Should American universities call the cops on protesting students? By The Economist

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Flashbangs to CLEAR occupied buildings, helmet-wearing police officers and handcuffed students: the scenes at Columbia and other American universities seem like a throwback to a rougher age. More than 1,500 students have been arrested around the country so far, and the number will probably rise in the coming weeks. For college presidents this is nightmarish. Members of Congress are trying to get them fired for indulging antisemitism; donors threaten to withdraw funding; they are supposed to be guardians of free speech and are also expected to create an environment that fosters learning and inquiry. Some outside agitators are showing up, hoping for a fight. The students, both pro-Palestinian protesters and those offended by the protests, are paying customers. And members of the faculty all think they could do a better job than the hapless administrators.

As a practical question, dealing with these protests is hard. As an intellectual question, the sort debated on college campuses, it really is not. And yet clever people are tying themselves in knots over the rights and wrongs of what is going on. To the right are politicians who have spent years denouncing elite universities for being full of snowflakes who cannot bear exposure to different opinions, and are now trying to stretch the definition of antisemitism to silence views they disagree with, preferably with the help of the National Guard. To the left are students, faculty and administrators who have embraced the idea that objectionable speech is the same as violence, and are now arguing that it is fine for people to wave banners that call for actual violence (for example, “Globalise the intifada!”).

Given that, it is helpful to stand back and think about the principles at stake. The first is the need to protect free speech. The First Amendment is a good starting-point. Though the legal obligations of public and private universities differ, all colleges should adopt a broad definition of speech and police it neutrally. They should protect the rights of students to raise their hands in class and call Israel an apartheid state, or even to express support for Hamas, because airing bad ideas is an important part of free inquiry.

But the First Amendment is not an instruction manual for creating a culture of learning. Letting protesters yell about globalising the intifada, intimidating Jewish students trying to get to class, is not consistent with that aim. Nor is there a free-speech right to occupy parts of a university. Freedom of assembly is also part of the First Amendment, but that does not mean protesters have a right to assemble anywhere, if doing so prevents other people from using public spaces. And damaging property is as much of a crime on campus as it is off it.

Protests should, wherever possible, be resolved through negotiation. Yet that requires a set of clear demands on the part of students. Some of their demands about divestment are impractical; others, such as the creation of a Palestinian state, may be consistent with government policy but are hardly within the gift of a college president; some are nonsensical. If negotiation doesn’t work, and laws and rules are broken, calling in the police is a last resort and may backfire. But universities are within their rights to do so. What those who decry the deployment of cops at Columbia and elsewhere miss is that the point of civil disobedience is sometimes to get arrested, in the hope that an unreasonable use of force draws attention to the cause and wins sympathy.

Thankfully, students have so far not attacked the police, and the officers have been relatively restrained. This is not 1968, when police shot 28 students and killed three at Orangeburg, South Carolina. The protests will fizzle in a few weeks, after graduation. But it will not be the end: protesters and the police may meet for a second round at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August. That could get a lot nastier. ■

How disinformation works—and how to counter it. The Economist

Read time: 5 minutes

Did you know that the wildfires which ravaged Hawaii last summer were started by a secret “weather weapon” being tested by America’s armed forces, and that American ngos were spreading dengue fever in Africa? That Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, went on a $1.1m shopping spree on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue? Or that Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has been endorsed in a new song by Mahendra Kapoor, an Indian singer who died in 2008?

These stories are, of course, all bogus. They are examples of disinformation: falsehoods that are intended to deceive. Such tall tales are being spread around the world by increasingly sophisticated campaigns. Whizzy artificial-intelligence (AI) tools and intricate networks of social-media accounts are being used to make and share eerily convincing photos, video and audio, confusing fact with fiction. In a year when half the world is holding elections, this is fuelling fears that technology will make disinformation impossible to fight, fatally undermining democracy. How worried should you be?

Disinformation has existed for as long as there have been two sides to an argument. Rameses II did not win the battle of Kadesh in 1274bc. It was, at best, a draw; but you would never guess that from the monuments the pharaoh built in honour of his triumph. Julius Caesar’s account of the Gallic wars is as much political propaganda as historical narrative. The age of print was no better. During the English civil war of the 1640s, press controls collapsed, prompting much concern about “scurrilous and fictitious pamphlets”.

The internet has made the problem much worse. False information can be distributed at low cost on social media; AI also makes it cheap to produce. Much about disinformation is murky. But in a special Science & technology section, we trace the complex ways in which it is seeded and spread via networks of social-media accounts and websites. Russia’s campaign against Ms Zelenska, for instance, began as a video on YouTube, before passing through African fake-news websites and being boosted by other sites and social-media accounts. The result is a deceptive veneer of plausibility.

