Reflections on the New Encampment Culture

There were many puzzling features of the recent protests. This coming year, universities must course correct—while protecting the right to dissent.

(Photo by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images.)

This article is part of an ongoing Persuasion series on the future of universities.

Universities are in crisis—losing public support, shaken by internal divisions, facing angry donors and alumni, and increasingly straying from their core mission of intellectual curiosity and open inquiry. Our series, which is made possible by the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, will consist of a collection of longform essays and podcast interviews aimed at helping higher education tackle this crisis. 

In today’s installment, Yale professor David Bromwich meditates on the internal logic of the culture of encampments that swept many campuses during the last academic year. He shows the similarities and differences between these protests and earlier movements in the 1960s, while describing the political monoculture that has become more firmly entrenched in universities over the years. To read the other installments in the series, from Eboo Patel’s blueprint for establishing dedicated pluralism programs to William Deresiewicz’s exploration of off-campus learning, click here!

– Yascha and the Persuasion team.

P.S. Do you know someone who would value Persuasion’s content? As the move back to campus begins, this month we're offering 25% off an annual subscription to students, faculty, and parents.

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This is a story of two political cultures. One of them shapes the attitudes that dominate political discussion in American universities. The other culture persists among a broad and reasonably well-informed public outside the universities and their government and philanthropic tributaries. When, in the academic year 2023-24, the two cultures faced each other with expressions of mutual dismay, the moment had been coming for a long time. On October 7, 2023, scores of Hamas fighters broke through the boundaries of Gaza, killed more than 1200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 others: the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. Within hours, 34 student groups at Harvard University had circulated a public letter affirming that “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” (The word “unfolding” covered the violence of the past, the present, and the future.) “Today’s events,” the letter went on to say, “did not occur in a vacuum,” and it added: “The apartheid regime [of Israel] is the only one to blame.” The signers concluded by urging solidarity with the Palestinian suffering which was sure to follow once the Israeli retaliation in Gaza had commenced.

What shocked many people about the student letter was its heartlessness. Even as the bodies were being counted, the signers told us not to blame the killers but to redirect our gaze and fix all responsibility on Israel. To anyone acquainted with the climate on American campuses, the timing of the letter was disturbing (not a moment’s pause for grief), but the sentiments were hardly surprising. They reflected the only highly visible political viewpoint that exists in universities today. Other opinions are tolerated, and have a lively presence in the curriculum, but settler vs. colonized, oppressor vs. oppressed, white people vs. persons of color—these moral antinomies guide the discourse in student-initiated and faculty-sponsored groups and events alike.

This pattern goes back at least as far as the mid-1980s. I wrote about the widening division between the academic and the worldly political environment in a book, Politics by Other Means, which ended with a hope that the academic culture of politics would grow less narrow and self-involved once the Reagan years had passed. That did not happen. As the numbers of the college-bred increased, they grew disdainful or even unconscious of orientations different from theirs. Gradually, the academic culture of politics turned into a separate entity, and instead of retreating, it spread beyond its borders. Large swaths of the literate middle class now have naturalized the jargon of trauma, navigate, spaces, marginalized, center (used as a verb), and privilege (used as both noun and verb). The therapeutic and bureaucratic language that got its start in universities has come to characterize a distinctive polite culture—epitomized by National Public Radio and audible (if not yet pervasive) throughout the liberal-corporate media. Younger media personalities have brought to work, in places like Google and Apple, the habits and usages of the academic environment. So, too, the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley startups, showrunners of the hip cable TV shows, and NGO staffers inside and outside the United States. Looking back, one can see that the frictionless corporate style of the Clinton years served to conceal the distance between the polite culture and the remnant of popular opinion it never absorbed.

That normal politics on campus and off had parted company was plain enough by 2023, but few could have imagined the depth of the division. Genocide, for example, is a word that to most Americans evokes the Nazi destruction of European Jews: a plan to exterminate an entire people based on religion and race. The meaning of the word, however, has broadened over the past several decades; genocide is now used by some to refer to a policy that involves war crimes or large numbers of deaths, even if its executors do not, to judge by the evidence, plan or envisage the destruction of a people or culture, as the legal definition of the term requires.

Meanwhile, another old word had been given an unfamiliar meaning: Zionist. This was once a non-pejorative description of the founders of Israel who aimed to create a homeland for Jews. Now, however, it was a kind of polemical shorthand: it assumed the identification of any supporter of Israel with the expansionist vision of a “greater Israel” espoused by the Netanyahu government. In this way, Zionist became a local variant of the generic term “racist.”

