Hypocrisy Runs Rampant at Elite American Universities
Yes, the protests are dumb. But we shouldn't lose sight of how universities have acted contrary to their own statements from 2020 on protests and policing.
I know the focus of this newsletter is usually the media, but I warned you in my About page that I would like to also focus on some other institutions replete with hypocrisy from time to time.
No collective has displayed more hypocrisy of late than American higher education, especially elite colleges and universities.
You’ve surely seen the news. Protests have roiled campuses from coast-to-coast about the war in Gaza, with students (and professors and in some cases outside agitators) calling on Israel to cease military operations and for colleges to divest from the Jewish state. Tents have propped up on campus greens and anti-Semitic threats and actions have often accompanied the demonstrations.
The protesters don’t seem to care that it was the terrorist group Hamas, not Israel, who started the conflict with a massive terrorist attack (and continues to make a cease fire unthinkable). Nor are they bothered by the way their institutions and others have invested in actual abusers of human rights, like Saudi Arabia and China.
But that foolishness shouldn’t be particularly surprising. SAT scores and parental donations may get you into Columbia. But it doesn’t imbue a teenager with a considerable amount of common sense. And we shouldn’t look to children for wisdom. From gun control to climate change and beyond, cooler heads have long known this.
That doesn’t excuse the stomach-turning displays of anti-Semitism that have popped up at some rallies. Others have done the important work of documenting these horrors, from celebrating Hitler to repeating calls for genocide. If you aren’t familiar with these stories, a quick Google or X search will be clarifying.
But I want to focus on another angle of this story that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention: the decisions of many of these universities in response.
The same universities who were shouting about the moral urgency of protests and the evils of America’s racist police and corporeal culture are calling for the police to descend on campus to break up protests. That hypocrisy isn’t lost on everyone.
Schools have gone from self-flagellating about their own racial and historical sins to calling in riot police to arrest students on campus.
Schools have taken different actions in response to demonstrators. Not every school has been a case study in hypocrisy. Some have lived up to their stated commitments from the Summer of 2020, like Brown University, who handled protests without police involvement. (Whether these schools’ commitments are reasonable I’ll leave to you, dear reader, to consider.)
Others, less so. I wanted to call out a few in no particular order within the context of their past statements about the police, protests and social justice more broadly.
Examples: There’s nowhere to start other than with Columbia University, who has been at the center of much of the media and online conversation about the protests.
Back in 2020, Columbia was at the vanguard of university efforts to combat racism and reform policing.
A roundtable hosted by the university in the Fall of 2020 and promoted by Columbia called “A Matter of Black Lives” applauded a professor who “has been inspired by the racially diverse street protests, seeing in them ‘the revitalization of American democracy.’”
The university applauded the “emergence of a powerful protest movement” focused on “highlighting the systemic quality of oppression, not merely the actions of bad cops and individual racists.” One of the school’s professors, in a piece published by the university, declared:
Our unprecedented moment requires political leaders to take unprecedented action. The time is now for the liberal leadership who govern blue state cities to step outside of history and defund the police and curb police power and stand firmly in solidarity with the protesters who are remaking democracy in the streets.
Columbia announced a “commitment to antiracism” that included a new “Mini-Institute on Addressing Anti-Black Racism with the Columbia School of Social Work.” The teachings were in line with the university leadership’s response to the murder of George Floyd, which highlighted Columbia’s need to “be deliberate and partner with local communities, public health agencies, and municipal governments to dismantle structural racism and end police brutality.”
Apparently Columbia doesn’t see the “revitalization of American democracy” in their on-campus protests of late. Last week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik called in the New York Police Department to disperse protestors (“with deep sadness” from Shafik, Forbes noted). It led to over 100 arrests from an outfit that has faced external criticism for being precisely the kind of organization Columbia pledged needed reform.
A few streets away, much the same is playing out at New York University. Last week NYU called the same NYPD to clear out demonstrators in a tent encampment, leading to the arrests of over a dozen students.