Spreader accounts build a following by posting about football or the British royal family, gaining trust before mixing in disinformation. Much of the research on disinformation tends to focus on a specific topic on a particular platform in a single language. But it turns out that most campaigns work in similar ways. The techniques used by Chinese disinformation operations to bad-mouth South Korean firms in the Middle East, for instance, look remarkably like those used in Russian-led efforts to spread untruths around Europe.

The goal of many operations is not necessarily to make you support one political party over another. Sometimes the aim is simply to pollute the public sphere, or sow distrust in media, governments, and the very idea that truth is knowable. Hence the Chinese fables about weather weapons in Hawaii, or Russia’s bid to conceal its role in shooting down a Malaysian airliner by promoting several competing narratives.

All this prompts concerns that technology, by making disinformation unbeatable, will threaten democracy itself. But there are ways to minimise and manage the problem.

Encouragingly, technology is as much a force for good as it is for evil. Although AI makes the production of disinformation much cheaper, it can also help with tracking and detection. Even as campaigns become more sophisticated, with each spreader account varying its language just enough to be plausible, AI models can detect narratives that seem similar. Other tools can spot dodgy videos by identifying faked audio, or by looking for signs of real heartbeats, as revealed by subtle variations in the skin colour of people’s foreheads.

Better co-ordination can help, too. In some ways the situation is analogous to climate science in the 1980s, when meteorologists, oceanographers and earth scientists could tell something was happening, but could each see only part of the picture. Only when they were brought together did the full extent of climate change become clear. Similarly, academic researchers, ngos, tech firms, media outlets and government agencies cannot tackle the problem of disinformation on their own. With co-ordination, they can share information and spot patterns, enabling tech firms to label, muzzle or remove deceptive content. For instance, Facebook’s parent, Meta, shut down a disinformation operation in Ukraine in late 2023 after receiving a tip-off from Google.

But deeper understanding also requires better access to data. In today’s world of algorithmic feeds, only tech companies can tell who is reading what. Under American law these firms are not obliged to share data with researchers. But Europe’s new Digital Services Act mandates data-sharing, and could be a template for other countries. Companies worried about sharing secret information could let researchers send in programs to be run, rather than sending out data for analysis.

Such co-ordination will be easier to pull off in some places than others. Taiwan, for instance, is considered the gold standard for dealing with disinformation campaigns. It helps that the country is small, trust in the government is high and the threat from a hostile foreign power is clear. Other countries have fewer resources and weaker trust in institutions. In America, alas, polarised politics means that co-ordinated attempts to combat disinformation have been depicted as evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy to silence right-wing voices online.

One person’s fact...

The dangers of disinformation need to be taken seriously and studied closely. But bear in mind that they are still uncertain. So far there is little evidence that disinformation alone can sway the outcome of an election. For centuries there have been people who have peddled false information, and people who have wanted to believe them. Yet societies have usually found ways to cope. Disinformation may be taking on a new, more sophisticated shape today. But it has not yet revealed itself as an unprecedented and unassailable threat. ■

 

What life is like down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Brent Lee

What life is like down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Brent Lee

Read time: 5 minutes

Brent Lee spent 15 years “down the rabbit hole”. He was a conspiracy theorist who believed the world was controlled by shadowy forces, that there was a “one world government” plotting to create an obedient, somnambulist blob of “enslaved” people. Lee was a “truther” and he had to wake everyone up.

In 2018 he managed to pull himself out of the conspiracy community and now helps other people get out too. In the last week, he has been watching closely as many alt-right, anti-establishment influencers and new-wave conspiracy theorists leap to the defence of Russell Brand, the comedian turned conspiracy theorist, as he is embroiled in sex assault allegations. He denies any wrongdoing.

Lee, 44, said: “You see different groups all coming together over the same thing, because in their world, if they’re coming for one of us they’re coming for all of us. They see this as a fight, a war against. They need to take down the establishment. This is saving humanity.”

Brent Lee managed to pull himself out of the conspiracy community

Brent Lee managed to pull himself out of the conspiracy community

This wider network of self-proclaimed “outsiders”defends, and amplifies, itself. Bound by their belief in libertarianism and free speech, it is an online mash-up of the neo-right, neo-left, spiritual gurus, old-school conspiracy theorists and the manosphere. They appear on one another’s podcasts and online chat shows and defend one another when one of them becomes a “victim” of a public “assassination”.

Lee continued: “The conspiracy influencers, like Russell Brand, would say: ‘I’m a truth teller, I’m just anti-establishment and telling you what’s really going on’. They believe they’re activists. But they’re just spreading conspiracy theories.”

In the past few days, an online army has been fighting Brand’s – and their own – ideological battle. Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer who is awaiting trial in Romania charged with rape and human trafficking, tweeted: “Welcome to the club.” Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, blamed “the Matrix”, as did the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Laurence Fox, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage blamed nameless, powerful forces, as did the pundit Katie Hopkins.

