Factual Dispatch #67 - Seymour Streisand Strikes

This post is not about Israel. This post is not about Gaza. This post is about the cornucopia of unforced errors made by institutional leaders over the last two months. This post is about the effects of bad crisis management, worse optics, and the Road Not Taken (big ups Bob Frosty) by the adultiest of adults America has. Their actions, not those of the high school & college students, but those of the cops, university presidents, and gov’t officials, all the way up to and including our president.

At the moment, about 100 students at Columbia have rebuilt the encampment for the 3rd time. In response, the NYPD is back at it again with the cop vans.

The first encampment at Columbia was built back in April, built by a thicket of pro-Palestine student groups. This organized protest was bulldozed by the NYPD, resulting in the arrest of over 100 students. Interestingly, student journalists at Columbia Spectator note that the second encampment started to form in real-time as the NYPD was demolishing the first. As cops seized and destroyed their property, more and more students joined the second encampment. This one was allowed to remain for days, while the university pretended to negotiate with the students. It all could have gone away then, but instead Minouche Shafik will win the 2024 award for “Least Stoic and/or Aware Person in Power,” narrowly edging out NYC Mayor Eric “Swagless McGee” Adams.

Instead of allowing the kids to protest their little firey hearts out, on April 29th Columbia President Shafik declared that the students needed to disburse “or else.” In response to that, radicalized students charged toward Hamilton Hall, one that had been seized in protests multiple times since the 60s.

The NYPD, asked by the president of Columbia and urged on by the Mayor and a nightmare blunt rotation of billionaires, swarmed what the protesters dubbed “Hind’s Hall.” Columbia’s Hamilton hall, renamed Hind’s Hall by the student protesters, in honor of a 6 year old Palestinian girl, slain in the Israeli reprisals on Gaza. The mayor and Shafik forgot the central precept of a crisis: The Streisand Effect must not occur.

(Editor’s Note: For the youths, the “Streisand Effect” refers to when Barbra Streisand sued a photographer who posted an aerial photograph of her mansion in Malibu. Not only did she lose the case, but public awareness of it led to the photo being seen by almost half a million people, when it had only been seen by 6 before her lawsuit. Mike Masnick of Techdirt named it the “Streisand Effect” in 2005.)

The deletion of the 2nd encampment went hand in hand with pro-Palestine encampments and calls for university divestment spreading like wildfire. In the weeks after, UCLA saw 200 of its own arrested after police violence that wouldn’t have been out of place during the George Floyd protests. 80 were arrested when Washington University in St. Louis saw its pro-Palestinian protest camp cleared. Professors joined calls for boycotts & divestment from Israeli companies, and have been getting arrested by the truckload, arm in arm with their students.

As of May 8th, protests had taken place in 45 states across 140 universities, and in another 25 countries. Universities in UK had been coping with students calling for divestment, actually winning a divestment agreement from the University of York in April. That didn’t keep the student protests from snowballing into actions at another 22 universities across Great Britain.

Nine in Australia, 23 in Canada (polite as ever, one only lasted an hour and was cleaned up promptly by its creators), 14 in Italy, 8 in Japan, and another dozen in the Netherlands. Dutch protests saw swift police actions to clear them, resulting in over a thousand people starting new protests at the University of Amsterdam, who shut their campus in response, just like Columbia did. Attending a satellite campus? Columbia’s dual-degree program at Sciences-Po in France, and the NYU campuses in Berlin, Paris and Buenos Freaking Aires saw a sit-down strikes, encampments, and protest actions. South Africa, Costa Rica, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, Panama, Lebanon, Romania, Kuwait, Tunisia, Bangladesh, and Yemen have seen protests and university encampments.

And the kids mean business. A pre-existing coalition of almost 90 Columbia student orgs called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” delivered a detailed set of requests, with receipts, including spreadsheets of the university’s holdings. What are all those students & “outside agitators” (more on that later) demanding?

• Divestment from individual stocks or bonds from war profiteering companies like Google, Raytheon, Microsoft, and Amazon.

• Divestment from ETFs that bundle companies together to deliver diversified exposure to those stocks.

• Transparent financial reporting, which Columbia falls far short in, compared to other Ivy League schools. 

• Columbia leadership to spotlight journalists being murdered and support for the ICC case brought by Reporters Without Borders.

How sophisticated is the student analysis? Given this was a leaflet being passed out before the Second Fall, quite:

Smart college students know that the best universities are basically a hedge fund with a school on the side. Columbia owns a hospital system, miles of real estate, billions in research dollars, an undergraduate school of arts & sciences, professional finishing schools for Biz, Law, Nursing, and Education, that hedge fund to manage their endowment, and a donation & development operation that matches the American Red cross in scale. When you frame Columbia as a firm that generates $5.8 billion in revenue annually, you’d be forgiven if you question why Columbia should have bent over backwards to please undergraduate students that contribute less than 4% of Columbia’s total revenue. The answer? Optics. From that same analysis from Columbia alum Adam Tooze:

Adam is right. Adults are yelling at a child to shut up from the front seat of a car while driving, only to have the kid yell louder. The less they’re listened to or taken seriously, the louder they must shout, as described here: 

But maybe it’s not the kids right? Maybe it’s those “outside agitators” right? Nope. Were there ever outside agitators in our history? Of course not, as this deep-dive from CNN reminds us. The long history of authoritarian assholes or aspirational autocrats like George Wallace using the trope to justify repression is depressingly detailed. MLK referred to the term in his Letter from a Birmingham jail:

None of this is new, but it is depressingly predictable. If the protests were ignored, we’d know how authorities feel about it. But, cops & campus security across the world attacked it with the fire and fury that you’d expect them to greet an invading alien army with.

Where does that bring us? We’re past snipers being deployed to university quads, harassment at UCLA from pro-IDF bystanders and frat boys doing violence at ASU protected by police, and Meta being shown to algorithmically obliterate pro-protest content. Some IG posts wouldn’t embed properly in Substack, to show you how deep the rot goes. While all of this happens, pro-Palestine punk shows are emerging in Brooklyn.

Brown, Tufts, Northwestern University, Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), Rutgers University, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis met their students and in some cases, cut deals on divestment and protest freedoms. Wesleyan and the University of California at Berkeley, let encampments continue unbothered. Guess which students are headed into summer vacation without war stories to tell their friends back home? Students who got beat, jailed and suspended for doing what every generation has done in college for the last 100 years, are probably going to hate cops and throw the finger up at authority for the rest of their lives. This is how you accidentally engineer resistance.

The universities that allowed students to protest or met with them to discuss divestment, weren’t the Ivy League, the most elite, or the most well funded. They just understood how this would all play out. Hilariously, $67 million in donations are being withheld by Columbia alumni until all disciplinary charges against offending students are dropped.

A generation ago, the Pentagon spent our money to spy on our peaceful activist neighbors. Today, we’re spying on student protesters and making it easier to do so in the future. A generation ago, our overreaction to 9/11 created the Department of Homeland Security. Today, our overreaction to campus protests is creating the Homeland Security Intelligence Advisory Board, a 40 member panel, with literally secret membership. 

When millennials protested the Iraq/Afghanistan War, we were treated like dogshit activists and spied on continually. But we weren’t kettled, arrested, held without bail, or fired from our jobs. If my fellow war protesters & I went back to their dorms and found themselves locked out or expelled, I’d imagine our lives would have been a lot shittier. Let’s give these kids the same grace. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s great PR.

Keep your head up,tn