Terminological shifts like these are a usual development in spoken language, but they seldom capture the passion of a crowd so suddenly. How did it happen?

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You can date the tremors preceding the 2023 eruption close to the start of Barack Obama’s second term. Many students went out from campus to the streets in the months after the killing of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; and the 1619 Project (a delayed product of the mood of 2013-14) signaled an unprecedented handshake between the journalistic and public education establishments: a thoroughgoing revisionist history, expeditiously composed by a picked body of journalists, was passed straight to the middle schools without demur. The polite culture supervised a far greater swing of public investment after the death of George Floyd, with the commitments by educational, corporate, professional, and cultural institutions to augment their usual functions by oversight bodies responsible for diversity and “inclusivity” (a new word for a value that has never been defined).

Black Americans or, more broadly, persons-of-color, by this reasoning were roughly synonymous with Palestinians, and the ground was prepared for the campus manifestations that four years later would turn almost overnight from anti-war to pro-Palestine. The Palestinian flags were a further surprising development that should not have surprised. On campuses and in college-bred suburbs and city blocks, Ukrainian flags had lately become a far more common sight than American flags—an identity-marker for American liberals who wanted to be known as good people with an international perspective. In April and May, the Palestinian flag would do the same work for anti-West progressives. This transfer of loyalty is an odd choice, when you think about it. What, exactly, are American liberals and progressives saying when they wave their non-American flags? The gesture says to the passerby, “I am part of something greater and more interesting than my surroundings.” It is a signal of chosen affinity rather than ascriptive identity; a relief, in a way, from the identity politics channeled into the cultural bloodstream by two generations of college mentors and their disciples in the polite culture.

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What Justice Requires in Gaza

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Where did this leave Jewish students? “I don’t know which I found more discouraging,” one of them told me, “the fact that they hate us, or that they don’t really know why they hate us.” At Yale, during the first couple of days, I walked around the embryonic protest site and saw a table and makeshift awning with a placard identifying Jews against the bombing and another identifying non-Jews. They joined forces later, but an expansion of aims would have been more impressive. After all, it seemed to begin as an anti-war protest, delivered against the United States as the sponsor of so many wars and proxy wars. Yet the passion and momentum soon went the other way. Enlistment in the cause became indistinguishable from rooting for one side, the Palestinians, against the other side, the Israelis (or “Zionism”). The exclusionist temper of the Columbia protest emerged in tactics like one leader’s announcement, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp. We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to destroy our community. Please join me in this chain”—followed by step-by-step instructions to the human chain.

Notice the curious emphasis on “privacy.” The protest crowd that called itself a camp or “encampment” (after Occupy and the tent cities in California) might seem to have an interest in portraying itself as a public action. It meant to broadcast a passionate indignation, and by doing so to gain more followers. But at the same time, the camp was private—a home for a separationist community whose valor was proved by its refusal of entry to persons whose clothing or other outward signs rendered them alien to the communion. The term Zionist, in this context, was complex in its valence: hostile, but also evasive and ambiguous. The students to be repelled were visibly Jewish, so it might have meant that all Jews are Zionists (settler-colonialists) by their very nature; yet for most of the students who repeated the “one step forward” chants and movements of the human chain, the usage was likely to have been more prosaic. The intruders were surely supporters of Israel. Nothing further needed saying.

Another feature of the situation should have been puzzling. For it was the usual inhabitants of the campus who had suddenly become intruders, whereas those inside the camp were not even required to be members of the university: they formed a spiritual community that outranked the corporeal institution they had displaced. The spiritual community was drawing a circle around itself from inside; and in this respect, the pro-Palestinian encampments revealed a notable departure from the anti-war movement of the 1960s. Not just fellow students outside the circle but journalists and for that matter outsiders of every kind were excluded. The encampment identity suggested a conviction of virtue so stainless that mere exposure to the worldly could be a degradation. Few of the protesters seemed to know the possible meanings of “from the river to the sea”; and it is doubtful that any image of the second intifada was evoked by the chant of “intifada revolution.”