Jacob Davey, who researches disinformation at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, said that social networks had merged distinct groups into something more amorphous. “Ultimately these figures gain a sense of identity by seeing themselves as outsiders and challengers to the status quo, which seems more powerful than traditional left-right divides,” he said. “That means we often have strange bedfellows.”

It is certainly a web. The alt-media pundit Patrick Bet-David (7.37 million total followers on a variety of platforms) interviewed Andrew Tate (9.5 million); offered the conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson (10.4 million) a show on his “network”; interviewed Alex Jones (350,000); and then went on Brand’s podcast. Brand (19.3 million) supported Carlson when he was fired from Fox and went on Joe Rogan’s podcast (27.4 million), who in turn interviewed Alex Jones, who interviewed Elon Musk (157 million), who then came out in support of Brand.

Alex Jones during his trial in Connecticut last year

Alex Jones during his trial in Connecticut last year

TYLER SIZEMORE/HEARST CONNECTICUT MEDIA/REUTERS

“Disenfranchisement seems to be the key to their unity,” said Joe Ondrak, head of UK investigations at Logically, a misinformation-tracking company. Their ideology, he said, was also based in the conspiracy narrative “the Great Reset”.

This theory was based on a white paper published by the World Economic Forum after the pandemic, said Ondrak, and “seen by them as a way that the ‘deep state’ was trying to control people in order to achieve the New World Order. It’s the big apocalypse that’s coming. The outcome of this would be the end of human freedoms as we know it, worse than we can ever imagine.”

Brand has produced more than 20 online videos about the Great Reset, beginning around 2021, with many racking up between one and three million views. He also started posting videos about whether the US planned the Russian coup, Covid lockdowns being exercises in social control, US “biolabs” in Ukraine, and interviews with figures including Robert F Kennedy Jr, who peddles conspiracy theories about his father’s assassination.

In July, he held his Community festival in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, an annual three-day event costing £250 a ticket. Followers who earnestly referred to him as “the messiah” and “the oracle” gathered to participate in guided meditations and intimacy sessions, and listen to talks intended to help them “stay awake” to how the media, government, pharmaceutical and food industries want to control them. Among retired white collar workers, yoga instructors and middle-class families, were loyal followers of Brand’s Rumble account.

The night before the sex claims were published, Brand decided to deny the allegations against him with a video on social media, rather than through his lawyers.

“I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, ‘watch out Russell, they’re coming for you, you’re getting too close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself’,” he said. “It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces, and these kind of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice.”

On the bookshelf behind him was The Fourth Turning, a manifesto which argues that the US is nearing a crisis, a looming apocalypse, plunging the nation into disaster. It is a favourite of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former political strategist.

Brent Lee said that Brand’s term for his followers – “my awakening wonders” – is a “conspiracy dog whistle”. “He is saying we’re the ones that are truly awake, and he is the man out there fighting for us, spreading the truth.”

Being “awake”, he said, had its roots in Q-Anon, the conspiracy theory that believes it must fight against Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. Lee said: “To them, ‘waking up’ is about seeing that everything is controlled.” Brand’s reference to not killing himself is a shorthand used by conspiracy influencers to suggest they are under threat and their death might be covered up. Tate often says the same thing.

Lee himself moved away from conspiracy theories after the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election made him realise that people had power, that votes were real and “this one world government, new world order, doesn’t exist”. His journey out, however, has been “difficult” and “isolating”, repairing relationships as well as deeply researching all of the topics he had previously misinterpreted. Today he has a podcast helping to pull other people out of the rabbit hole, called Some Dare Call It Conspiracy.

“Conspiracy theorists want to save people, we must remember that,” he said. “And when things become heated, as they are now, it feels like you’re making headway, that you might actually get the message out, wake the world up to the control being asserted by the powers. Conspiracism is defined by their unity so they have to protect each other. It is a leaderless cult.”

I’m a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By Dov Waxman

I’m a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a longtime advocate for peace and for Palestinian rights. I have publicly opposed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and its blockade and now destruction of Gaza. I support the rights of students and faculty to peacefully protest against Israel, including by establishing protest encampments, such as the one on my campus at UCLA. I do not want these protest camps to be removed by the police, whose propensity for unnecessary and excessive use of force is well-established.

