U.S. campus protests are the latest test for universities already facing heightened scrutiny

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From Columbia in the east to UCLA in the west, American campuses are being roiled by chants and challenges to authority, protests and police presence – a burgeoning set of angry confrontations on college quadrangles that have revived a classic debate about the nature of free speech, the purpose of higher education and the role of a university in broader society.

These questions are concentrated on the Gaza war, but they go far beyond contemporary feelings about the conflict in the Middle East. They may not have been debated with this level of intensity and public scrutiny since the campus controversies of the late 1960s, but they have simmered, unremarked upon but unresolved, below the surface of the leafy byways of college campuses and behind in the ivy-covered walls of North American universities.

“None of this is new,” Robert Iuliano, the president of Gettysburg College, said in an interview. “There always has been an inherent tension between the desire of people pressing hard to have their views expressed and the possibility that they may infringe on others’ rights and even violate the law. There is also the question of when do you comply with rules and when do you not.”

In recent days these questions have spawned fresh controversy on campus, in Congress and, inevitably, on the presidential campaign trail.

Do the freedom-of-expression clauses in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which specifically ban federal-government constraints on speech, apply to private universities? Are protest encampments, which have drawn responses by police in riot gear at Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Texas and elsewhere, a form of free expression? And, less legalistic but more pragmatic: Is it wise, in the last days and weeks before students disperse for the summer, to match what administrators consider student overreach with a law-enforcement crackdown that students consider administration overreach?

“These are extremely important matters and it has never been more essential that we have these conversations on college and university campuses,” said Joseph Helble, president of Lehigh University. “If we can’t figure out how to do this in ways that are thoughtful and respectful, even when they are awkward, I can’t see how we can do this in society more broadly.”

These protests are coming at a time of intense focus on American higher education, when a series of other issues – elitism, the broader culture of these institutions, the survival of the liberal arts, the role of varsity sports on campus – have become flashpoints for debate. They have provided talking points for political figures and put new focus on a dramatic, fundamental realignment of American politics, with university graduates migrating to the Democratic Party and those without university degrees flocking to the Republicans.

Moreover, this spring’s protests have come during the run-up to a contentious presidential election, inviting comparisons with the 1968 anti-war demonstrations that shaped the election of that tumultuous year. Those protests, which began on campuses and then reignited at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, were a factor in the election of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in a close contest. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan, who was in the middle of a successful campaign for governor of California, had lacerated student protesters in a campaign speech in which he attacked them as “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” more concerned “with rioting, with anarchy” than with “academic freedom.”

Contemporary students have adopted and adapted many of the techniques of the protests of more than a half-century ago: slogans, tents, building takeovers, defiance of orders to depart their encampments. The police sweep of the Columbia campus occurred on the same calendar day (April 30) as a similar action there 56 years earlier.

While campuses have always been an unusually fertile ground for protest – they are huge collections of people living in close quarters, a universe of energetic, tireless students of pretty much the same age – there are fundamental differences between the protests of 2024 and those of 1968.

“There’s more division among students and faculty than there was in the 1960s,” said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian who was co-chair of the radical Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard and was one of those involved in a student takeover of Harvard’s University Hall in 1969. “In the 1960s protests, just about everyone was opposed to the war; the question was what to do about it. You don’t have that unanimity now.”

The contemporary protests – a contagion that has extended to Canada, where encampments have sprouted at McGill University and the University of Toronto – have added considerable pressure on university presidents.

“It is different on every campus and in every community, but finding ways to enable thoughtful discussion is essential,” said Mr. Helble, the Lehigh president. “There are lines where that endangers campus safety. But how do you decide where that line is?”

That question haunts American university presidents, already beleaguered by pressures related to high tuition costs – US$88,942 at Columbia, a private institution, and US$42,127 for California residents at UCLA, a public institution – and increasing alumni impatience, much of it growing out of charges of antisemitism on campus and leftist ideology in the classroom.

The result is pressures even greater than those of the 1960s. The annual Gallup institutional-confidence survey last year showed that only about a third (36 per cent) of Americans indicated confidence in higher education, a sharp drop from the solid majority (57 per cent) from as recently as 2015.

University presidents “are second guessed from every constituency – Congress, state governors, boards of trustees, donors, faculty, administrators, nearby communities, students, parents, alumni groups,” said Barbara Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the former president of Wilson College. “Everyone wants something different. Being a president today is no longer the way it was, when you could teach a seminar and contemplate the ‘life of the mind.’ It’s a test of courage, resiliency and endurance.”