{"id":47542,"date":"2024-05-10T13:09:53","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T21:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=47542"},"modified":"2024-05-10T13:09:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-10T21:09:53","slug":"when-students-are-a-shock-to-the-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/10\/when-students-are-a-shock-to-the-system\/","title":{"rendered":"When Students Are a Shock to the System"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally appeared at TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once upon a time, in another era, maybe even another universe, the head of a university refused to call on the police, the National Guard, or even federal troops<\/a> in the face of student and other protests. Instead, he opened<\/a> the doors of his school to the demonstrators.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of Kingman Brewster, who was the president of Yale University on May 1, 1970, as peaceful<\/a> protests over racial justice and against the Vietnam War were taking place in New Haven, Connecticut. It was just days before, thanks to the killing<\/a> of four demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, anti-Vietnam War protests would \u2014 rather like the present Gaza ones \u2014 spread across<\/a> hundreds of college campuses nationwide. Yale avoided the worst of it, when Brewster, among other things, said<\/a>: \u201cI am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States. In large part, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against Panthers in many parts of the country. It is also one more inheritance from centuries of racial oppression.\u201d I\u2019m sure you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew promptly and publicly called for Brewster\u2019s ouster, while the students united behind him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

No such luck these days, of course. The police are being called onto ever more campuses, starting with Columbia University where the Gaza demonstrations were first launched<\/a>. Had its president, under pressure from the Spiro Agnews of this day, not called in the police to arrest students, there might be no nationwide Gaza protest movement today. Instead, as I\u2019m writing this, more than 2,000 students<\/a> have been arrested across the country, including \u2014 yes! \u2014 44<\/a> for \u201ctrespassing\u201d at Yale.<\/p>\n

Rare indeed has been Brown University<\/a>, where \u201conly\u201d 61 were arrested after two sit-ins and a hunger strike before its president finally agreed to let its governing body vote this fall \u201con a proposal to divest the school\u2019s $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel\u201d and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment there ended peacefully. With that in mind, let TomDispatch <\/em>regular Norman Solomon<\/a>, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/em>, fill you in on the ways in which American students have bravely risked their college careers and their futures to reject what he calls an all-American death culture amid a horrifying war in Gaza to which this country continues to supply<\/a> the most devastating of weaponry.<\/p>\n

Follow\u00a0TomDispatch\u00a0on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and join us on\u00a0Facebook<\/a>. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer\u2019s new dystopian\u00a0novel,\u00a0<\/em>Songlands<\/a>\u00a0(the final one in his Splinterlands series),\u00a0Beverly Gologorsky\u2019s novel\u00a0<\/em>Every Body Has a Story<\/a>,\u00a0and Tom Engelhardt\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>A Nation Unmade by War<\/a>, as well as Alfred McCoy\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power<\/a>, John Dower\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II<\/a>, and Ann Jones\u2019s<\/em> They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America\u2019s Wars: The Untold Story<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Once upon a time, in another era, maybe even another universe, the head of a university refused to call on the police, the National Guard, or even federal troops in the face of student and other protests. Instead, he opened the doors of his school to the demonstrators. I\u2019m thinking of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-47542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47542"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47548,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47542\/revisions\/47548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47542"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=47542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}