Modeling the World We Seek

Published as a preview to the winter 2025 issue. The full issue will be published in February 2025.

Additional accounts of recent crackdowns on campus protests appear in a series of blog posts organized by Annelise Orleck for Academe Blog.

As an aging college professor, I found myself in a surprising position on the evening of May 1, 2024: face down in the grass of the Dartmouth College Green, with a heavily armored riot policeman kneeling on my lower back and three others holding me immobile. Police wrenched my arms painfully behind me as they roughly tightened plastic zip ties on my wrist that cut sharply into my skin. “You’re hurting me,” I cried. “Please stop.”

Though they did not kill me, as they had so many Black women and men in the years before and after 2020, and though I only briefly thought that I might die that night, I found myself croaking the words that I have heard so many victims of police brutality say before me: “I can’t breathe.” Because my face was pressed down into the grass, and I actually couldn’t breathe. One of the officers growled at me the words that I had also heard too many times from police: “You can talk. You can breathe.” As I thrashed and gasped for air, they threatened to charge me with resisting arrest, which at the moment did not matter much to me, since breathing came first. After a while, they pulled me up hard to my feet and pushed me toward one of the college vans that the administration had commandeered from the student outdoor club and given to the police to facilitate the only mass arrests I have seen in my thirty-four years of teaching at Dartmouth.

Like many colleges and universities, Dartmouth had banned tents on the Green after student encampments spread across the country calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and for divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s war. College policy violations don’t usually result in arrests, but Dartmouth chose to report the protesters to local and state police for “criminal trespass.” As a recent court order made clear, “the State arrested each named defendant at Dartmouth College’s behest.” When New Hampshire riot police arrived, there were ten students sitting quietly in five tents, surrounded by roughly 150 supporters, who had linked arms around them. It was a notably diverse protest, with Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist faith communities represented.

Over the years, students have led myriad peaceful protests on the Dartmouth Green: to support campus unions, to denounce sexual violence, and to call for divestment from fossil fuels and, before that, from companies that profited from South African apartheid. There have been rallies decrying racist statements in the famously conservative Dartmouth Review, calling for protection of undocumented students, and opposing the incarceration of migrant children. Not since the late 1960s has Dartmouth called in riot police to assault protesters. Across the country, student protest has flourished largely unrestrained on college campuses since the disastrous 1970 crackdowns at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi cost six students their lives. Why are we seeing beatings and arrests of thousands now? What moved college administrators this spring to make such a sharp change in how they handle peaceful student protest? 

Understanding the Crackdowns

That night at Dartmouth eighty-nine people, including me, were brutally arrested by phalanxes of heavily armed men in full body armor with helmets, truncheons, police dogs, and an armored vehicle. They descended alongside several local police forces, apparently called in by the college president and the Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who, hours earlier, had condemned campus protests calling for peace in Gaza as “100 percent antisemitic.”

A disproportionate number of those arrested that night were students of color. Their own experiences of state violence and discrimination have sensitized them to the suffering of Palestinians. Some of the arrested were, as I am, Jewish. This fact reflects the broader movement for a ceasefire in Gaza, which contains a disproportionate number of Jews who are moved by our religion’s call for tikkun olam—the holy work of repairing the world—to denounce the genocide being committed in our names. The narrative promoted by politicians like New Hampshire’s then governor, many media pundits, and supporters of Israel that these protests are “100 percent antisemitic” is, on my campus and others, 100 percent untrue.

These violent crackdowns on campuses have been executed in the name of fighting antisemitism, defending free speech, and keeping campuses “safe.” Dartmouth’s president and other college administrators have argued that calling riot police and arresting protesters are not an infringement of their rights to free expression. Rather, they insist, there are proper and improper ways to protest. “Occupations”—the word administrators use to describe the tent encampments student protesters have set up to evoke the situation in which more than a million displaced Gazans are now living—infringe on the freedom of those who disagree with the protesters, making them uncomfortable and perhaps physically impeding them as they walk to or from classes or dorms. Some Jewish students who have experienced such discomfort have filed class-action lawsuits against their universities for not protecting them.

Regardless of where you stand on whether campus officials should arrest peaceful protesters whose speech is making some other students feel uncomfortable, it is crucial to recognize that this new campaign against alleged antisemitism on campuses is not instigated by Jewish undergraduates who feel unsafe. It is coordinated by powerful organizations with international reach—some of them funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by wealthy conservative US donors and the Israeli state. The Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP), closely tied to Israel’s ruling Likud party, has provided research and data to members of Congress and state governments seeking to pass laws opposing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. ISGAP research was also cited in Republican-led congressional hearings investigating the so-called rise of antisemitism on college campuses.

While ISGAP has concentrated on government agencies, many suits against colleges and universities have been litigated by the Louis D. Brandeis Center, founded in 2011 to combat civil rights violations against Jewish or Israeli students. The Brandeis Center usually sues for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination against or exclusion of anyone on the grounds of race, color, or national origin in any program receiving federal funds. It has launched suits and legal complaints against Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Vermont, American University, Brooklyn College, Tufts University, the University of Southern California, and many other institutions. The center has also promised to clean up “the morass of Middle Eastern studies,” mounting complaints against 129 Middle Eastern studies programs and centers on campuses. “When universities fail to comply with their legal obligations,” the Brandeis Center website declares, “the center holds them accountable by taking legal action.”

If the language and arguments made by campus administrators to justify crackdowns on encampments sound eerily similar, that is because they are. Much of that language can be found in a handbook published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), An Equal Space for All: A Trustee Guide to Preventing Encampments and Occupations on Campus. ACTA grew out of the National Alumni Forum, which was founded in 1995 by former National Endowment for the Humanities chair and culture warrior Lynne Cheney, and it is now on the advisory board for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the first six months of the Trump administration. ACTA brings together alumni, donors, trustees, and university presidents to help them “fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities,” which might be read as doing the bidding of donors. Calling “Spring Semester 2024 a national and international disgrace,” the handbook argues that “time, manner, and place” restrictions on the right to protest are crucial to furthering the academic mission and protecting freedom of speech. It states that the encampments were “designed to disrupt” and insists that college presidents, as part of their responsibility to trustees and donors, institute “pro-active” regulations to prevent such protests.

Does all of this make politicians and college administrations tread carefully when students protest Israeli policy? You bet. The massive PR campaign to delegitimize criticism of Israel has also powerfully influenced mainstream media coverage of the protests. It has not only been relentlessly negative but also wildly alarmist: One CNN anchor compared the campus protesters with Hitler youth on campuses in the 1930s; another insisted that they were in the pay of Iran, while an MSNBC host compared the protesters to the armed Donald Trump supporters who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, arguing that campus protests are motivated only by hate.

It seems clear to me, as a historian of US politics and social protest movements, that we are in the grip of a national mass hysteria not unlike the Red and Lavender Scares of the post–World War II years, when Hollywood actors, writers, New York schoolteachers, postal-service workers, and federal employees in Washington, DC, were called in front of congressional investigating committees and interrogated about Communist Party sympathies or hidden gay lives. In that era, Communists and gay people were painted as threatening to US national security for two reasons. Communists were thought to want to reveal secrets to our enemies, and closeted gay people were seen as vulnerable to blackmail by foreign spies because of shame about their identities. Now it is critics of Israel’s war in Gaza who are seen as threats to US national security, because they question long-standing agreements to supply billions in weapons annually to our primary ally in the Middle East. The US-Israel relationship makes a few people (some of whom are on the boards of trustees of colleges and universities) a lot of money. This country’s major producers and suppliers of weapons are well represented among boards of trustees of elite institutions. In 2022, more than two-thirds of foreign investments in Israel came from the United States. And Israel’s investments in the tech-heavy NASDAQ stock exchange are fourth in the world—smaller than only those of the United States, Canada, and China. Seen in that light, we can understand why trustees and politicians alike view student protesters’ calls for colleges and universities to divest from companies tied to Israel as an existential threat. Dartmouth’s president is a director of Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world, which is headed by an Israeli tech guru and invests heavily in Israeli technology.

Money is certainly part of what is fueling the bipartisan response of politicians to this year’s wave of student protests. Politicians heavily funded by Israel’s premier lobbying firm in the United States, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are more than happy to conflate criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism. Just as members of both parties in Congress—from the 1940s through the early 1960s—feared being called soft on Communism, now politicians are weaponizing fears of a “new antisemitism” to further their own political agendas and line their pockets, bolstering military and technology contractors in Israel and the United States as they rile up voters. Fear sells. It generates both profits and votes.

That’s where the campaign of shock and awe came in during the spring of 2024. It all happened so quickly it was head-spinning. On April 27, a pro-Palestinian student protest at Washington University in St. Louis resulted in one hundred arrests. Steve Tamari, a Palestinian history professor from nearby Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, was thrown to the ground by police with such force that he suffered multiple broken ribs and a broken hand. His crime: filming the police action. That same week, state police broke up a small encampment at Emory University in Atlanta, injuring one professor so seriously that months later she could not fully turn her head.

