Hate of young people on Fox News that distracts from the 88 felony counts against their presidential candidate.

The hypocrisy is astounding, especially from the likes of Abbott, who actually signed a 2019 law he insisted would protect students’ freedom to speak their mind. “Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses,” Abbott said five years ago. “Well, no more.” Well, that’s exactly what Abbott and his tin soldiers did last week, even though months earlier the governor was silent when the Texas Republican Party rejected a ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers.

The complexities of never-ending conflict in the Middle East is what allows the cynical Greg Abbotts of America to get away with this. Too many would-be Democratic critics are too wedded to years of deep support for Israel, ignoring that a) the right-wing extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies is not your father’s Israel and b) the assault on campus free speech has much deeper implications than the current crisis. Too many college presidents have displayed extreme cowardice, caught in the headlights between Republican bullying and billionaire donors, who likely fear the protesting students might eventually question the brand of capitalism that made them billionaires.

Topping off this perfect storm is a critical failure on the left, which over the last couple of decades has emphasized a particular brand of campus identity politics that didn’t take the free-speech question seriously, despite warnings from folks who remembered how hard students fought in the 1960s and ‘70s to win those rights. The safe-spaces crowd is now seeing the “safety” issue turned against them at places like the University of Southern California, where administrators’ fear of a Muslim valedictorian led to the cancellation of commencement for 65,000 people.

But the biggest problem is the large mass of Americans sitting on the couch and saying absolutely nothing, glued to the nonstop Trump Court TV that cable news has become, watching pundits fret that democracy will die in the November election even as a runaway police state already clamps down in April. Look, the threat of a Trump 47 dictatorship is real, and last week’s three-hour Supreme Court debate over whether any president is above the law was riveting, even if in a healthy republic it would have lasted just three minutes. Too many boomer “Trump Resistance” types see the wave of college arrests as a distraction, a sideshow. Trust me, this is the entire ballgame.

Ending free speech on college campuses is the leading edge of a bigger war against dissent that could already be lost by Nov. 5, and any contest of the election result that follows. I’m sure Congress and President Joe Biden have some valid concerns about Chinese ownership of TikTok, but I doubt lawmakers would have moved so quickly to threaten a large media platform with extinction were it not for fear that too many young people are exposed to ideas they find dangerous. The chaos on college campuses is already being cited to curb other protests, such as moving demonstrators far away from July’s Republican National Convention so they can’t be heard. Democracy defenders might find the battle to stop a second Jan. 6 coup was lost on the playing fields of Emory.

By the time a returned-to-the-White-House Trump makes good on his vow to send out troops and tanks to put down any Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration protesters, America might be numb to such images. That’s why the time to speak up for America’s young people and everyone’s right of free speech — to your neighbors, or in church or at the coffee shop, or even at the family dinner table — is today. We can’t trust the job to feckless college presidents who are willing to watch their students get slammed to the ground to save their jobs. Will somebody please call the philosophy department?

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter