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Thank you for your ruthlessness, Michelle. You’re such a great, gentle — we should make you the president of Columbia University.

I mean, Michelle’s repressive society, it’s going to look very different out there, everywhere —

[MUSIC PLAYING]

— not just Columbia. From “New York Times Opinion,” I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen. And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

Sadly, our beloved Carlos is out this week. And Ross has a filthy head cold. Nevertheless, we will press on. And this just means that Lydia and I will have to talk extra, which should be exciting because today, I want to talk about the college protests that are taking place across the country.

The situation has gotten quite political, on and off campus. And it’s getting increasingly contentious. So I want to get everyone’s thoughts on what the lasting effect of these campus protests is going to be for academic institutions, and more broadly, just for our politics.

But to kick us off, I want to get down into the weeds on the campuses. And, Lydia, you spent a lot of time reporting on the protests at Columbia last week. So you want to tell us what you saw?

Yeah. I have sort of an unusual vantage point on this whole situation. I just happened to be at Columbia two weeks ago. I was speaking at a class the day that the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, decided to call in the NYPD.

I saw the encampment. It was a bunch of kids hanging out, chanting various slogans, none of which seemed particularly outre to me. But I was sort of stunned to see an hour later that they had decided to bring in the NYPD. And those same arrested students, I caught up with a few hours later because I live a block from police headquarters, which is where they take protesters, and process them, and then kind of release them.

So I’ve had a chance to spend quite a bit of time and do a fair bit of reporting and then return to Columbia campus. And it’s clear that there is a really, really, really strong and motivated movement out there for people who are really, really upset about what’s happening in Gaza and want their universities and institutions to listen to their demands for various things, like divesting their endowments, changing other policies.

And I think a lot of people are asking, are these protests motivated by anti-Semitism? Are they violent? I didn’t see any violence. I think anti-Semitism, it seems silly to try and pretend that there is absolutely none anywhere in any of these protest movements. But these seemed like pretty peaceful, pretty chill student protests.

That seems to have changed in the last 24 hours, just in the sense that both at Columbia, where a group of students took over a very famous Hall on campus, and then also around the country, where there are lots and lots of other protests going on, there have been, in some cases, really violent counter-protests.

So things do seem to be getting more and more hectic. And where this goes next is anybody’s guess. But it seems really, really, really bad.

So we’ve seen these college administrators, who are in the middle of all this, trying to figure out what to do, what role to play. And different schools are responding in different ways. I mean, do you guys think that any of them have responded notably well?

[CHUCKLING]

And there’s silence. Well, I — you mean broken only by a rasp. I mean, I guess my general view of this situation is that it’s sort of an extension of the problem that universities have been struggling with ever since the Hamas massacres in Israel and the war in Gaza began.

There is this long tradition of left-wing students protest at most elite American universities, Columbia very much included, that over the course of the last 50 or 60 years, has been sort of burnished and romanticized as a kind of essential aspect of what it means to be a politically engaged college student.

So you have that view joined with the sense that I think really built up in the last five years on universities, that when people are protesting in the name of anti-racist, anti-colonialism, a lot of the ideas that inform protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza, they’re sort of assumed to be right and have a lot of moral authority.

And I think that universities sort of carried that assumption, for instance, throughout the George Floyd protests, that whatever rules might be broken, students were basically in the right. But in this case, Israel and Gaza, the universities themselves are just deeply divided.

And so schools are stuck, in a way, having, on the one hand, this idea of protest in general and left-wing protest in particular as something that has to be given a certain degree of deference, but also having this particular issue create unusual divisions on campus, where lots and lots of people who would have deferred to a different kind of left-wing protest, don’t want to defer because they think the pro-Palestinian protesters, whether or not they’re anti-Semitic, are just wrong. So it’s a mess.

Definitely it’s a mess. But then there’s also just the sort of practical, tactical questions. Northwestern University took a pretty conciliatory stance. And they just negotiated with the students and then ended up disbanding the encampment after discussions. Wesleyan also decided not to —

I think Brown —

— bring in the [? cup. ?] Yeah, Brown has done it, right? Berkeley, UC Berkeley. So there are lots of schools that decided to talk their way out of this.

And, look, I don’t like to play the game of who started it because it’s truly a childish game. But the question of who escalated this, particularly in the case of Columbia, what was Minouche Shafik thinking calling in the NYPD? It just didn’t make any sense. And it threw gas on the fire. You started to see more encampments happening in places where they weren’t happening before.

This whole thing kind of spreads like wildfire. And now we have much, much, much bigger political conflagration. And, I don’t know, I’m not a parent, but the University, if it’s in Loco Parentis, if you’re calling the cops on your kids, you’re really not doing a great job. So I guess I really struggle to understand how they have failed to de-escalate here.

Well, I definitely want us to drill down into what happens when these outside forces that are beyond the campus come into play. But first I want to take a step back. I mean, Ross is talking about the romanticizing of protests.

Although it is notable that you’re talking about Columbia being famous for being the site of a lot of protests over the years. In the late ‘60s, when protesters took this over, they called the police in. They dragged those protesters out downstairs and arrested hundreds of people. This is not some consequence-free thing.

And then later, they shot and killed four college students at Kent State. I mean I don’t think we look back on that and think, oh, yeah, they really sorted that out. And then furthermore, I don’t think we look back at any of these so-called left-wing student protests and think, oh, they were on the wrong side of things. They really shouldn’t have been protesting against apartheid. Or that Vietnam War, we really could have won that. I mean, they’re —

I can think of some student protests that I don’t think were correct. But —

But those are the big examples, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think there were real crackdowns on anti-Vietnam protests, that then most people involved in higher education decided had been on the right side of history. And then when the divestment protests came around, I believe there were fewer crackdowns. These were the protests, especially in the 1980s, urging universities to divest from South Africa, which are one of the models invoked here.

And then again, I think in the last five years or so, especially in the Trump era, especially in 2020, there’s just been an assumption that the protesters are the voice of conscience and so on.

But that landscape has shifted. And the example of these outside forces is part of it, that politicians in Washington DC have sort of woken up to the fact that — I mean, the baseline here is that these universities are incredibly rich. They’re huge corporate entities that manage a huge hedge fund and also teach some classes, right?

Oh, and don’t forget the real estate, also has a huge real estate portfolio.

And the real estate manages a real estate portfolio, right? And politicians, especially Republican politicians, but not only them, have sort of woken up to the fact that when there are protests on these campuses that their constituents don’t like, in fact, these really rich institutions get a lot of money and tax breaks from the federal government and are therefore political.

Congress does not stand fully outside the modern university. It’s in there in its own way. So again, it’s a mess. I’m just going to end every —

Yeah, but I think —

— statement I make with it’s a mess.

Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a mess. But I also think that one of the questions that I’ve been asking is what exactly is a university now? Last night I was at a dinner with a group of professors from NYU and Columbia. And these are professors who are sort of long tenured.

And they were asking this question and saying, like, there was a time when it felt as though professors and students were the heart of the university. And the decisions, and the conversations, and the debates that happened there were the ones that mattered.

And the thing that I think is just so striking about this situation is that this seems to be a conversation that’s happening almost outside of the university. It was notable to me that the president of Columbia sent a letter to the NYPD requesting them to come in. But repeatedly, professors and students at Columbia said, our campus is being raided, and we have not received any email or any kind of communication from the administration of the University.

So it’s almost like there’s this conversation that’s going on between Congress, and the University administration led by the president, and the trustees who generally are just very, very, very rich and often highly politically connected people, that just feels like totally disconnected from what you would assume is the heart of a university, which is students and faculty.

Yeah, I mean, I have —

Well, presumably —

Go ahead, Ross.

No, go ahead.