On April 30, the New York City Police Department made nearly three hundred arrests at Columbia University and City College of New York, barricading students into their dorm rooms, jailing protesters without water for sixteen hours, and holding two in solitary confinement. On May 2, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) broke up an encampment of student protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles. For hours before that they watched as a mob of self-proclaimed Zionists, some of whom were armed thugs with ties to actual neo-Nazi and anti-LGBTQ groups, beat them, shot fireworks at them, and sprayed them with chemical irritants. When the LAPD did step in, according to witnesses, officers shot unarmed, peaceful protesters and faculty in the chest, face, arms, and legs with “less-than-lethal” munitions. According to one volunteer medic, injured protesters were prevented from seeking hospital care until police had zip-tied and arrested them.

The violence continued at the University of Virginia, where—seven years earlier—actual neo-Nazis had marched with torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” No police moved in to stop them. But, on May 4, 2024, Virginia riot police called in by the university president pepper-sprayed and violently arrested peaceful protesters, destroying both tents and students’ belongings. Two and a half weeks later, on May 21, riot police used tear gas and chemical irritants to break up an encampment at the University of Michigan, on a part of the campus that, like Dartmouth’s Green, has hosted peaceful protests for decades without incident.

More than 3,100 were arrested at Gaza protests on college campuses from April to June 2024. The independent Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that 97.4 percent of these protests were completely peaceful. Most of those arrested, including me, were charged with criminal trespass: for standing on the property of the institutions where they study and work. Interestingly, prosecutors from Manhattan to Austin have dropped charges against hundreds of protesters for lack of evidence and, as one Indiana prosecutor put it, because the charges are “constitutionally dubious.” So far, New Hampshire authorities have offered deals but refused to drop charges outright because, in the words of one prosecutor, a statement must be made to “entitled students who think they run the world.”

This theater of repression did what it was supposed to: Bringing in riot police makes it seem that peaceful protest is actually threatening, which is why many student protesters chanted at edgy troopers: “There’s no riot here. Why are you in riot gear?” But those who cracked down on the threat were lauded by Republican politicians. In late June, Dartmouth was cited in The Chronicle of Higher Education as the only Ivy League campus not investigated by Congress for antisemitism. Our president continued to insist that she was acting in defense of free speech when she called armed police to arrest peaceful protesters. Her rhetoric mirrored exactly the arguments made in the ACTA handbook.

Republican congressional interrogators gloated over the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania late last year. In mid-May, as riot police were flooding campuses to “clear” encampments, US Representatives Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx called to Capitol Hill the presidents of Northwestern University and Rutgers University, where administrators chose to negotiate rather than call police on their own students. The irony of a Jewish, pro-Israel university president, Northwestern’s Michael Schill, being dressed down by Republican House members with ties to actual white supremacist, homophobic, antisemitic, and Islamophobic organizations, should not have been lost on anyone. But, alas, it was. Because that is how mass hysterias work.

Some of the loudest self-appointed congressional defenders of American Jewry are non-Jewish conservatives who supported the January 6, 2021, assaults on Capitol Hill, where some protesters wore Camp Auschwitz shirts and others wore clothing with the logo 6MWE, which stands for “six million wasn’t enough”—a clear and chilling reference to the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Those same members of Congress are now convening hearings to “investigate” how antisemitism is allegedly running rampant on college campuses and in K–12 education.

War on "Campus Radicals"

With the election of Donald Trump to a second term and the ascension of the GOP House leaders to positions of greater power, it is crucial that we understand this latest campus crackdown in historical context. Calling in armed state police to beat and jail teenage protesters may be seen as an alarming new stage in a seventy-year war by conservative politicians and intellectuals to “retake” higher education from “tenured radicals” who allegedly poison students’ minds by radicalizing them. Israel and its supporters have their agenda right now regarding campuses, but so too do conservative educators and politicians.

The war on campus radicals can be traced at least as far back as William Buckley’s 1951 polemic God and Man at Yale. It heated up with Roger Kimball’s 1990 screed, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. In 1994, Lynne Cheney rejected the American history standards she had commissioned (and which actual scholars of US history developed) as paying too much attention to “obscure” figures like Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and embarrassing topics like Red Scares and the Ku Klux Klan—and not enough to Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee or inventors like Orville and Wilbur Wright, the so-called fathers of aviation.

