1) Taking over physical space and having a protest encampment there is a powerful tactic. It's a tactic that requires collective organization, and the participation of significant numbers of seriously committed individuals. As long as a physical space can be held in some visible form, it can continue to be a magnet for solidarity, more organizing, and popular education, as well as opposition, attacks, ridicule, and more. Past powerful examples of holding physical space and generating a lot of attention, controversy, and even political changes have included the IWW's free speech campaigns of the 1910's, the union sit-down strikes of the 1930's, the campus occupations of the 1960's, Alcatraz Island and other campaigns of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's, the urban squatting movement in many parts of Europe and New York City in the 1970's and 1980's, the Tahrir Square occupations in various Arab countries of the 2010's, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
2) The tactic of occupying a public space is often opposed by the authorities with state violence. Holding physical public space generally involves violating the law on a daily basis. Usually there are laws against setting up tents in public spaces like the centers of campuses or in city parks, and other laws against spending the night in those tents. The authorities in most countries tend to get worried when a whole bunch of people are very publicly and intentionally violating laws, because it undermines what they call "the rule of law" and their authority. If negotiations are even attempted, authorities quickly resort to violence either way, in many countries.
3) If the repression doesn't kill the movement, it can cause a solidaristic reaction, and make it grow instead. There are many examples of social movements that started relatively small, but then after being violently repressed, grew dramatically as a result of the broader community being outraged by the way protesters were treated by authorities, as well as the way they were being misrepresented in the press. This was a pattern that could be observed repeating itself regularly across the country during Occupy Wall Street, as well as during the global justice movement in the decade preceding Occupy.
4) The corporate media is using the protests as an opportunity to try to fear-monger around the supposed atmosphere of antisemitism and general chaos on the campuses. This campus uprising is getting heavy media coverage. Partly this is because of dramatic events, police repression, brutal physical treatment of students and professors caught on camera, etc., and partly this is because an agenda of a given media platform is being served by covering the protests from a certain angle. It's good to bear in mind that protests and even large social movements do not automatically get media coverage of any kind, let alone positive press. And getting lots of media coverage, whether it's positive or negative, comes with major pros and cons.
5) The politicians, especially Republicans, are hoping to use their manufactured crisis as a means to win upcoming elections, a la Nixon in 1972. The only crisis in this equation, of course, is Israel is committing genocide. There is no antisemitism crisis, and there is no chaos on the campuses -- overwhelmingly just peaceable, public campouts of concerned citizens who are doing what they are doing out of outrage against genocide, and at great risk to their personal safety, personal finances, and academic futures. But the reason for the massive media coverage on the part of much of the media is to create the impression of a crisis, either in order to distract attention from any number of other things -- such as the famine that is taking hold in Gaza, or the continuing, daily massacres of children that are now getting far less news coverage on many outlets -- or in order to get "law and order" candidates elected. This political strategy has been used successfully on various notable occasions, such as the pivotal election of 1972, which Nixon won.
6) It is significant, however, that this movement is taking place during a Democratic administration, and can't easily be painted as (and isn't) a partisan phenomenon. Although the conservative, Republican Party-oriented media outlets are painting the movement on the campuses as "woke" and "liberal," the reality is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party leadership is 100% behind Israel, no matter how genocidal the government running the country may be at a given time. My experience with the global justice movement, that began during the long reign of Democratic Party neoliberalism and imperialism in the 1990's, was the fact that it was opposing capitalism and transnational corporate hegemony during a time of a Democrat-led government helped clarify the beliefs and intentions of the movement as a whole, and made us less susceptible to getting distracted by what most of us felt to be the hopeless arena of US electoral politics.
7) The repression against protest and free speech in the past six months has been extreme. Even by the standards set by repressive police states like ours over the past couple of generations, the political atmosphere in the Congress and in the media has been especially rabid and one-dimensional. Whereas during the genocidal American war in Vietnam, despite a tremendous degree of campus activism and mobilization of society in general, for a long time it was a real taboo to call in the riot cops to arrest your students. Fast forward to 2024, it seems to be standard practice.
8) Whether the student-led movement will be able to seize the mantle of defenders of free speech is an open question, and I think a very important one. Without painting the students, staff, or faculty across the US with too broad a brush, it's fairly obvious to say that for many people involved, this is a movement to free Gaza and it's a movement for free speech, against conflating opposition to Israeli genocidal practices with being anti-Jewish, against throttling free speech, canceling Valedictorian speeches on false grounds, or banning student organizations. For other people involved, free speech may not be such a priority. Recent years have seen many left-identified people on campuses across the country protesting against and shutting down events involving speakers identified, rightly or wrongly, as rightwing in some way. It has been normative for there to be a greater concern for "safety" over freedom of discourse. Without an unequivocal support for the fundamental notion presented by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, we stand to lose this argument.
9) If the movement doesn't subside quickly, psy ops tactics to divide and conquer it will (continue to) be employed on a massive scale, and this takes many forms. All successful movements are profoundly inclusive in nature. All unsuccessful ones adopt exclusive attitudes. There are always dishonest actors working for one or another division of the police across the country, along with random wingnuts and brainwashed sectarians, who will be pushing for the movement to behave in exclusive and cliquish ways, always pushing for divisions within the movement to be explored, pushing to denounce people within the movement who are perceived to have made mistakes. This phenomenon must be recognized and opposed through rejecting exclusivity and embracing inclusivity. Movements desperately need to grow, or they die (unless they become successfully institutionalized). This is always the case. This one is surely no exception.
10) There's a big difference between "widespread protests" and "massive protests," and it's important to note this and the perceived atmosphere various media are trying to establish, for whatever varied and contradictory reasons. This movement is getting massive media coverage. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's important not to mistake massive media coverage for a massive movement. Occupy Wall Street also got massive media coverage. The global justice movement a decade earlier did not. The impact of Occupy getting huge media coverage from the beginning was pretty evident; the movement didn't have time to develop in some organic way, but was just everywhere all of a sudden. This gave it the appearance of being a big movement, but this was only really the case in certain cities. The blanket media coverage seemed to give a lot of people within the movement and outside of it very inaccurate impressions about how big, how organized, or how much potential various local groups had to accomplish what both the media and many participants imagined could be accomplished. Unlike with the case of movements that got virtually no press, such as the global justice movement, Occupy never had large-scale protests in most of the country unless it was a protest announced in advance on local media, and this was also the case with the racial justice movement of 2020. And in both of these cases, although repressive authorities and police brutality played a huge negative role, it was when the media stopped covering these movements that they largely just seemed to dissipate.
In conclusion, in case it's not abundantly obvious, I hope to see this movement grow dramatically, and bring our bipartisan, genocide-enabling political leadership to its senses, and soon. But if that has any chance of happening, this movement will have to find a way to overcome a lot of major obstacles.
Bearing Witness is the new album, out on Bandcamp now, dropping on streaming platforms on May 1st. The Bearing Witness WORLD TOUR has me in the PNW in May, Australia in June/July, California in August, Scandinavia in November, and those islands north and west of France in March, 2025.
Some Thoughts on the Campus Protests