The official story now often seems to be that student protest taught universities a set of important lessons—about the need for diversity and inclusion, for instance—that, now that they have been learned, do not need to be repeated. University marketing now even frames past protest as an example of the kind of transformative learning experiences that students can hope to have if they enroll, although of course administrations today hope that students’ minds will be broadened in less disruptive fashion. In 2018, my undergraduate alma mater, Northwestern University, held a ceremony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of an action in 1968 when more than 100 Black students occupied the Bursar’s Office to protest the university’s complicity with white supremacy. The problem isn’t that such actions don’t deserve celebration: exactly the opposite. It is that integrating student protest into a self-congratulatory narrative of progress helps universities to obscure the fact that the issues students protested “then” are still alive and well, which in turn gives them cover to crack down on protests now. Don’t you know we’re better about all this stuff today?
I think that sometimes those of us involved in campus activism unwittingly internalize this narrative. We take inspiration from our predecessors but also feel on some level that we live in more enlightened times—times whose demands on us are less severe. The action we take is usually less drastic than the famous incidents of sixties unrest, as if our institutions today need only a nudge where those of the past required a shove. That is why I think the wave of action on campuses right now in solidarity with Palestine—so evocative of those widely memorialized images from the Vietnam era—is so important. It feels like a moment of collective recognition that the moral situation today is not less dire just because we live now and they lived then. We have spent months naming what is happening to Gaza: an atrocity fully commensurable with the great atrocities in which the United States was involved in the twentieth century, with support from companies that elite university endowments invest in. But it often seems—and I say this above all in a spirit of self-reproach—that we don’t really believe it, or else we would have reached the breaking point described by Savio, that point when continued participation in the machine becomes impossible and you have no choice but to defect. You all are showing that you do believe it. And that you understand that the reality of genocide demands refusal.