Those first battle cries were alarming at the time. They seem almost quaint now. The assault on education has intensified mightily since 2010 with the passage of book bans, bans on trans children competing in team sports, and the enactment in more than twenty states of “divisive concepts” laws that forbid teachers to discuss anything that makes students or, more likely, parents uncomfortable. In some districts this has meant a ban on teaching the history of slavery, systemic racism, the Holocaust, and anything positive about LBGTQ people. Along with riot police on campus have come new policies ending or drastically limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and calls for an end to Middle Eastern studies programs, women’s, gender, and sexuality programs, and more. Campus crackdowns have been accompanied in some public universities, such as the University of Texas, by the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and the firing of their staff.

The bans in Florida, Texas, and other states on teaching the history of US minority communities go hand in hand with a spate of laws introduced since the racial justice protests of 2020 to criminalize protest in general. Teaching “divisive concepts,” conservative education officials assert, fuels protests. Post–September 11 antiterrorism legislation is now being adapted so that all kinds of acts of civil disobedience—blocking pipelines, roads, and bridges, for example—can be prosecuted as terrorism and protesters can be harshly punished. Again, with a second Trump administration, we can only assume that all of this activity will intensify and that it will become more dangerous than ever to protest on campuses.

Legislation now being considered in Washington, DC, and in state capitals may quickly take us down that slippery slope. House Resolution 6408, a piece of legislation that has already passed the US House and is awaiting consideration in the Senate, would give the secretary of the treasury unilateral power to terminate the tax-exempt status of any organization that provides “material support”—and that includes speech acts—to any supposed terrorist organization. It has so far been blocked by a Democratic Senate but is likely to be adopted and signed into law by the new Trump administration.

What some have called “anticipatory obedience” helps to explain why Columbia University suspended its campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. There is zero evidence of any links between those groups and Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 civilians and taking more than 230 civilian hostages. Nevertheless, Israeli government–funded campus surveillance agencies such as Canary Mission, along with the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, have repeatedly charged campus activists with providing aid and comfort to Hamas. That charge has been echoed ad infinitum by some vehemently pro-Israel faculty, students, and administrators but even more vociferously by members of Congress (mostly Republicans but also strong Israel supporters in the Democratic Party). If H.R. 6408 becomes law, we will undoubtedly see numerous colleges and universities suspending or banning student groups engaged in protest—not just of Israeli policy but also of US policies. Student protesters talk of a “Palestine exception” to free-speech protections. But if these bills become law, protest for any reason could be subject to harsh punishment. This is already happening as more recent arrests at campus protests at Stanford University, the University of Rochester, and elsewhere in summer and fall 2024 have resulted in multiple felony charges, meaning that peaceful protesters are now facing real jail time. Such punishment is intended to have a chilling effect on student protesters, and a sharp decline in campus protests suggests that it is doing just that.

As part of the crackdown on recent calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, Congress reauthorized an expanded version of Section 702, a post–September 11 program of warrantless mass surveillance (including private communications). This tactic has already been used against Black Lives Matter activists and journalists. The intent now is to enhance surveillance of campus protests. A proposal to reform Section 702 to require warrants for surveillance of US citizens was defeated, with the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel groups arguing that it would hamstring surveillance of “pro-Palestinian” movements.

There has been, without doubt, a rise in antisemitism in this country and around the world. But the most worrisome antisemitism is not coming from student protesters calling for an end to the horrific war in Gaza. Since 2015, when Donald Trump launched his successful campaign for the US presidency, we have seen the rise of a vast network of violent white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic groups. Frighteningly, most of them are armed to the teeth with actual weapons of war. Continued erosion of any kind of gun control makes them more dangerous than ever.

But I want to go one step further and say that, like the Red Scare of the 1950s, the violent crackdown on student and faculty protests over the past year is itself antisemitic. It has targeted Jews disproportionately; it seeks to enforce, through state violence, surveillance, and legislation, a particular political stance to which all Jews must adhere; and it insists that if Jewish students and faculty ally with Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists to oppose Israeli policy, we can all be charged with supporting terrorism. It seeks to eviscerate the rich array of Jewish identities, which has always included people critical of Zionism. There is no room in this view for Jews whose identity is rooted in the long tradition of Jewish support for minority and worker rights, democratic pluralism, and social justice.

It is ironic, even tragic, that campus protesters have been so demonized. Because, in some very real ways, the student encampments have modeled the new world that we must bring into existence if there is to be peace, in Israel/Palestine and beyond. At encampments across the country, Jewish and Muslim students have broken bread together, prayed together, and shared insights and rituals from their respective religious traditions. These students—the very same ones who have been targeted for arrest, beatings, suspensions, and expulsions—may just be leading us toward new visions of what is possible. And, in these dark times, we need that if we are to move forward.

Annelise Orleck is professor of history at Dartmouth College and president of the Dartmouth AAUP chapter.