As a Jew, I do not personally feel threatened or unsafe because of the protest encampment at UCLA. I know some of the students taking part and believe they are well-intentioned. Many, probably most, of the protesters are simply horrified by the mass killing and near-famine in Gaza and want it to end. So do I. But I cannot join this protest because it is not just a protest against the war in Gaza. Among the demands of the protest organizers is the demand to “sever all UC-wide connections to Israeli universities, including study abroad programs, fellowships, seminars, and research collaborations, and UCLA’s Nazarian Center.” Needless to say, I oppose the demand to boycott the Nazarian Center, which I direct. The Center is devoted to the academic study of Israel and has no ties to the Israeli government. I also oppose boycotting Israeli academic institutions and academic boycotts in general. But it isn’t only the demands of the protest organizers that I have a problem with. One of the organizations behind the protest, Students for Justice in Palestine, has expressed support for Hamas and has even celebrated the massacre of Israelis on October 7. Being in solidarity with Palestinians does not necessitate supporting Hamas. On the contrary, Hamas oppresses Palestinians and has no concern for the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They have openly stated that they are willing to sacrifice countless Palestinian lives—“martyrs”—for their cause, which is the ultimate eradication of Israel. They have spent billions building a vast underground network to protect themselves and their weaponry, but they haven’t built a single bomb shelter for Gazan civilians or sheltered them in their tunnels. They are prolonging the devastating war in Gaza, and the humanitarian crisis there, in order to maintain their power and authoritarian rule in Gaza. I know that many people in the pro-Palestinian movement don’t support Hamas and don’t praise the October 7 massacre, but groups like SJP lead the movement on many college campuses, exploiting the sympathy that many students rightly feel for the suffering of Palestinians. Students and faculty demonstrating in support of Palestinians shouldn’t ignore the fact that the organizers of these demonstrations are, in many cases, ideologically committed to eradicating Israel and expelling Israeli Jews, supportive of violence against Israeli civilians, and willing to ignore or even justify Hamas’ strategy of sacrificing Palestinian civilians for their political ends.

A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses. By Josh Marshall

A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses

 Member Newsletter

April 29, 2024 1:47 p.m.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the ongoing crisis and mess in Israel-Palestine and also on America’s elite college campuses.

First, a thought on the campus situation and this question of whether these protests are tainted by anti-Semitism. I know most about the situation at Columbia, which certainly isn’t to say I’m an expert on it. To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.

But to me these instances obscure a deeper issue. The groups which are spearheading most of these protests — specifically, Students for Justice in Palestine but also others — support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish Israeli population. This is sometimes talked about as though this is envisioned without people actually being killed at a mass scale or under the pretense that Jewish Israelis have other home countries they can relocate to. But that’s not how overthrowing a whole society works. These views are also embedded in the big chants and manifestos, which you can hear just by turning on your TV.

Is this anti-Semitic? Not as such. It’s a political view that the Israeli state never should have come into existence in the first place and that the events of 1948 should simply be reversed by force, if a solution can’t be voluntarily agreed to. But since a bit over half of Jews in the world live in Israel, that is a demand or an aim that can’t help but seem wildly threatening to the vast majority of Jews in the world, certainly the ones in Israel but by no means only them.

There’s also quite a lot of express valorization of Hamas and the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. That, again, can’t help but seem pretty menacing and threatening to most Jews. But I don’t think this is as important as the first point I noted. The valorization is mainly the kind of revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism.

This gets us to the definition of Zionism. People have used this term to mean many different things over the last century. But the simplest and broadest definition is that it was a historical movement to re-found a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine. Understood as such, Zionism is essentially moot. There is a Jewish-majority state in Israel-Palestine and has been for 75 years. All Zionism really means is that state continuing to exist. If you have leaders of the protests getting caught saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” … again, pretty threatening. And also unsurprising given the social milieu of groups like SJP.

We can also take a short detour to make a more general observation about college campuses and our society generally. And that is that in educational institutions over the last decade there has been a big push around the idea that it is the obligation of the institution and greater community to ensure that students are not just physically safe but have a subjective perception of their physical and emotional safety. It is certainly the case that this standard does not appear to be applied to Jews and that is in part because in the governing ideology on many campuses they are not seen as actually a minority group or the target of oppressive ideologies in the same way other groups are.

But back to our core point. If it is true that the groups spearheading the protest expressly hold eliminationist goals and beliefs about Israel, it is just as clearly true that the real energy of these protests isn’t about 1948 or even 1967 — they are about what people have been seeing on their TVs for the last six months. And that is a vast military onslaught that has leveled numerous neighborhoods throughout Gaza, led to the substantial physical destruction of much whole strip and lead to the deaths of more than 30,000 people. That’s horrifying. And people know that the U.S. has played a role in it. It’s not at all surprising that lots and lots of students are wildly up in arms about that and want to protest to make it stop.

To me, you can’t really understand the situation without recognizing that Hamas started this engagement by launching a massacre of almost unimaginable scale and brutality and then retreated to what has always been its key strategic defense in Gaza, which is intentionally placing their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas so that the price of attacking them militarily is mass civilian casualties that are then mobilized internationally to curtail Israeli military attacks on Hamas.

This is unquestionably true and no one can honestly deny that this is Hamas’s central strategic concept: employing civilian shields to limit Israel’s ability to engage Hamas in military terms.

But that being true doesn’t make tens of thousands of people less dead. And most of the dead aren’t Hamas. So if you’re a student you say — along with quite a few non-students in the U.S. — all that stuff may be true, but what I’m seeing is the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocents and I absolutely need that to stop, especially if it is being carried out directly or indirectly with arms my tax dollars bought.

Both of these things are true. And this was brought home to me by a post on Twitter over the weekend by an academic named Dov Waxman who is the chair of Israel studies at UCLA and runs a center devoted to Israel studies at the university. I recommend reading the post. But the gist is essentially that he agrees on protesting what has happened in Gaza, is a long time opponent of the occupation and supports greater equality for Israel’s Arab minority. But he can’t participate or support these protests because of what I noted above — because the groups running the protests (which is different from the participants) want Israel itself dismantled.

All of these things are true. They can be true at the same time.

In these moments we sometimes hear people say, well, don’t try to police the decisions of an oppressed group. This gets to the rub of this issue. The real world isn’t black and white. Groups don’t fit neatly into boxes of oppressed and oppressor. People can have whatever beliefs they want and protest about whatever they want. But the groups who are the targets of eliminationist political goals can make their own decisions about what to associate with and what not to.

And here let me shift gears to my next main point. The last six months has thrown me very hard back on to defending the existence of Israel, its historical connections to Jews in Europe and the Middle East before the 20th century, its origins as the political expression of a people who are in fact indigenous to Israel-Palestine. And that’s because all of these things are now questioned and attacked as core questions.

But the reality is that these conversations, often harrowing and angry, are simply diversions from anything that creates a path forward from the terrible present. There are two national communities deeply embedded in the land. Neither is going anywhere even though there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that to happen to the other one. There’s no way to build something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship. That’s the only plausible endpoint where violence doesn’t remain an ever-present reality. How you get there is another story. And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there. If that’s what they want, great. That’s almost certainly never going to be the case. And it’s a failed state in the making.

But none of these arguments about 1948 or 1967 or indigeneity or “settler colonialism” really impact or have anything to do with getting to some two state/partition end point. And no I’m not saying for a moment that that will be easy to get to. It seems terribly far off. But fantasies and alternative histories won’t get us there.

Oslo gets a bad name today. And perhaps that’s fair since it failed. And failure is a bad thing. But we shouldn’t ignore the irony that we have spent the last six month in the grip of Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. And if you look back at the period from 1993 to 1996, there are two players who destroyed Oslo, as a matter of strategy and design. Netanyahu and Hamas. They both saw it as in their interests to kill it and they did kill it. You can question the good faith of the key actors of both sides of Oslo. But those two are the ones who set out to kill it and did kill it. They have always been, in effect, allies.

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Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else. Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.

But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.

Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.

Here are two true propositions:

    Young people are less engaged than older people

    The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders

Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.

In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.

In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.

Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”

And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics.

If you ask people “is climate change important?” they often say “yes.” But if you ask them to make small personal financial sacrifices to address climate change, they rebel. My interpretation of this is that most people don’t care much about climate change, and that Democrats’ decision to elevate this to the top of their priority stack is their central political difficulty.

The Harvard Institute of Politics did a good polling exercise in their most recent youth poll where they gave respondents a bunch of pairwise comparisons — they asked them to consider two issues and pick which one is more important. Then they aggregated the winners of the head-to-head matchups to see which issues young voters care about most. Climate does not crack the top 10.

Note that two other issues that are frequently said to be politically important to young people — student loans and Israel — ranked even lower than climate change.

The top issue for young people is inflation.

Inflation, of course, is a tough issue for Biden. So he is lucky that number two is health care, which remains the thing that I think Democrats should talk about more. Unfortunately for Democrats, abortion rights rank higher than climate, but still not that high.

I think this carries a few implications. The main one is that if you’re a Democrat and you need to address a persuadable group of young people, you should probably talk about the same stuff you’d talk about to any audience. Threading the needle on inflation is tricky, but Trump really would make inflation worse. Biden has a bunch of good health care ideas. Young people seem to care more about housing and less about immigration than the general public, and that’s an underlying strength for Democrats.

In terms of organizing and mobilizing work, I know that Israel critics like to say they are trying to help Biden by coercing him into shifting his position to one that’s more popular with the Democratic base. But look at these numbers — most people don’t care about this issue. When you stage protests and do other things to try to drive up its salience, you are driving up the salience of a Trump-friendly wedge issue and making it more likely that a candidate who is relentlessly hostile to Palestinian interests will win. If you can’t in good conscience actively work to help Biden get elected, that’s fair enough, but don’t be deluded about what’s happening here. Conversely, if we’d had University of Texas students getting arrested last week staging a pro choice protest at the Texas Capitol, that would have driven up the salience of an issue that is much better for Democrats. Organizing on abortion rights is very valuable precisely because this issue has a tendency to fall out of the headlines.

Not only are events at Columbia and Yale not representative of American higher education, college students are not representative of young people in general. Most people in the 18-24 bracket are not in college.

