Griping about youth is as old as Socrates and as up-to-date as Gaza protests. The best way to deal with it is to put a premium on civility and to listen to what the youth are saying.
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To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963, Letter from the Birmingham Jail
On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students and wounded nine others at an anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University. At the time, 58 percent of Gallup poll respondents believed the students bore responsibility for the shooting.
Historically, We the People hate student activists. Movies like Trial of the Chicago 7 make it easy to smugly conclude that the Nixon-era prosecution of dissenters represents a long-gone animosity toward activists. That would be a mistake. We must recognize the through line from Kent State to today.
I learned earlier this month that 41 students had been arrested for taking over a building at Brown University, which I attended decades ago. I chose to attend Brown because of its “new” or “open” curriculum, which allows students to choose what they learn. Fun fact: This open curriculum happened amid student protests in the Vietnam era in 1969 when students regularly took over buildings to end a war and reshape their education.
The idea that students have sufficient wisdom and judgment to design their curriculum and chart their own learning has been a core part of Brown’s identity for decades. So is the idea that listening to students is good even when it’s inconvenient.
In a deep history of the famous 1965 debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin before an overflowing crowd at the Cambridge Union, The Fire is Upon Us, Nicholas Buccola meticulously traces the origin of the conservative disgust with kids today. In 1951, Buckley’s first and most famous book, God and Man at Yale, scolded his Ivy League cohorts for not doing enough to inculcate students with anti-communist, free market, and Christian beliefs. He argued in the volume that helped make him a national celebrity that to fix kids today, trustees and alumni exercise control over universities. Sound familiar?
I will say, as a Jewish person who much prefers the college experience of today to the days of Jewish quotas or to Buckley’s dream of an explicitly Christian Yale, I’m wondering what people think they’re getting when they cheer for donor control over universities.
The Academic Freedom Alliance, of which I am a member, issued an excellent statement calling on universities to protect academic and expressive freedom in the face of pressure to censor speech and protest. University administrations should heed their advice to resist enacting speech codes and to apply codes of conduct neutrally and fairly.
Although I agree that schools can shut down protests that substantially and materially disrupt the educational process, I winced at AFA’s statement that conduct rules should be “stringently enforced.” It’s an accurate statement of what universities can do about protests. Still, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, I would encourage college administrators not to be so preoccupied with what they can do to silence students—and instead consider whether they should.
Put another way, if I were in-house counsel for a university, I would be bound to agree that they can ban teach-ins and silent or peaceful vigils in university common areas. But I would rather they consider the question: Is a school better off when a peaceful but unauthorized student teach-in is dispersed, and its participants are charged with conduct violations? Is the public better off when student activism is sharply constrained or when it is permitted to flourish even when the participants color outside the lines?
This is where I depart from this organization, of which I’m glad to be a member. I can do that because the Academic Freedom Alliance protects my right to be contrary and to engage civically without fear of losing my job, for which I am grateful. In that spirit of recognizing the university as an incubator for dialogue, I want to direct people’s attention away from presidents and conduct codes and toward our intense and urgent national need for meaningful conversations and civic engagement.
At its core, education is about attempting to understand. Scholarship is an attempt to understand the world, and we gather in universities to try to understand this scholarship and each other.
As a person whose teaching and writing focus on trying to understand one another, I can’t help but notice that in the conversations about how university presidents handle kids today, nobody has attempted to understand these students or to consider whether kids today are threatening anyone, much less whether it would be useful to engage with students’ political beliefs and actions.
Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me at all. A wave of illiberal proposals: book bans, educational gag orders, attempts to remake higher education, phone bans, and efforts to suppress students’ votes, are all targeted at regulating kids today instead of listening to them.
Some unifying features of these dubious proposals: First, young people lack agency. They are the mere vessels of others’ indoctrination. If kids today are messed up, then some DEI administrator, teachers’ union, trans advocate, or TikTok is to blame. Ideas do not originate with students.
Second, when students behave in ways we don’t like, it is a crisis—but only if their behavior also is in service of disfavored viewpoints. We had months of hand-wringing about Stanford students yelling at a federal judge. By contrast, efforts to shut down film screenings and lectures related to Israel and Palestine have been met with muted responses. Illiberalism on the part of administrators, donors, parents, and trustees—people who hold real power—should raise alarm bells. Yet we continue to focus on the pressing question of how university presidents will regulate kids today.
We saw members of Congress attempt (and fail) to trap college presidents into conceding that student activists are calling for the genocide of Jews. What a cynical, cruel exercise that was. Cruel to students, who are as conflicted and troubled as the rest of us at the seeming impossibility of peace in the Middle East. Cruel to American Jews—on and off campus—whose real pain and concern about antisemitism has been used as a partisan wedge. Cruel to Palestinians—on and off campus—who are being doxxed, threatened, silenced, and shot. Their self-advocacy has been cynically rebranded as a threat to another group.
Instead of fighting over how to regulate young people, what if Americans refocused our efforts on greater understanding—making space for students to achieve greater understanding about the Middle East, each other, and the world—and making space for people in power to hear students, too?
This would mean letting go of the idea that education is in crisis if students harbor beliefs we don’t like. The fact is, people have been arguing about kids today, at least since they killed Socrates for corrupting the youth.
And I believe it could mean making space for student activism even when it gets messy, as long as the ordinary business of a university can proceed.
When facilitating dialogues, I ask, “What would you do if you wanted to understand?”
Well? What would you do if you wanted to understand kids today? The first thing we usually do is make space for them to talk. I have seen vanishingly few student voices showcased in the media. Please lend some column space to them.
I would make space for their direct action to understand students. If that means people have to walk by a protest to go to a class but can still hear and participate, I would prefer administrators and the rest of us to take time to listen and engage rather than regulate.
There’s an overlap in higher education between dialogue work and democracy-building work. Polls show that students have lost faith in civic institutions, and a perennial struggle exists to interest them in voting. Speech codes and hardline policies toward protest are counterproductive to developing students’ civic engagement.
If you are concerned about the phrases students use in their activism, practice curiosity about how they came to use those words. Ask, listen, and engage.
Next, if we are concerned about students, I suggest we study them instead of churning out endless takes about them. I have seen probably a dozen pundits state that DEI is why students feel the way they do today about Israel and Palestine. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know whether that was true instead of simply asserting it?
Finally, if, upon listening to students, we conclude that they are as misinformed, confused, and lacking in nuance as the rest of us, I propose giving them more opportunities to learn. And that means understanding what the universities are for—the education of students and the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge through scholarship and publishing.
Universities aren’t for donors. The pay-to-play idea of a donor not only telling the school what money has to be for but also how the school has to function going forward must end. When we let donors run universities, we’re saying that something other than inquiry, something other than a commitment to understanding, is the core function of a university.
I’m fortunate not to be a university president, which seems to me a far less fun job than working with students, as I do. But since my university is currently searching for a new president, let me take the chance to say to whoever is in the running: Nobody needs a new gym or a new lab enough to compromise what makes us special. Students who have the freedom to practice citizenship in a ratty dorm are infinitely better off than students in a fancy one, living under a cloud of censorship. Society is better off when students learn to engage civically. Let’s make that—and not regulating kids today—our focus.
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