A couple of things, one, talking to my kids, I have a 20 year old at Boulder, which is not like Columbia and it’s a hotbed of liberal activism. But he has a lot of sympathy to the complications of the situation in Gaza. But when they started arresting students, he’s like, what is with the overreaction?

So you have a complicated issue. But then when it starts escalating, you drive people into camps and you drive this polarization . And while I am extremely sympathetic to Ross’s point that conservatives and Republicans have seen college and academia in general, it’s kind of a hostile environment. I think there’s just no way that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other lawmakers, from both parties, mind you, have any business touring Columbia and other campuses.

Why?

They just don’t.

Why not?

Because it just makes it worse. If what you’re trying to do is get past this

Well, you’re not — but that —

— and not turn it into a national issue, where —

But why don’t they have a right to turn it into a national issue?

They do have the right, Ross. There’s a difference between what you can do and what you should do.

But what I am saying is put yourself in the position of a normal Republican, for a minute, of whom a few. These are incredibly rich —

It’s not just Republicans —

— and powerful —

— who are doing this. The Democrats are touring as well.

You have incredibly wealthy, powerful institutions, whose self-professed job is to educate the American elite, that receive large sums of money and tax breaks from the federal government. And you have an opportunity to shift —

To exploit the situation.

For — yeah, that’s what politics is. If you think Harvard, and Yale, and Columbia —

Because they know it’s not going to solve the underlying situation.

OK, but —

All they’re trying to do is [INAUDIBLE] the Republican campaign arm of Congress is selling fuck Hamas t-shirts in response to this. How responsible is that?

The actual policy that some of these Republicans would like to do is to raise the tax on big endowments. That seems totally responsible and reasonable to me.

Yeah, but that’s not what they’re doing with this.

Yes. They’re also trying to win elections.

And they’re doing it on the backs of college students. And if that’s — that’s fine, as long as we’re very clear about the fact that they don’t care about these college students.

OK, well, let’s talk about the college students for a minute, since we can get wound up a little bit here. So I agree, the Columbia president’s decision was a bad decision to send in the NYPD. Why did she make that decision? I would say, presumably, because a number of Jewish students and probably their parents expressed a feeling of not being safe on their campuses.

Now, I have not walked around the protests, but I’ve walked around the protests in Newhaven. So I’m not going to tell you how much hostility to Jewish students there is in these protests. I don’t think we’re going to exactly quantify it. There certainly is some hostility to Jewish students. In that context, those students are also stakeholders in the University. And that is the explanation for why universities are taking these actions.

Well, hang on. Hang on a second. I mean, I did go and speak to a number of Jewish students who were inside the encampment. And I just want to say, I’m not Jewish. None of us here are Jewish. I don’t presume to represent or speak about the way any person is experiencing this. What I’ve tried to do is actually just talk to people about what they’re thinking and feeling. And I’ve scoured and scoured and scoured and looked for people who were on the receiving end of actual anti-Semitic statements, or threats, or things like that. And what I heard was a very real, genuine sense of being upset from Jewish students who are not participating in the encampments. And there are a number of Jewish students who are participating in the encampments.

But I don’t think this is a question that you can ultimately solve in some kind of objective way. There’s not a kind of anti-Semitism detector that’s just going to ding and tell you, yes, this is anti-Semitic, therefore, it’s out of bounds. Or no, it’s not, therefore, it’s OK. All of these things are in the eye of the beholder.

And so I think that we’re really at this place where we have to take seriously the feelings of these students who feel hurt, upset, perhaps unsafe. And I talked to students who felt that way. But I think that we also have to take that feeling seriously in the context of many students who have very, very strong feelings about what’s going on in Gaza and also Muslim students, Arab students, Palestinian students who feel like they’ve had targets on their backs since October 7th.

So there are a lot of feelings to be managed in this situation. And there’s a lot of people feeling threatened.