The beauty, as many participants called it, of the encampment experience was an intensification of the morale-boosting that had been for decades a normal part of political education in many classrooms. Seldom is the teacher’s purpose doctrinal, in any conscious sense, nor is the enforcement rigorous, but the message is consistent, unvaried, largely unopposed, and all of one kind. In the “studies” programs, the history of the United States is recounted as a continuous process of racial subordination at the hands of white privilege. The history of the world is recounted as a process of colonial aggrandizement and oppression at the hands of the West. Among the required readings in humanities and social science classes, an undergraduate in 2024 is likelier to encounter Frantz Fanon than John Stuart Mill.

Many schools, Columbia and UC Berkeley most prominently, also advertise their protest lineage as an attraction of the place—a hallowed tradition that students may be expected to continue. The president of Union Theological Seminary, the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, went further in a recent interview, saying about the seminary itself, “we consider it a sanctuary [against invasion by police], a place of safety. And so, rather than responding with arrests, with penalizing students, we support protesters. We support students learning what it means to find their voice and speak out for justice and freedom.” This stops short of saying that protest is a skill they teach, but it goes beyond an affirmation of support of the right to protest. The suggestion is that political activism is one of the things a university or a seminary ought to assist their students in learning. The academic-pastoral duty in question extends to protection from arrest, even in political actions that gain their moral credibility as acts of civil disobedience. A generalized tacit agreement that this is part of the university’s mission accounts for the amnesty (or penalties so light as to approach amnesty) granted to almost all the students arrested at Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere.

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I had better now make my position clear to avoid a misunderstanding. In April and May, and earlier for that matter, I would have supported a campus teach-in, or better, a campus-originated march on the White House or the Pentagon to demand an immediate Israeli cessation of bombing and to press for the negotiation of a ceasefire, under threat of withdrawal of American support. It took a very few days, however, for the protests to face in an altogether different direction: what began as an anti-war protest had turned anti-Israel, without regard to peace or war, and it seemed clear that, for some people, the Palestinian flag had taken on a new meaning, including the erasure of Israel from the map.

It had become unclear anyway—in strictly political terms—by what logic the universities were the most effectual staging ground for a protest. Yet the encampments, the slogans they chanted, and the symbols they asked to be known by, all seemed a natural expression of the politics that has come in the public mind to represent the universities.

The long-term consequences of the specialization of campus politics have been unhappy for American society generally. Political complexity of mind is rare among students, but the same students will go on to be full-time citizens. Some of the fault is traceable to university administrators: their political position-taking, after recent elections and supreme court decisions and certain shocking local or national events, has seemed to define the boundaries of polite opinion. Such public statements are now being pulled back, with recent moves toward “institutional neutrality,” and that is a good thing. The idea that universities, as if they were a person, should carve out an official stance on social and political issues of the day is a recent innovation; it has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity—neither of which qualifies as an educational value.

What can be done to redress the absence of variety in the political views that are likely to be heard in the typical university or liberal arts college? The reason, to repeat, is not active censorship so much as a vague social intolerance, which follows from the homogeneity of manners and enlightened prejudices acquired by most students before they enter college. Many professors, too, grow fretful when they hear the word “conservative” applied to any aspect of their thinking or behavior; and yet, knowledge of the past makes one necessarily conservative to some extent: there are things one wants to conserve. But no change can be expected on this front so long as students suppress their doubts and questions for fear of being ostracized.

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How To Put a Country Back Together

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Education leaders ought to consider themselves under an obligation to reassert the status of universities as pluralistic institutions. These places exist to support the diverse and often incompatible and sometimes discordant interests and judgments of the people who work there. It is because differences of intellectual pursuit must be tolerated by every member of the institution that a university must not presume to speak on public questions with a single voice. As soon as it does so, it becomes the instrument of a temporarily impressive minority.

A wrong lesson has been learned from an airbrushed memory of the 1960s. The antiwar protests of that time may have begun in college teach-ins, but they went on to organized marches in big cities. Disrupting the universities became part of the program only in a later and decadent phase; and even as the narrowest of tactics, it never made sense. The truth is that “shut-it-down” campus protests were the path of least resistance, the method closest to home, but they pushed against the necessary ethic of a university because they involved an element of coercion.

The implication for the present moment is clear. On no account should students or their faculty supporters be allowed to prevent the speech or disrupt the intellectual work of any member of a university. If students opt out of attending classes, or otherwise fail to satisfy academic expectations, the normal penalties should apply. Meanwhile, of course, the right to dissent has as natural a home in a university as it does in a free society more broadly.

David Bromwich, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books and The Nation, is a professor of English at Yale. His most recent book is How Words Make Things Happen.

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