On April 27, 2024, police in the United States arrested about 200 students from pro-Palestinian encampments at three universities. Student protests have intensified in the past few weeks not only across the US, but also in Canada, France, the UK, and other places. The protests in the US now have a more clear and focused aim: they ask that universities divest from companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The statement issued by students at Columbia university says, “Divest all finances, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine” and further asks for “complete transparency” regarding all of Columbia University’s financial investments.
What exactly are the students articulating? At one level, they are registering their horror at being made unwilling participants of, and contributors to, a global economy that funnels their tuition money into corporations that profit from war and starvation. Would those who are opposing these protests – including politicians, administrators and parents of students – not want these students to experience, voice and act upon their horror?
Let us imagine, for a moment, that the protesting students were not protesting; that, like most of us, they were simply going about their daily business at a time when over 30,000 people, about half of them children, have been killed in Palestine in seven devastating months, and when hospitals, schools and universities across Gaza have been systematically destroyed. Let us imagine that, like many of us, the students too had simply viewed such massive violence as an unfortunate but distant event that did not concern them directly; that they had continued with their classes and daily activities, blockingg out daily news of children being bombarded, aid workers killed, thousands of people being starved; that they had, like much of international media, paid scant attention to the history of colonialism, racism and occupation that has culminated today in such violence. By thus retreating and insulating themselves, would they have indeed accomplished their goal of receiving the “education” they seek in these prestigious institutions?
With the intensification of their protests, these students seem to be doing far more than asking their universities to divest from a violent, colonial, apartheid regime. In effect, they are asking the university to declare its truth. Does the university see itself as engaged only with the world of business and with the task of training students to participate in this world, however corrupt and degraded it might be? Does it ultimately see its task as producing, year after year, “global citizens” who have learnt the art of hiding behind language—who, like most “adult” leaders of today, know exactly how to use the language of reason, of peace, and of responsibility while engaging in the most unreasonable, violent and irresponsible acts? In that case, the university would have already renounced all aspiration to the “universality” to which its foundation orients it. Let us face it: there is one and only one reason for the university to continue to exist today and that is, to save itself from becoming entirely subsumed as an ideological arm of capitalist ethno-nationalism. Only the possibility of such resistance, however fraught it might be, can offer some hope for the promise of the university today. From this perspective, the protesting students are only doing what those who administer universities have so abysmally failed to do: saving the university from utter ruin. This ruin is undoubtedly different in kind from the one universities in Gaza have faced, but it nevertheless portends a disaster of immense magnitude.
The recent public statement issued by the administration of Columbia University is a case in point. New initiatives that ostensibly aim to “reinvest in Columbia’s values and mission” unashamedly include a set of university “rules” about protests. Are institutions to now dictate the rules by which their members might protest against them? Let us recall that the word “protest” itself (from the Latin protestari) etymologically carries with it, not necessarily the sense of opposing someone or something (this seems to be a later connotation, coming from the civil rights movement in the United States), but rather the sense of making a public declaration, constituting oneself as a witness (testis). Yes, assuredly, testimony in our world is also structured by its own rules, but surely it risks becoming a meaningless act if such rules were to be dictated by the very entity about which one is testifying. Once universities start framing rules for protests, you can be assured that they have already suppressed the very idea, meaning, and history of protest.
Why is it, I’ve often wondered during these past weeks, that young students, some of them not even 20 years old, can see so clearly what so many adults can’t. Why is it that they can be touched, moved, appalled, by suffering and injustice in a way that many of us are not? What enables them to make disturbing and important connections between their own lives, the institutions they inhabit, the money they earn and spend, and the wars raging across the world in a way that most of us are either unable or unwilling to make?
In this context, I’m reminded of something that Bhagat Singh, one of the most thoughtful and courageous student-protestors of his time, wrote in his 1931 article, To Young Political Workers. Insisting on the importance of youth for the growth of the anti-colonial and communist movements in India, he wrote, “Let me make it clear that if you’re a businessman or an established worldly or family man, please don’t play with fire.” His point was that those who have already become beneficiaries of a system cannot be expected to oppose it with the passion of those who are yet to be fully enmeshed in it and who can hence view it from a certain necessary distance.
He understood all too well that testifying publicly, acting to change hierarchies, rules and habits is “playing with fire,” yet he believed it was the kind of risk that the young can and should take, that they alone are best equipped to take. It is as if he were saying that only those who have not yet committed themselves to the present, to the way things are, can commit themselves fully to the idea of a different future.
The old, in whose ranks I now count myself, often speak with derision of this “idealism” of youth. Behind such accusations of idealism lies the tired cynicism of age – a cynicism that can neither be avowed nor disavowed. The young, at least, seem to understand that language matters; that there is something ugly, violent and cowardly about inhabiting language in a purely instrumental manner; and that only a care for the words we speak and write can save us from deceit. That is why they insist that there is no compatibility between the pursuit of liberty and equality on the one hand, and business as usual on the other. If capitalist ethno-nationalism functions mainly by hiding connections – between products and producers, investments and armaments, events and histories, words and meanings – then those who wish to resist its violence must constantly expose these very connections. Protesting students today, in the US and elsewhere, are showing us how to do precisely that.
Simona Sawhney teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.