It is true that most high school graduates do enroll in higher education, but the completion rate is a rather low 62 percent.

I would not particularly suggest making boosting college completion rates a major point of rhetorical emphasis on the campaign trail. But if you want to understand a substantive policy issue impacting young people, the fact that 38 percent of people who enroll in college don’t finish seems like a big problem. Some of those people probably shouldn’t be enrolling in the first place, and the rest of them should be either getting more help with their work or enrolling at better institutions.

Note that one reason the student debt issue is not as high a priority for young voters as many Democrats seem to believe is that a majority of young people owe $0 in student debt.

Think about a cranky old boomer who has no student loan balance and thinks it’s weird that at a time of high inflation and interest rates, the government would give free money to random recent college graduates. Now consider that the typical American under 30 is in the exact same position. It’s true that this situation is less common among young people than it is among boomers. But it is still the case for the majority.

If you want to make a pitch to young people, my advice would be to find an issue that is impacting a majority of them. Most young people care about inflation, so you might be able to persuade them that Trump’s plan to explode the deficit, tax bananas and coffee, and shrink the workforce is going to make prices higher. And young people care about health care! Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act impacts every single young person in the country.

Most of all, though, I think it’s absolutely crucial that Democrats not let themselves get snowed by climate advocates.

There is currently an effort under way to convince Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” which would allegedly unlock sweeping authority to block fossil fuel extraction projects. This is being pushed by youth activists who are claiming that it will help galvanize climate voters.

I am begging anyone who is contemplating this issue to try to think it through logically.

Everyone agrees that raising the gasoline tax would not be popular. And the reason it would not be popular is that people like cheap gasoline. So why would you block domestic oil projects? One possibility is that blocking these projects won’t influence gasoline prices. But if it doesn’t influence gasoline prices, that’s because foreign producers are fully substituting for the lost output and there’s no impact on global emissions. If there is an impact on global emissions, then the mechanism through which the impact occurs has to be higher prices.

Note that Joe Biden has been reluctantly forced to re-impose sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry due to human rights abuses by the Maduro regime. I say “reluctantly” because the administration had been trying to score Venezuela generously precisely because the were afraid of the impact on global oil prices. Venezuela, unfortunately, did not play ball and the sanctions are getting tougher again. It’s completely reasonable for Biden to consider the impact on world oil prices and the US domestic economy when making foreign policy decisions. But he should consider the exact same issues when it comes to the so-called climate emergency.

Most of all, he shouldn’t fall for the idea that there is some secret youth exception to the rule that people care about cheap energy. It’s right there in the Harvard poll — inflation is a much, much bigger concern for young people than climate is. Advocates tend to talk around this reality by interpreting the fact that young people often don’t know what Biden has done on climate as evidence that he needs to do more left-wing stuff:

    “We’re seeing a number of especially young people and people of color who are not convinced right now that Biden is doing enough on climate change. And many of them are actually feeling disappointed,” [Anthony] Leiserowitz from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication said. “And he’s going to have to win them back. He's going to have to help them understand what he has done and what he will do with a second term, because right now he has not sealed the deal.”

I think a much more natural interpretation of this set of facts is that many young people don’t know what Biden has done on climate — which was, after all, the centerpiece of his biggest legislative initiative — because they don’t care that much about climate change.

It’s not some big secret that he signed legislation creating big subsidies for zero-carbon energy, for electric cars, and for clean home appliances. There was a huge, months-long legislative debate about this, and there have been tons of articles about it. I’m sure lots of people don’t know these facts, but that’s because they don’t care that much about the issue in particular and don’t care that much about politics in general. Of course, you don’t need to care a lot about politics to notice that there was a huge surge in inflation and find that annoying, and if you don’t follow politics closely, you might wrongly assume that Trump has good ideas to fix this. The best thing Democrats can do right now is to tell these people why Trump is bad on inflation and Biden is good on inflation, not take dramatic steps to indicate that they don’t care about energy prices.

timothyburke.substack.com. Academia: On The Inside?

timothyburke.substack.com

Academia: On The Inside?

Timothy Burke

14 - 17 minutes

Many of us are looking on with sadness and shame as university administrations all over the country are falling into profoundly self-harming overreactions in coping with protests on their campuses.

For many faculty and students, many of these decisions—cancellations of graduation ceremonies, ordering students and faculty arrested for trespassing on the campuses that they study and work at, bizarrely one-sided readings of “safety” and so on—seem all the more incomprehensible in light of restrained and tolerant administrative reactions to protests from the mid-1970s into the pandemic.