It’s hard to square that decision with the way NYU talked about protests (and police) back in the summer of 2020. Announcing the news of Floyd’s murder, president Andrew Hamilton lamented the “inequities of the criminal justice” that black Americans face from the police system.
The university created a whole page dedicated to bringing about antiracism.
Then in June, the school’s McSilver Institute, launched in 2007 to help “communities most affected by inequality and injustice,” went further, pledging their “support of the protest movement” before affirming “black lives matter, and we join people across the nation to demand policies and practices reflecting the fact.”
One such policy strenuously advocated for by Black Lives Matter, the group organizing these protests, was defunding the police. Their website explicitly calls for a “national defunding of police.”
It’s important to remember that, particularly in the heady days of 2020, pledges of racial justice were necessarily tied to policing, both as a result of BLM’s push to defund, and as a way to articulate what needed fixing. The protests that swept the globe — the one’s these universities are applauding — explicitly focused on the intersection of black lives and the police, set against the backdrop of “police brutality and structural racism.”
NYU wasn’t the only college calling in the police on their students after pledging support to BLM.
In Atlanta, Emory University published a guide on how to get involved with BLM. The school pledged to take action to improve the university in the wake of Floyd’s killing, including a pledge to change their own policing practices. The German Studies (?) Department pledged its commitment to dismantling police brutality.
It was part of a broader commitment to “student activism,” which the university declared was “an Emory tradition” in an article heralding the campus’s BLM protest leader.
It appears that “tradition” may be coming to a close.
Late last month, Gregory Fenves, the same president who proclaimed his support in 2020 for protestors “who are speaking out for progress during this difficult time” called in the police to break up encampments on campus, leading to the arrest of 28 students.
Likewise, statements from administrators across Yale University pledged support for and solidarity with the BLM protests back in 2020, even offering legal services should protestors be arrested as a result of expressing their commitments.
Yale’s Department of African American Studies went even further, issuing a call to action titled “Black Lives Matter,” echoing the claims of the group.
More than most other universities, Yale took particular pains to point the finger at police as a problem. Following the announcements, Yale said it would be reviewing its own police force. Following a report in 2020, administrators said they were committed to implementing changes, “starting with new scenario-based training in de-escalation techniques and reduction of use of force.”
Apparently that concern with de-escalation and use-of-force didn’t stick around. In late April, the university called in local police, who swarmed campus in riot gear and arrested dozens of students. One wonders whether the legal aid support was still offered.
Back in 2020, Dartmouth College celebrated their students and teachers engaged in Black Lives Matter protests. Senior leadership at the university declared: “Black Lives Matter, and Racial Injustice Must End.” Protests were a matter of moral urgency: the admin declared “[w]e want to express our strong support for the growing movement across the nation to put an end to systemic and systemic [sic] racism.”
An alumni newsletter gave tips on “How to BLM.”
The university called in local police to break down an encampment last week that not even the university alleged was violent, leading to 90 arrests. The video of the arrest of a 66-year-old professor stoked outrage. So much for “we must act as well as speak,” as the university put it in 2020.
And that self-heraldry around past protests that colleges mythologize isn’t just about peaceful protests, either. As Atlantic contributing writer Tyler Austin Harper told PBS, Cornell University has spent years retrospectively celebrating the violent takeover of a building on campus in 1968 as emblematic of the spirit of the university and its commitment to higher ideals. (His entire X thread about how Columbia and NYU do this faux historical flattering, too, is brilliant.)
The Floyd protests in 2020 led Cornell’s president to tell the community that “[d]ecent people and institutions cannot stand silent” to deliver “change in our world.” In a follow-up, Cornell announced a campus-wide virtual reading of “How to Be an Antiracist,” by Ibram Kendi, who would call to defund the police a week later.
Much like Yale, Cornell sought to reform its own police force in the wake of Floyd’s killing, citing “a methodical, open, and inclusive process.” The report delivered after the conclusion of that process called on Cornell to “acknowledge that the police have done great damage to people of color” and called “for a fully operational public safety model for the university.” Cornell’s president “responded to the report by thanking the committee members for their thoughtful and diligent work and by reaffirming the university and the Cornell University Police Department’s commitment to racial justice.”