So again, I want to say this is an example of the point I’m making, which is that, yes, it turns out that the world is very complicated. But colleges have been making decisions for many years on the basis of the idea that if a group of students expresses as a sense of threat, grievance, a feeling of being oppressed, that you defer to them.

And so now, colleges are in a position where you have converging and conflicting arguments along those lines. And it’s just the system that colleges have put in place doesn’t know how to manage that. That’s one point.

A second point, again, I have not reported on the Columbian encampments. I have, however, been teaching classes at Yale for the last two semesters. So I have had a lot of contact with students, including Jewish students at Yale, after October 7th.

And we don’t even have to debate anti-Semitism versus non anti-Semitism. We can just say that in the aftermath of October 7th, on elite college campuses, there were expressions of support for and solidarity with the actions of Hamas that killed a lot of Jews. I think that that is a reasonable general situation in which Jewish students could feel threatened in a way that goes beyond the normal level of threat discourse on these campuses.

Now, our protesters at Columbia wearing t-shirts with hang gliders on them, in what numbers are —

Absolutely not.

— invocations of solidarity? How often does someone say glory to our martyrs? I —

I never heard it once.

OK, I agree —

Never heard it once.

— well, let’s agree, then, that we’re not going to quantify this. However, we do have, for instance, the example of Khemlani James, who is one of the student leaders. I’m not going to say he’s the only student leader, one of the student leaders at Columbia University’s encampment, who has said a lot of things about Zionists and their right to life —

Vile.

— and compared them — right, vile things, right? And if you imagined a world where this was a pro-Trump encampment and there was video circulating of leaders doing sort of QAnon stuff — and the Khemlani James stuff is, like, left-wing QAnon-level stuff, talking about how we’re going to purge the Deep State, and put everybody to death, and so on — no one on the left would be talking about how, well, there’s a lot of conflicting claims of victimization. No. People would be apeshit about that.

And again, the reason part of the University is freaked out and part of it is freaked out in the other direction is that this is an issue that doesn’t just fall into the usual left-right divisions. It’s an intra-liberal argument. And universities don’t know how to deal with it.

Maybe. Maybe. First of all, I think there’s just been absolute and universal condemnation of this college student who said these terrible things. I have not seen anyone in a position of authority stand to defend him.

But it is interesting. I mean, when I was reporting the column that I wrote about Columbia, I went back and looked at some of the things that were said on the Columbia campus, when American young people were dying by the thousands in Vietnam.

These were chants that were quoted in the “Columbia Spectator.” One side’s right, one side’s wrong, we’re on the side of the Viet Cong. Save Hanoi, lose Saigon, victory to the Viet Cong. I mean —

That’s a good example of how many anti-Vietnam protesters were not on the correct side.

No, of course, right? They were not on the correct side. But the —

Because it was bad that the Viet Cong won, right?

No. But the —

Do we agree on that? no? Was it good or bad that the Viet Cong won?

That’s not the point.

Stop. Stop.

My point is —

Stop.

— it was bad. But what I will say — what I will say is that from 1968 until the end of the war, 38,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, countless, countless, countless people in Cambodia, and Vietnam, and Laos died as well.

And we were fighting a pointless, unwinnable war that the Pentagon knew was pointless and unwinnable at that point. Our public officials were lying to us about it. I just really, really feel like I understand the motivations of the students here, even if some of their tactics — and I personally am repelled by some of their tactics, are gross.

We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So I don’t want to get too specific to Colombia because this has spread all over the country, not just elite colleges. What should the college administrators do? And I think, Ross, you are on to something here with your first point. They’ve made this bed, to some degree, because there has been this sense, in a lot of colleges, that if somebody says something that makes you uncomfortable, then that is a terrible kind of situation and needs to be addressed, in a way that is not easily dealt with in this particular circumstance.

That said, you got all these college campuses. You’ve got all these administrators. What should they be doing?