In the mid-1980s at my alma mater, anti-apartheid activists were once arrested when we blocked access to the main administration building, but we expected to be arrested. It was standard civil disobedience, very politely done, and no one was charged. We also had an encampment called “Free University” that went on for a week where students taught mini-classes and it was all fine. In the years I’ve been a professor, I’ve seen many protests. Some of them were more disruptive in various ways than anything this year, in one case by a considerable margin. Administrators behind the scenes were very frustrated, but they reacted with great restraint and patience nevertheless. The basic wisdom has held for decades now: this is part of the learning experience, be patient, don’t incite by over-reacting. That has worked, by and large. I think in many cases protestors themselves have on later reflection recognized where they either didn’t know as much as they should have or where they made tactical mistakes. That kind of learning was only possible because nobody in authority over-reacted, because administrative leaders understood where their first and last responsibilities were vested.

So the question is what has changed? It’s nothing in the tactics of protesters, especially not the current round centered on encampments. It’s very obviously at least partly in the content of protests, in multiple ways, despite all the mealy-mouthed attempts to claim otherwise coming from various administrations.

But I’m trying to think about what it looks like inside the room where university presidents and their cabinets are sitting at the moment that they decide to bring the police into play or decide to suspend and expel students en masse or decide to cancel graduation ceremonies or decide to hold classes virtually rather than finish out the semester. I’m trying to understand why Minouche Shafik thinks she can do anything that will satisfy Elise Stefanik. Or why Shafik doesn’t understand that she is prolonging and intensifying the enormous and deliberate distraction this whole issue is providing the GOP, who have no genuine or deep-seated concern about anti-semitism or the security of elite universities but are straightforwardly chasing anything that will change the political momentum in their favor before November.

In the case of public universities, I don’t have any trouble imagining what’s going on in the room where it happens. The threat from red-state governments is immediate: administrators will be fired if they refuse. Sorry, UTAustin faculty and students: you’re in Texas, and Greg Abbott would be happy to put “I destroyed the flagship campus of my own state” on his list of professional accomplishments.

In the case of wealthy private universities, I have to work harder in guessing at the specifics of their decision-making process.

In doing so, I’m trying to be as sympathetic as I can manage in assessing what they’re coping with. Here’s what I come up with as I think it through.

    This is the consequence of the institutionalization of ‘safety’ as a pre-eminent discourse about social justice on campuses. Here is the one place where some critics are right to say that this is the campus left being hoisted on its own petard. I have been worrying about this point myself for a long time—I particularly raised it during some protests here on my own campus in 2013, where students were demanding a much more aggressive, top-down response from the college administration to complaints about discrimination and micro-aggressions by privileging the language of safety. I understand the difference between then and now, between the cases, but it should just be understood that empowering an institutional apparatus to act assertively following an open-ended logic is always a dangerous move. But it’s not mostly a cynical move on the part of administrations, either—many are trying to do right by the concept of safety for everyone because they really have embraced that idea. And because administrations in higher education have learned to speak an almost-utopian language about such ideas—to promise something like safety for all with little care for the real-world trade-offs involved, or the competing values that weigh against it.

    Close on the heels of this point is the soaring stock of risk management and protection against liability as a comprehensive ideological frame that has replaced older paradigms like “fiduciary responsibility”. Within the upper reaches of most administrations in higher education, protecting the endowment and the institution’s other assets against any perceived risk that might produce legal claims is now the single paramount value that precedes all others—and advice about what constitutes risk is now by its nature permanently shrouded from scrutiny or debate, since it mostly comes from counsel in forms that are protected and in some sense unspeakable. To even admit you are acting out of a perception of potential liability is thought in some circles to create a risk of liability. But this thinking in some cases creates enormous risk because the people who are articulating risk only think along one line of vulnerability, the one they understand—or because their logic is easily bent towards a pre-determined conclusion by ideologues prepared to manipulate it.

    Some university leaders have long enough memories—or have listened to the testimony of a previous generation of leaders—to regret having not acted against past protests in a more forceful way. That tempts them into thinking that if they had acted differently, they wouldn’t be dealing with the issue of the moment. I think that’s a profoundly incorrect counterfactual proposition: a more harshly punitive response in the past would do nothing to prevent successor protests, not the least because student culture has a 4-year cycle that produces serial amnesia. But I also do understand why administrative leadership feels like their time gets taken up year after year by protests that they see as unstrategic, histrionic and focused on issues that they can’t do anything about anyway, protests which occasionally are also aimed at individual administrators in professionally threatening ways that seem unfair or disproportionate. There is some justice to those characterizations. If I could magically shift the ground in many of these current protests, I’d argue that they should see the university simply as a convenient venue for staging protests that are focused elsewhere, not as the target, and lodge their demands elsewhere. Though now, unfortunately, the issue has legitimately become the universities that have acted so harshly and foolishly against their own students and faculty.

    There’s a kind of herd logic to many decisions in higher education. When enough institutions do a thing, refusing to do that thing makes you a prominent target in some fashion. If you decide to reject U.S. News rankings, then U.S. News goes out of their way to damage you in retaliation. You might not be that interested in admitting more low-income first-generation students when it’s just Amherst moving aggressively on that goal, but when the New York Times publishes a ranked list of institutions based on the number of Pell Grant recipients they matriculated, suddenly it becomes urgent to embrace that goal. The herd logic is in very strong play now and it will take a mighty degree of common sense to refuse to follow it.

