Why is the simplest explanation of campus protests so hard to accept?
Why is the simplest explanation of campus protests so hard to accept?
Over the weekend, New York Police Chief of Patrol John Chell took to social media to offer thoughts on the college campus protests that his department had a role in disrupting a few days before.
“Who is funding this? What is happening? There is an unknown entity who is radicalizing our vulnerable students,” he wrote over a photo of university encampments. “Taking advantage of their young minds. As parents and Americans we must demand some answers! I can’t speak for the rest of America, but in NYC we won’t rest until we find out!”
Variations on this idea that young people have been snookered into opposing Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza have been rampant in recent weeks. It’s a subset of a much longer-standing belief, particularly on the right, that young people arrive at their beliefs as a function of being brainwashed by various actors or technologies.
The reality is simpler: Many young people (and many Americans) object to how the war is conducted. The encampments are an inexpensive way to demonstrate those objections. But this impulse is presented as some grand conspiracy — including by a prominent member of law enforcement.
The New York Police Department has not bathed itself in glory in its reaction to the encampments. In the immediate aftermath of last week’s action, an NYPD deputy commissioner presented a heavy chain as evidence that outside agitators were involved in taking over a Columbia University building, Hamilton Hall. The chain was quickly demonstrated to be one sold by the university for students to secure their bikes.
Then another official went on television to present items seized from protesters.
“Let’s talk about Hamilton Hall,” Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry said on the right-wing network Newsmax. He held up a book: “A book on terrorism. I’ve said it before, there’s somebody, whether it’s paid, not paid, but they are radicalizing our students.”
That book, too, had a place on campus: It was a textbook exploring the history of terrorist actions.
But you see the thread, manifested again by Chell: Someone is doing this to the students. To the “children,” as the person ultimately in charge of the NYPD, New York Mayor Eric Adams, put it last week.
On Sunday, Politico published a report that could be seen as answering Chell’s question about funding. The protesters were backed by “a surprising source,” it claimed: President “Biden’s biggest donors.”
The path from “Biden donors” to the protests, though, was far from direct. One conduit identified by Politico was the Tides Foundation, which we looked at last week when debunking the idea that liberal philanthropist George Soros had an active hand in the protests. The Tides Foundation has gotten money from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF); it also contributed to organizations that have supported the protests. But Tides is gigantic, with hundreds of millions in assets, a small fraction of which was donated by OSF. Tracing money upstream to Soros (or other “Biden donors”) is an exercise not in determining responsibility but in meeting demand for non-student originators.
More importantly, though, there’s no reason to think that the protests are centrally and uniquely powered by organizations that received this funding. Again, the simple explanation is that left-leaning organizations received money and are contributing to a cause popular on the left. There isn’t even any reason to think that significant funding is needed for the protests to exist. Camping out in cheap tents is not only inexpensive, but in the abstract it’s an utterly unremarkable activity for college-age people to engage in. One might more justifiably wonder who’s funding young people’s trips to Coachella.
The protests generate as much support from Democrats overall as from people under 30, as polling released by YouGov last week shows. More than half of Democrats are over 50. Did the Tides Foundation get to them, too? Or did someone else brainwash them?
Maybe it was TikTok. That’s the favorite boogeyman for many critics of the protests and of young people’s politics in general. That less than a third of people under 30 get news from TikTok and that people in that age group make up a larger chunk of Reddit’s news-consuming audience than TikTok’s is brushed away.
Early efforts to blame TikTok for views of the war — and by extension, to blame the app’s Chinese-owned parent company — were confusing correlation for causation. But it’s not a coincidence that Congress passed legislation forcing the sale of TikTok in the wake of that rhetoric. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pointed specifically to those claims last week when talking about the legislation.
We’re back to the same place: The simplest explanation is that young people are more sympathetic to the Palestinian position than older people (as they were even before the war) and that it doesn’t take many who feel strongly about it before a movement can gain a foothold.
We’ve seen this before. In 1970, the pollster Harris & Associates asked Americans who or what was to blame for campus protests targeting the Vietnam War — a cause that people now broadly view as just. “Radical student groups” were blamed by more respondents than anything else. More than three-quarters blamed college professors. In fifth place (of eight) came “the continuing war in Vietnam.”
Then, as now, some other factor was sought out.
There is one other reason that the NYPD’s leadership might be so eager to blame non-students for the unrest (and not simply that police tend to be more politically conservative than the populations they serve). Last week was the second time that New York police cleared Columbia’s campus. The first time was in mid-April, an event that coincided with a surge in media attention being paid to the protests and to an increase in new encampments at colleges around the country.
The police response at Columbia has been identified as a trigger for protests elsewhere. And while correlation is not causation, it is easier to point to the actions of the well-funded NYPD organization as a reason for the surge in protests than to the actions of the Tides Foundation.