The Campus Heretics

The only education these students are getting is how hard it can be to say the blindingly obvious.

This week in Gaza, mass graves were uncovered near two hospitals on the Gaza Strip. As of this writing, reportedly, the bodies of some 700 men, women and children have been exhumed. Some of them show signs of torture. Some of their hands were tied behind their back. Some were elderly. Some were just little kids. Some still had IVs plugged in. The U.S, the UN and the EU are calling for an investigation.¹

700 people is just a fraction of the 34,000 Palestinians that have been killed so far in this horrible war, but sometimes we can reckon with these smaller numbers in a way we can’t with the bigger ones. 700 isn’t that small. You might have something like 700 numbers saved on your phone. What if all those people were gone tomorrow?

If you heard this news in a total vacuum, you probably would not be surprised to hear that people were protesting the military actions of the nation responsible. You’d be inclined to join them. But you might be surprised to hear that the media and politicians were treating these protestors as nuisances, idiots, bigots and terrorists.

But you did not hear this news in a vacuum, so you know that the people protesting this are mostly college students. And it is these protesters, not the mass deaths they’re protesting, that have drawn the scorn and ire of America’s political and institutional class.

College students protest. It’s what they do. You take a cohort with time, energy, healthy knees and the conviction that can only come from not knowing how much you don’t know and put them all together in one place, they are going to protest something. This has led to some bad stuff, but it’s led to a lot of good stuff too. A broad overview of the history of positive social change would have to include a few chapters on student protests. From ending Jim Crow to getting us out of Vietnam, college students have been the vanguard of some of America’s most necessary hours. And as for student protests like the March For Our Lives or the 2019 Climate Strike that failed to create broad, sweeping change? Well, I think history will look back on those students with a lot more kindness than it will the administrators and politicians who ignored them.

“Ignored them” would be a better case scenario for the students at Columbia University than university president Minouche Shafik’s decision to have them rounded up and arrested for trespassing on the college grounds they’re paying to attend. Over 100 students were collared by a group of New York cops who seemed unsure of why their presence was needed. “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” said the chief of patrol, John Chell. A few of them are also now effectively homeless, since they’ve been barred from their dorms. Some of them might not even be able to graduate. All this for the crime of saying the blindingly obvious.

Shafik’s limp reasoning for this had something to do with the protests posing a “a clear and present danger” to the university. Since there have been no reports of violence or harassment, one can only assume the danger she’s referring to is her own professional career. Ivy League presidents are currently groveling for mercy before the House of Representatives for the crime of allowing students to exercise the freedom of speech, and it looks like Shafik is hoping that tossing a few students into the volcano will keep them off her back. Good luck with that.

Now certain reporters seem to be hellbent on retroactively justifying Shafik’s actions by portraying the student protestors as, if not dangerous, than stupid and deluded. At the Atlantic, Michael Powell said the students had a “fervor that borders on the oppressive,” but cites no evidence to back this claim other than one student who said something very dumb about Israelis “checking their privilege” and another who posted an insensitive tweet six months ago. Powell says nobody wanted to talk to him except for the group’s spokesperson, a Palestinian American named Layla Saliba, who would seem like the best person to talk to anyway. She is, after all, the spokesperson. Powell admits that Saliba spoke with him “at length and with nuance” but he quotes almost none of what sounds like an interesting, informative conversation with the person actually in charge of communicating the protest’s perspective and demands. In fact, the only other thing he tells us about Saliba is that she had family who died “in the fighting.” When she took to Twitter to correct him, saying her family of Palestinian Christians actually had not been fighting at all, but were killed by bombs, Powell brushed her off.

That’s the sort of reporting you get when you come to a story already knowing what you’re going to say. That said, at least Powell is talking to some protestors, however poorly he represents their views. Other pundits seem basically unconcerned with all that, with everyone from Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper, the Atlantic’s David Frum declaring that the students are there to support Hamas, full stop.

Why are these people so certain that student protestors are motivated by an abiding hatred of Jewish people and not footage we’ve all been seeing on social media and the news every single day since last October? This, the most obvious possible question in the face of these crackdowns, is not something anyone in charge cares to ask.

Now, these protests have attracted some very gross antisemites, because anti-Jewish idiots are everywhere and will take basically any opportunity to leverage their influence. A group of pro-Hamas nonstudents in Harlem chanting “bomb Tel Aviv” has gone viral. In the confusion, social media users baselessly linked the chant to the Columbia students, furthering a narrative of antisemitism run amok at these protests.

It’s clear that rising antisemitism is a real problem and, and it’s also clear that college students sometimes say some very dumb things.² But it’s also clear that the student leaders themselves have rejected those groups. “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us,” the Columbia student protesters said in a statement. “Our members have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob."

This has not stopped the media from tut-tutting college students, hand wringing about radicalism and portraying fringe antisemitic freaks as indicative of the mainstream ceasefire movement. This framing, and Shafik’s endorsement of it, has kicked open the door for authority figures and administrators across the country to characterize the ceasefire movement everywhere as explicitly antisemitic. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is just openly having college kids arrested because he doesn’t like what they’re saying. The same thing happened at Emerson, where 100 students were arrested. A police sniper was deployed to a rooftop at Indiana University, where at least 24 were arrested.

While all this was going on, those mass graves were uncovered. That, which would seem to be a good deal more serious than student protestors camping out on sidewalks and is in fact the subject of the protest, has mostly gone ignored by the adults in the room. If those adults really did care about the feelings of Jewish students on campus, maybe they’d address the Jewish students among the protestors holding shabbos services. As Rabbi Abby Stein noted, some Jewish students had to take part in the service from behind gated doors, since they’d been kicked off campus. Student protestors at George Washington University were even joined by an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor named Marione Ingram. “I experienced as a child every single thing a Gazan child is experiencing on a daily basis,” she told the students gathered. “There’s no excuse for the slaughter of fifteen thousand children. I am proud to be here with you.”

All this is only a problem for the “all the protesters are antisemitic” narrative if you’re listening to the protesters. Which is to say, for many of the people in charge, it isn’t a problem at all. 

“College is the best time in your life to be a heretic.” A professor told me that at the little Bible school I attended, and I appreciated it. Her reasoning was that college came with a sturdy safety net, so I could go about believing all sorts of wrong things about God or the Bible without any serious danger to my mortal soul. College could stop the contagion and the community of fellow students and professors could get me back on the right path before I’d wandered too far from the straight and narrow.

I’ve got a few issues with that sentiment now, since it came with an unspoken understanding that I would abandon any non-evangelical Protestant heresies before graduation. But I can at least appreciate the willingness of any college faculty to tolerate what they perceive as heresy in their midst. 

But little Bible colleges aren’t the only schools with orthodoxies. You can find them at any university or, indeed, any institution. And wherever there are orthodoxies, there will be heretics. If the administrators of a place of higher education feel that these students are guilty of heresy, you’d think they’d be well equipped to offer some instruction and guidance. But if the only response they’ve got is violence, then I don’t think the heretics will be changing their minds anytime soon. I don’t think they should.

1. Independent verification is badly needed here. But since the U.S. is willing to let the accused investigate itself, I won’t be holding my breath.

2. When I was in college, I knew more than one student who believed Obama was one of the beasts prophesied in Revelation. Not great, obviously, but it didn’t spark a nationwide moral panic.