    I’ve found that over the last two decades, it’s become harder and harder for most administrators to see protest as a pedagogical occasion. Or in the case of certain students, professional development. When I first started as a professor that seemed like a much more common insight—as a very junior professor here, I once sat with a former president here and several colleagues in a big circle with students who were highly aggrieved about what they believed was a defacing of a space set aside for intercultural understanding, and we all treated the discussion like a classroom conversation, patiently untangling their demands and gently challenging their understanding of what had happened. The former president and several other administrators completely understood that the moment wasn’t something to manage or make policy about, but a teaching moment. For whatever reason, that frame has just become very hard to access inside decision-making conversations in these kinds of moments.

    Equally, I’ve found that administrative leaders increasingly feel the need to defend the formal prerogatives of their leadership, both for themselves and as a way of establishing precedent. That becomes the principal value they are defending in certain kinds of confrontations: the right to be the person who decides what will happen. The oddity of this insistence in this particular moment is that leaders at Columbia, NYU, Vanderbilt, USC and elsewhere don’t look like they’re defending their autonomy as leaders, their prerogatives to make decisions: they look weak, they look mostly like they are appeasing hostile outsiders who have no intention of being appeased. Here the need to be “the decider” is really leading them astray, because they’re in effect doing the exact opposite.

    But this is because it’s not just hostile outsiders. When I started my career, for the most part, trustee boards at most elite universities and colleges were composed of modestly wealthy executives, prominent professionals, and highly accomplished individuals in the arts, in civic leadership, and so on. For the most part, they stayed out of the everyday affairs of their institutions and deferred to the president and their cabinet. (Selection of board members was also often effectively controlled by administrations rather than boards themselves.) They were there as donors, as genial cheerleaders for the institution, and as a kind of “in case of emergency, break glass” authority of last resort, to be called on in the case of a major crisis. In the few cases where a forceful personality really insisted on getting their way, you’d either humor them if what they wanted was sequestered enough from the core of the institution (say, building a new stadium or hiring a new coach) or you’d do what they wanted and then regret it, as Yale did in accepting a big donation from Lee Bass back in the 1990s. Today many of those same boards are peppered with micromanaging interventionists, many of them part of an extraordinarily small hyper-wealthy elite that has arisen since the 1990s. They’re accustomed to getting their way, often see the president and administration as subservient to them, and more than a few have little respect for universities as such and even less for many of the underlying values that animate life on campuses. So if you’re inside that decision-making room, you can’t just blow off or ignore that small subset of trustees who not only expect to have your ear but increasingly demand your obedience, where once upon a time your development staff would have insulated you from that kind of pressure. You can’t ignore it because on paper, the board is in charge, and the students and faculty are not. But this is a situation where university presidents and their staffs got themselves into hot water by losing some of the insulating safeguards of the past through incautious pursuit of the biggest wallets. That’s what happened at Penn, for example, where Amy Gutmann ended up exposing her successor to strong personalities who wanted to be in charge first and foremost and are open about their disdain for the basic ethos of university life. 

All of this amounts to the anatomy of an enormous mistake, however: these leaders at various institutions are pleasing no one and alienating everybody, and this is not going to be the kind of moment that people just forget. They aren’t calming things down, they’re escalating them. They aren’t protecting their values, they’re undercutting their brand. They are pursuing strength via an accelerating weakness.

It’s true that in American history, it’s often been politically profitable to take credit for actions taken against college protestors. A lot of people forget that the Kent State shootings were popular. Antiwar protests were disapproved of by a supermajority of Americans polled until the waning days of the war itself, and really only rose in common estimation much later on. (Sort of the same way that suddenly everybody claims to have been against the invasion of Iraq now that it’s obvious that it was one of the worst decisions in modern American history.) Older Americans being glad for an opportunity to hate young Americans, especially people in college, is kind of an evergreen part of post-1945 American life.

Two things to consider, though. First, it’s politicians who get a boost, not university leaders, whose professional viability is often at risk when they don’t protect and sustain their own institutions. (It is especially hard to forgive the invocation of ‘safety’ by universities who are exposing their students to serious danger.) And even that boost doesn’t last for long, especially as a counter-discourse rises and pushes back.

And second, if I were Joe Biden, I’d be really careful about trying to claim a share of the demagoguery coming from the GOP on this issue. Not just because that kind of triangulation has been a consistent loser for the post-New Deal Democrats, but because there’s a real and present electoral danger to him if the overreaction by campus leaders coalesces a single-issue protest movement into a full-blown generational grievance. And an electoral danger to Joe Biden is, unfortunately at this point, not just his risk alone to manage.