Early in the morning of June 5, the last day of classes in the spring term at Stanford, a crowd of some 50 protestors gathered outside of the office of the president. During the year, the university had witnessed many demonstrations in response to the war in Gaza, including an encampment that had lasted for months. A tense peace prevailed. But when those early morning protesters broke into the administration building, barricaded themselves inside and assaulted a member of the security staff, they crossed too many redlines.
The university leadership, which had gone out of its way to tolerate protests in the interest of free speech and civil discourse, acted decisively. Police were called in and within hours the occupation of the building had ended, participating students were arrested and, in addition, the encampment was finally removed.
There are lots of lessons to learn from this teachable moment. First, it was important that a university administration be willing to act decisively when protests leave free speech behind and their tactics escalate into violence. Once demonstrators decide to commit crimes — like breaking and entering and assaulting a staff member — it is time to call the police.
Of course, universities cannot succeed without robust debate, but neither can they fulfill their educational mission in a context of threats and chaos. In higher education, just like in the rest of society, no one should be above the law, and that includes elite college students. Rules have to apply to them too, no matter how smart they think they are. Kudos to the leadership for having them arrested.
Second, while some students were inside the building, others were outside, busy spraypainting graffiti on the sandstone buildings of Stanford’s historic “quad.” Their slogans tell us a lot about the protestors’ motivations. If you think the campus chaos was only about Israel and Palestine, you are wrong. Plenty of the slogans were hatefully anti-American. They wish “death to the U.S.” or they denounce “Amerikkka.” Other slogans call for attacks on the police who are referenced with expletives and various derogatory terms.
Radicals have evidently moved beyond their appeals to defund the police and now announce their intent to kill them. That’s what the protest movement has become. Another slogan calls for destroying the university, or in eloquent student parlance: “burn this s— down.” Those students who may have been initially moved by the scope of the violence in Gaza or attracted to the reasonable idea of a two-state solution quickly discover that the price of joining the protests is that they have to buy the whole intersectional package — reject the U.S., hate the police and “smash capitalism.”
At Stanford as at other campuses, radical groups from the outside, without university affiliation, have played a role in organizing and coordinating the protests. They raise ever more extreme demands and incite students to break the law. But when the police come to arrest the students, the outsiders are generally smart enough to be absent. This is intentional. They groom naive students to get criminal records instead of diplomas.
With a felony on your resumé, forget law school, but you may be able to have a career as a community organizer. This is not to excuse the students, who are adults and should know better than to break the rules, but it is important for everyone to understand this game plan. Those outside organizations are coordinating criminal activity across campuses. The FBI should investigate.
The afternoon of the occupation, I conducted the final meeting of my undergraduate seminar on “Zionism and the Novel.” Given the topic of the course, the students have regularly been eager to discuss current events, in the Middle East and on American campuses, and this time was no exception.
They were astonished by the protestors’ ill-timed decision to stage a building occupation at the end of the term, when serious students are focussed on exams. Even more, they were contemptuous of “kids playing revolution,” as several of them put it. Trying to explain the motivation, they assumed that the protestors hoped to rally support once the predictable arrests took place. Would not students rush out to defend their friends?
Here’s the good news. There was no solidarity effect with the law-breakers. Students in the class, representing a range of political views, reported that the building occupation had only alienated the rest of the campus. Public opinion has shifted strongly against the demonstrators precisely because of their violence. Students who were previously neutral or middle-of-the-road on Gaza are now voicing criticism of the protest movement.
Losing support was surely not the goal of the protestors, but that is what they achieved. This too is a teachable moment. To become effective, moderates have to divorce themselves from the radicals. Those who support a two-state solution have to break with the extremists who hate America and Israel. Proponents of peace have nothing in common with the advocates of “global intifada” or world revolution. That same break also has to take place at the national level.
Democrats who want peace have to sever their ties with those who are sympathetic to Hamas. By the same token, we are still waiting for the alleged moderates in the Palestinian Authority to distance themselves from Hamas. The leadership in Ramallah has yet to give any full-throated condemnation of the pogrom of Oct. 7.
Moderates committed to compelling goals, like peace in the Middle East, cannot succeed as long as they are allied with radicals committed to war. This political lesson holds as much in the tunnels of Gaza as it does on the campuses of American universities.
Russell A. Berman is professor of comparative literature and German Studies at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The views here are his own.