The school responded to a peaceful sit-in by arresting 24 students on April 22nd.
At another Ivy League institution, Pennsylvania University, the president used Floyd’s killing to reiterate, “Penn’s commitment to doing our part to create a more inclusive and mutually respectful environment.” She later drew from the ongoing protests which “have given voice to change that is long overdue” to announce a set of initiatives that would “propel progress in our University, city, and society toward a more inclusive and impactful university and community. …to do our part to help heal wounds, strengthen community, and create hope in our world.”
That included drawing on the school’s legacy of “civic commitment” dating back to its founding by Benjamin Franklin. An article in that vein highlighted a professor who is quoted in the piece — the title of which begins “Power to the protest” — calling protests, “the canaries in the coal mines that warn of future political and electoral change.” The university paraphrased him, saying that protest is an “important harbinger of new directions.”
Penn doesn’t appear to be much committed to that idea these days. Last week the university tried to have Philadelphia police come to campus to break up an encampment.
The city wasn’t interested. Pointing to efforts in New York, Philly’s district attorney said that the city didn’t need to “do stupid.” Whether the D.A.’s decision was itself stupid is another question but that a university would be more comfortable siccing the police on its students than the state is telling.
Why it matters: Again, this isn’t an effort to defend these students, whose protests are misguided and silly at best and virulently anti-Semitic at worst. But we shouldn’t lose sight of how these universities have behaved contrary to their commitments.
Whatever happened to the idea that words are violence? What of the importance of safety on campus for everyone?
How is calling in police in riot shields against protestors consistent with the high-minded ideals that were so omnipresent on these campuses in 2020?
It might be nice to imagine that this episode will force administrations to move beyond safetyism culture to one of debate and dissent and discussion, free of threats and violence but tolerating unpopular opinions.
But that seems foolhardy. Instead, what we’re seeing is a crash course in mind-bending hypocrisy, because neither side of the debate affords universities the opportunity to pat themselves on the back, as they were so quick to do in 2020.
That’s particularly apparent because these schools aren’t actually serving any of their students. Countless schools, including the above, haven’t lifted a finger to protect the Jewish students on their campuses who face the vitriol (and even violence) of their classmates. Universities aren’t cracking down on protests to root out anti-Semitism. They’re doing it to avoid inconveniencing Board meetings and attempting to salvage their schools’s tattered reputations.
All while tolerating or even cultivating anti-Semitic hostility.
Part of why this matters is because American universities have enormous cultural cache — particularly elite ones like those featured here. Despite hand-wringing from their graduates and others, an elite education is still a precursor for entry into the upper echelon of America’s elite.
Study after study have found that graduates of these universities go on to litter the ranks of the upper crust of society; politicians and judges and businessmen, innovators and soon-to-be elder statesmen, the types of people who attend black-tie galas and fundraisers and dot the boards of companies and nonprofits. (I would be remiss to not mention that Columbia is also the home to perhaps the most esteemed journalism school in the country. Their publication, Columbia Journalism Review, is something of a Supreme Court of media issues, for both good and ill. Columbia churns out some of the most successful journalists in the country. Make of all that what you will).
The decisions that these institutions make reverberate across American culture and society
And many of these campuses receive a lot more of your tax money than you realize. In 2023, Columbia received over a billion dollars ($1.2 billion) in federal funding. Penn got $956 million. Yale got $775 million, while Cornell received $735 million. Dartmouth brought up the rear among the Ivies with $130 million, as Fox Business recently reported.
Many of these schools operate essentially as unregulated hedge funds that also endeavor to scold everyday Americans about what they do or should believe. All while their graduates fill the ranks of America’s movers and shakers.
The takeaway from this episode should be not only that these gilded institutions are hotbeds of hypocrisy. But that many of them simply aren’t operating in the best interests of their students, their communities or our country.
If the main outcome of these protests is that the scales fall from the eyes of the average American about the value of these schools (and their degrees), that will be valuable. But hopefully the corrective action goes further than that.
When it comes time to determine how much the government should be investing in these places, decision makers ought to remember that, and finance accordingly.