I think that universities should use discretion. There’s a difference between an encampment that creates hassles and inconvenience in the takeover of a building. And I’m OK with what — as far as we can tell, what Columbia did with the building takeover, sending in the police to take the students out. I’m fine with that. I don’t think it was a good idea to send the police into the initial encampment. So that’s where I would draw the line.

And obviously, when you’re encampment is inside a library or something, then I’m not sure. But I think there’s a difference between occupying public space in a sort of problematic way and taking over buildings, which is a more violent kind of act, especially the way it actually went down.

It is reasonable for universities to have a policy that allows protests and says if you break university rules of a certain point while protesting, we will use physical restraint to prevent you from breaking those rules.

All right, Lydia, what about you?

Yeah. I mean, look, again, I come back to this question of what is a university, right? A university is a place where you send not quite fully formed young people to essentially learn stuff and grow up, right? They’re very delicate ecosystems. And they’re essentially communities. And we’re all Gen X-ers, right? So we had a different experience of what it was to be in the university than I think what we have now.

And, I mean, look, I would agree with Ross that this sort of — I don’t know, maybe I’m mischaracterizing — but this kind of hegemonic university administration, like vampire squid, that is attached to a giant hedge fund and these real estate holdings. That is fundamentally I think a corruption of what these communities should be.

And part of the problem of why we’re having these kinds of disconnects — This is why I invoke the idea of calling the cops on your kids. Because I don’t get the sense that — and again, I keep speaking about Columbia because that’s the one that I know best, because I’ve spent the most time there, and I’m also an alumnus of the journalism school there — but I just don’t get the sense that the administration of Columbia is thinking about this as a kind of organic community, as opposed to a legally structured corporation.

In a family, there’s give and take, right? There’s the sense of compromise and discussion. And so I think the question that I would ask is how do we get our institutions of higher learning back to being those kinds of communities and not being these kind of weird bureaucratic quasi [CHUCKLES]:: quasi corporate, very much influenced by politics places.

And this is the point of convergence, where we just need — once the Republicans defund the universities, then they can return to the kind of organic scholarly activist communities that Lydia wants them to be.

There we go.

It’s unity. We’ve achieved unity. Only Speaker Mike Johnson can save the modern university.

Can bring us together?

But this brings us back to the point of whatever’s happening with these protests, whatever happens once all these dorms shut down for the summer and all these kids go off to their jobs, or internships, or whatever, this is going to be echoing in the political realm, especially during this campaign year. We’ve already seen Donald Trump come out and say, are these kids going to be treated like the January 6th protesters? This is not going away on a big P political level.

So what’s the best case scenario you guys see for this going forward, versus really what’s going to happen, which we all know is going to be really ugly and divisive?

Well, the wonderful thing about the academic year is it has these built-in kind of pressure release valves. There are breaks. Kids go home. So so in terms of what happens to the students, I mean, one of the things really, striking to me is how scared these students are of facial recognition, of being, essentially, doxed and their entire future’s being essentially foreclosed by being identified and put on the side of a van driven around New York City. And I think you’re starting to see —

Because some of them want to join the vampire

Yes. [ROSS LAUGHS]

Because, Ross, they’re college kids, right?

Of course.

I mean, they’re confused.

No, no. no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One can have a conscience and also want to be of the world right, like? These are not either or. And I guess that’s my point —

Absolutely.

— is that these are young people who are — we believe that this is just cause. But we also believe that we’re living in this insanely polarized time. And Bill Ackman might Tweet out a picture of my face and ruin my life. And we didn’t have to deal with that when we were in college, right? There was no Twitter. There was no Bill Ackman.

There are these interesting sort of pressure valves and things that lead toward amelioration on the side of the students, I think the problem is that politically, it’s in the interests of politicians to stop that from happening. They don’t want this to go away. This is wonderful. They wanna keep the pressure up. They want everybody to be all riled up about this issue.

Well, the Biden Administration wants it to go away.

