Trump is Trying to Destroy Higher Education. Why Aren't Students Doing More to Protest?

“Why aren’t the students out protesting what Trump is doing to the universities?” I’ve been getting this question again and again from friends in France, who are astounded that the Trump administration’s assault on higher education has provoked so little in the way of coordinated student action.

Unfortunately, there’s a simple answer to the question.

What students tend to protest most frequently, most angrily, and most effectively, is not government, but their own universities. Back in 1968, the major blowup at Columbia University did not take place over the Vietnam War, but over the university’s own real estate development plans, which students claimed would harm surrounding black neighborhoods. Back in the 1980’s, when I was in college, students angered at South African apartheid did not direct their fury at the South African consulate or embassy, but at their own universities for refusing to divest from companies that did business with the apartheid regime. This past year, protests over the war in the Middle East also quickly came to target the universities for not divesting from companies that did business with Israel. “Princeton, Princeton, you can’t hide! You’re supporting genocide!” I heard that chant many times last year. In addition, what tends to happen in most waves of student protests is that the protests grow more angry and radical, and in response the university lumbers into action and disciplines the more unruly protestors or even calls in the police to arrest them. This action triggers yet more protests, all directed squarely at the university itself. At Barnard College this year, most of the protests have centered on the punishments meted out to students, not on Israel/Palestine.

There are many reasons why students prefer to protest their own universities. These institutions make a clear, close, obvious target. Particularly when it comes to protests against disciplinary actions, the students are acting to protect themselves against what they see as harshly unfair persecution. And unlike the Trump administration, their own universities are likely to listen to them, talk to them, and perhaps give in to some of their demands. It’s hard not to think that there’s an oedipal element involved as well.

Given this background, it’s easy to see why students have been so slow to protest the Trump administration’s broad assault on American higher education. The students most likely to march in the streets do not see university administrators as their allies, but in many cases as their enemies. It doesn’t help that even before the current protest movements started, most student activists tended to regard elite universities as complicit in all manner of “neoliberal” evil. When Donald Trump promised (mendaciously) to end America’s “forever wars,” these activists often tended to nod in agreement. So when the administration delivers savage funding cuts to a Medical Center located two and half miles north of Columbia’s main campus, hurting mostly faculty, postdocs, grad students, and technical personnel, it doesn’t stir much undergraduate anger. Tellingly, the only Trump action so far that has really triggered large-scale student action at Columbia—or at other universities—was the detention of Mahmood Khalil, a former Columbia student and leader of the anti-Israel protests last year. Last week, days went by during which the student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, published article after article about Khalil, and nothing about the $400 million in research funds that had been cut from the Medical Center.

So now the universities are finding themselves in a truly awful fix. The Trump administration is waging the greatest assault on higher education in American history—an assault that in some respects already dwarfs anything that happened in the days of Joe McCarthy. But at the same time, the universities are being attacked from within, by their own activist students. Columbia is getting the worst of it. Its administration, supported by a distressingly wide swath of public opinion, sees Columbia as an out-of-control citadel of the woke mind virus and anti-Semitism. Activist students, supported by progressive opinion, condemn it as a ruthlessly repressive extension of racist American power structures that is unfairly targeting its own students over blatantly false accusations of anti-Semitism. The interim President is twirling like a weathervane in a tornado, desperately trying to assure the students that she is committed to protecting them, even as she desperately promises the federal government that she will address its “legitimate concerns” over anti-Semitism and campus disorder. But there’s no way to reconcile these two sides. To use a different metaphor, she currently looks all too much like someone standing in the middle of a busy highway, frantically gesturing to stop the traffic speeding towards her from both directions.

And if student protestors are not going to be placated, they are certainly not going to help universities much in the current crisis. American university leaders need to be fighting the administration in court to block its (entirely illegal) cuts, while joining together to denounce Trump’s actions and to remind the republic of everything that will be lost if they go under. Ideally, more students will eventually realize what is at stake and come out in support. But don’t expect them to be first over the top of the trenches.