Carleton Reunion Protest Report

I attended my college reunion this week (my 16th, my wife's 15th). It was, as always, a lot of fun to see old friends and old professors and old hangouts. 

Going in, I was curious about how much protest activity there might be (reunion is a huge event at Carleton, to the point that other schools send observers to see how we do it). Despite being on campus these past few months, I've actually been relatively insulated from major protest events: Lewis & Clark has been a lot quieter than other Portland campuses -- compare Portland State (where the library was absolutely trashed) or Reed (where a Jewish student was hit with a rock) -- and what protest activity has occurred centered on the undergraduate campus. I knew Carleton had an encampment at one point, but hadn't heard anything else about it, and my general rule of thumb on this subject has been "no headlines = good news."

 

Anyway, the answer to my question of how much protest activity would be found at reunion was "some, but not too much." There were a few alumni wearing pro-Palestine t-shirts -- I probably saw 3 or 4 over the course of the weekend. The major action item seemed to be a pledge to withhold donations "until divestment". I saw a handful of buttons to that effect, but it didn't seem to be very effective (relatively early in the weekend the reunion organizers announced that my wife's class had already blown past its fundraising target). On the last day, about a dozen alumni protested in front of a campus center, which to me just honestly looked boring -- standing in a line on a hot day chanting the same few phrases in unison? Subject matter aside, it's clear that protests just aren't for me. But it didn't really disrupt anything or cause any problems, so they can say what they want. And that was my general take on the whole weekend as well: there was a visible pro-Palestine presence, as was their right. It was a pretty small sliver of the overall attendance, and didn't materially impact the weekend. I won't go so far as to say one wouldn't even have noticed them without being on the lookout, but it was not some overwhelmingly or inescapable presence by any means.

As it happens, one my favorite professors at Carleton is an expert on protest politics, so it was fun to pick her brain as to what had happened on campus over the course of the year. Her take was that the student protesters, while "enthusiastic", were not especially good at protesting and lacked any robust theory of change. The encampment was mostly let alone and neither caused nor was subjected to significant trouble. The biggest "event" came when a group of about two dozen students decided to stage a sit-in inside a campus administrative building. The college responded to that by locking and evacuating the building, but a sympathetic faculty member arrived to ostentatiously unlock the building and allow the protesters inside. The administration set a deadline for the students to leave or face disciplinary action; about half left, half didn't, and the latter were put on disciplinary probation.

In terms of what the protesters were asking for, some of the major demands were (1) divestment and (2) termination of a scholarship program supporting students studying in Israel. The latter was never going to happen. The former was, in my professor's estimation, "ill-formed", mostly because Carleton has little, if any, direct investments in arms manufacturers of any sort and so the protesters were left trying to fit round pegs into square holes. As with most colleges, Carleton's endowment is primarily in funds with relatively opaque portfolios, so it's unknown who have holdings in, and it took some serious stretches to find problems with the known companies. For example, they found one company Carleton is invested in that sells, among other things, some form of air traffic management software that can have military applications and which has sales in the Middle East. The sales figures aren't further broken down by country, nor are civilian and military uses disaggregated, but by assuming that all the Middle East sales are to Israel and all the Israel sales are military, voila -- Carleton is killing kids. The level of attenuation made it hard for the college to take this seriously as an actual demand as opposed to a slogan, and so the divestment call also seems likely to be a non-starter.

I also read over how the Carleton administration had responded to campus protests over the course of the academic year. Again, the overall impression was that things were handled quite well -- there was no significant signs I saw of violence or aggressive police responses. One thing in particular that the college President did that I thought was extremely effective was that she maintained lines of open communication with the protesters, but was emphatic that these meetings and discussions were not some sort of "concession" to be extracted:

The reason I have made a point of offering meetings up front, before any sit-in or impasse, is to establish that I see communication as a given, not a negotiating tactic. I was, and am, willing to meet with you — not as a result of threats or demands, but because you are deeply committed Carleton students whose views are important to the institution and to me. 

This, to me, is exactly correct. On the one hand, it is a very bad thing when college decisions are made simply by reference to whomever is yelling the loudest. At other schools where encampments and protests had been successfully "de-escalated" by promises that the college would hear and listen to various pro-Palestine pitches, there was some measure of frustration by Jewish students who did not feel like they were given the solicitude and avenues of access and basically wondered whether the only way they could get a hearing would be to occupy a building. That's a toxic dynamic. At the same time, it is part of the Carleton President's job to listen to and be attentive to student concerns. The President should hear what the protesters are saying not because she is forced to, but because that's part of her job description. The submission is not, or should not be, the point.

The final thought that pinged around my head related to the "no donations until divestment" campaign.  Again, it does not seem like this is making a material dent in Carleton's donations. Nonetheless, we are of course seeing many cases of donors publicly withdrawing contributions to various colleges and universities unless and until they adopt or alter this or that campus policy -- consider Bill Ackman and Harvard as an especially high-profile example. These initiatives I find a bit difficult. At one level, donors of course aren't obligated to give anybody money; if something about Harvard or Carleton or wherever renders it a place they're not comfortable supporting, that's their business. On the other hand, amongst academics it is generally viewed as a very bad thing when a university does in fact alter a policy or practice due to donor demands -- they shouldn't bow to outside pressure (and I think that this belief in institutional independence is at least somewhat severable from underlying opinions about the substantive merits of the underlying demands). So we're left in this weird space where we all agree that donors are absolutely entitled to withdraw their contributions in protest, but we also think that said protests should systematically fail.

In any event, on the whole I was pleased with how things played out at Carleton, and I'm glad that most stakeholders for the most part have comported themselves in a manner that allowed for that happy and peaceable outcome.