They want it to go away, yes, it’s true.

So part of the reason the whole situation is a big deal is because it devides the liberal upper class against itself. If it’s just Republicans shouting about college students and the college students aren’t doing that much, I don’t think that’s a huge problem for the Democrats.

The problem for the Democrats is when the story is, the left has turned against Joe Biden. And that’s a problem. On both ends, it’s a problem, where the left might actually turn against Joe Biden. And he might lose votes. And it’s also a problem because, right now, Joe Biden needs to convince a bunch of moderate-to-conservative Americans to vote for him instead of Trump. And the situation isn’t helping with that.

Well, the primary — a primary rule of politics is you latch on to any issue that divides your opposition and unites your own party. And this is a classic one. I mean, Republicans have no split within them over this issue. And so they are indeed —

Except for Tucker Carlson.

Fair.

And Candace Owens.

Well I mean, they have their they have their own anti-Semitism problem.

There is an Israel critical, if you will, right. But I agree it’s not — it is not especially well represented.

From an electoral standpoint, if Tucker decides he wants to run for the presidency, we can have this discussion.

All right, we’re going to leave it there. And when we come back, we’re going to get hot and cold

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All right, guys, let’s turn to a little distraction before we go. Who’s got something for us? I do. So I have just finished watching the Netflix show, “Ripley,” which is an interpretation of a wonderful, famous book, “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” And I’m less hot on that show, although I think it’s certainly watchable. It stars the man known as Hot Priest from” “Fleabag,” Andrew Scott. It’s really interesting and in some ways very faithful interpretation of the novel by Patricia Highsmith.

But what I actually want to endorse is just more broadly doing a deep dive on various interpretations of a literary character. Because it sent me down this rabbit hole. I watched one of the earliest interpretations, which was a French film called “Purple Noon,”

Purple noon.

— which starred a much, much, much too handsome and charismatic Alain Delon as Ripley. It didn’t quite work. But anyway, the thing that I’m endorsing is do a deep dive on some literary character or work that has been interpreted many times over. And just think about it. I’m really enjoying that.

I’ve watched a couple of those. And the Andrew Scott interpretation of the character is not resonating with me. I don’t think he’s quite ingratiating enough or kind of appealing enough. Now, it’s also beautiful. It’s done in black and white. And it is so gorgeous.

We talked about the Black and white of reimaginings with Jamel in the last episode,. And I think it’s completely gorgeous. But I’m totally with you. And there are potentially so many good options out there for digging into.

Ross, do you have a favorite Ripley?

I love, love the Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow version. So I have the opposite thing, where I’m hesitant to watch the new one because I’m like, one, obviously I respect black and white. But I’m like, how can you lose the Italian color. The gorgeousness of Italy is so essential to Jude Law on a boat.

The gorgeousness of Jude Law? And the blue of Jude law’s eyes. I mean, woo!

I have no in saying that Jude Law is incredibly gorgeous in the 1999 “Talented Mr. Ripley.” But you get sort of that where you’re — my wife loves, loves, the John Wayne version of “True Grit.” You can’t sell her on the Coen brothers version, which is — I don’t think it’s bad. It’s interesting, right?

But she’s like, if it’s — no. She’s never going to watch it because — or she did watch it and never wants to watch it again.

But sometimes it works really well. Like, the Jeremy Brett version of Sherlock Holmes my household was big on, until they did the Benedikt Cumberbatch version, which we resisted watching for a long time. But I liked it. And it also had Andrew Scott, who, as Moriarty, is to die for.

That’s right.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, I’m just here for reinterpretation. “Shogun” is another one.

I have not tried that. Should I?

Let’s save that for the next podcast —

OK then. There we go.

— and we’ll talk about.

There we go.

[LAUGHS]:

Until then, guys, happy watching.

All right, thanks, guys.

Feel better, Ross.

Take care.

I already do. I’m invigorated.

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“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Walker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our. executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.