The arrest, on April 18, of around a hundred Columbia University students gathered against the war in Gaza, led to a large wave of demonstrations on American campuses.
Numerous public interventions denounced the decision of the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, to call on the police to chase away the demonstrators. This should not be seen as the individual gesture of a leader overcome by panic. Since the end of the 1960s, the administrations of American universities have acted with full awareness of the risks of prosecution by law firms serving ultraconservative circles and major university donors, who ensure the good image of the campuses.
Politicians are also not shy about scolding university administrations, as was the case when Representative Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, sent a letter at the end of March to the leadership of Rutgers University castigating administrators, professors and student organizations in a McCarthyite diatribe for creating “a climate of pervasive anti-Semitism.”
Since last week, police interventions on American campuses have resulted in more than several hundred arrests in a few days. In addition to Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, New York University (NYU), the University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University, to name just a few, are part of the long list of campuses where peaceful protests are suppressed by political violence. Everywhere, legal and administrative brutality accompanies police brutality. Far from calming things down, the mass arrests have galvanized the student movement from east to west.
“Inherently dangerous” activities
University managements defend their actions by saying that they have an obligation to ensure security on campuses, in particular by dismantling camps because of the fire risks they represent. Therefore, their decision to call the police would not target the student community itself or its fundamental right to demonstrate.
Controlling demonstrations would not be a political gesture on the part of university management, but the only possible way, according to them, to ensure the safety and protection of people. This is what the management of Princeton University said, for example, after the arrest of two students, because pitching tents “violated University policy”. Depending on management, space occupations, sit-ins and encampments are “inherently dangerous” activities that must be prevented at all costs.
If pitching a tent is a dangerous gesture, we should ask the executives of these universities what they think of the presence of assaults by mounted or armed police, of people thrown to the ground to be arrested or of the use of Tasers. against defenseless young people. The argument of campus security gives carte blanche to police forces, who, far from acting in a manner to protect people and property, brutally charge student groups and even arrest members of the faculty who came only to show their support for the right of students to demonstrate.
In a speech at Columbia University, House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the White House to intervene by calling in the National Guard to put an end to the protests. He took the opportunity to ridicule the protests by asking students to stop wasting their parents’ money and return to working in the classroom. Given the political climate in the United States, it would not be surprising if tragic episodes occurred such as that of May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired on a crowd of demonstrators at the University of State, killing four students and injuring nine others, recalled in the famous song Ohioby Neil Young.
So far, protest movements have been relatively modest on Canadian and Quebec campuses, with the exception of McGill, where an encampment was set up, and Concordia. It remains to be seen whether student groups from French-speaking universities will mobilize. This could happen now or later, if the war continues into the fall or if it is extended by a military occupation of Gaza. The events of 2012 showed us all the violence the police were capable of against the student community. Let us hope that the management of Canadian and Quebec universities will not be tempted to imitate those of our neighbor to the South.