What explains the rapid spread of similar strategies against student protestors across American campuses? Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about this issue—as many of us have—with constant puzzlement. While national political life might seem to be echoing times past thus explaining at least some of the reaction of university presidents, these are also very distinct times, when images and on-the-ground narratives travel quickly with unpredictable consequences. For people who want to keep things under control, the risks that university administrators are assuming by calling the police on peaceful student protests and escalating situations is, at minimum, perplexing.
The most reasonable conclusion I’ve reached to explain what is going on is that the events of the last couple of weeks are a confluence of two very different trajectories. One is macro-structural and refers to the relative weakness of American higher education institutions (yes, even the very elite institutions like Harvard and Columbia) with respect to the political establishment. The second is conjunctural and refers to the actions of a single individual that, like an irresponsible and entitled camper playing with fireworks in the middle of a dried-up forest, created a fire that spread into a catastrophe. Let me explain.
The first point is relatively straightforward. American higher education has been caught up in some sort of process of decline for a while. This can be seen in terms of the dwindling state support for public institutions, in the growing discourse about the added value of college degrees, in the stagnant budgets for science in public institutions, in the credentialization of everything, the remorseless expansion of debt, and in the broader location that colleges and universities hold in the public imagination. If we take Google Trends to be a relative measure of public interest, however imperfect it may be, there might be reasons for concern: between 2004 and 2022 the relevance of the search terms ‘university’ and ‘college’ fell by about 50% and 75%, respectively. These numbers may not be indicative of anything concrete (whether Google Trends really captures shifts in public interest is debatable), but they may hint at some form of actual institutional weakness.
It is odd to think of universities like Harvard, NYU, Penn, and Columbia—with a combined endowment of about $90 billion—as ‘weak’. But they are. What else would explain their inability to simply shrug off comments from clearly deceptive public figure with inane accusations of ‘plagiarism’, for example. Institutions with actual power can simply ignore these accusations, or even diminish the mental and academic competence of those who putting them forward (“That idiot just doesn’t understand how academia works”). Their immediate surrender to external demands and inability to coordinate internal criticism that echoes attacks from the outside (e.g. Steven Pinker, who has acted as a clear provocateur), shows institutional powerlessness despite a healthy balance sheet. Mimicking what is seen as a successful performance of power and control is, in this context, almost an obvious way of avoiding further weakening. Let’s call this particular form of isomorphism “race to the bottom isomorphism” or something like that. You get the idea. The point is, if you are in a weak position and you see another institution in a similarly weak position do something and get away with it (in the short run), you feel compelled to copy their actions. This is the macro-structural setting: weak institutions under stress will copy each other hoping that they won’t be the ones to pay for the bill.
But initiated the sequence of copying? Here, we simply had bad luck: Minouche Shafik, ensconced in a very visible and desirable job as Columbia’s president. I truly do not understand how Columbia’s Board hired Shafik for the job. She came with a terrible reputation from the London School of Economics where she showed nothing more than contempt for academics and students. Her time at the LSE was neither interesting not productive; quite the contrary, it was (as I have heard) a moment when vast swaths of the School’s constituencies felt disaffected, partly because Shafik had no interest in running an academic institution (rumors are that Shafik was angling to become the next head of the Bank of England but wasn’t offered the job; LSE was a consolation prize). Columbia is certainly a tremendous coup for Shafik, given that her compensation must be well above the $1.5 million in base that Bollinger received. And yet, the Baroness may well be interested in even bigger things, making Columbia but a steppingstone in an otherwise profitable but substanceless career. An individual in this position, seeing their relevant audience as future employers, would stop at nothing to perform power and resolve. Calling the cops to appease right wing politicians and maybe save the job makes complete rational sense. That criticisms of her actions from the upper echelons of politics were sparse (was there not even a really dumb White House statement sort of supporting Columbia’s actions?) merely made this choice seem more rational.
If Shafik could do it without getting fired, other university presidents—perhaps also as career focused—saw an opportunity to display power of their own. If the head bully wasn’t reprimanded by anyone that matters for them, why not be a bully, too? Why not show authority, even if you actually lack it? Why not hide your ineptitude and weakness behind public security forces, just like Minouche? The spark reached the kindling. The fire raged. And here we are.