The War on Terror and the Demonization of Student Protests

As the incoming freshman class of 2028 moves into dorms and considers its first set of course offerings at universities across the country, some of them may notice features of campus life they were not expecting.

At the University of Pennsylvania, a sign has been posted on the College Green informing students that all “events, demonstrations, rallies, protests, and large gatherings require prior University approval.” At Columbia University, the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine has been permanently banned from Instagram, a platform where it had amassed more than 120,000 followers. At NYU, security guards have been stationed around fenced-off benches so that students are unable to assemble there, and the University of Michigan has instructed students and faculty to call the police if they run into any “disruptive protests.”

Universities have taken these measures because they are desperate to avoid a reprise of the pro-Palestinian and antiwar protests that roiled American campuses during the previous academic year, resulting in Congressional hearings, the resignation of multiple university presidents, the deployment of city police on campus grounds, the mass arrest of students, and (in Columbia’s case) the cancellation of commencement.

Read More: What America’s Student Photojournalists Saw at the Campus Protests

It isn’t hard to understand why universities have taken these steps: there’s nothing career administrators dislike more than unpredictable events, negative media attention, and outraged donors. In doing so, however, they have not just failed to live up to their commitment to protect freedom of speech for their students—they have also revived an ugly episode from the early years of our now-concluded war on terror.

In the years following September 11, 2001, as the Bush administration sent Americans to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, schools throughout the country were roiled by protests, including widespread student walkouts. On the campus of Denver, Colorado’s three Auraria colleges, students even established an encampment. With antiwar activism exploding across America, these student actions became part of a long linage of campus protest movements, including those during the Vietnam War in the ‘60s and the anti-Apartheid protests of the ‘80s.

But instead of welcoming their students’ contributions to the country’s most important political debate, many university administrators cooperated with government and law enforcement agencies in subjecting protesters to surveillance and repression.

Many Muslim and Arab students during this period were already dealing with a hostile campus atmosphere characterized by suspicion, harassment, and intimidation. On September 14, 2001, a Muslim student at Arizona State University was beaten and pelted with eggs in a parking lot, and two men at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro beat a Lebanese student while shouting “Go home, terrorist!” Other Muslim and Arab students reported being singled out for hostile questioning by their professors. Muslim student associations (MSAs) should have served as a refuge for students during this period, but they became targets as well, as when someone threw rocks through the windows of the MSA office at Wayne State University.

What’s more, it soon became clear that students faced surveillance and intimidation from government agencies as well. After September 11, the FBI began enlisting hundreds of campus police departments to help out in surveilling what the Washington Post ominously described as “insular communities of Middle Eastern students.” And in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security began requiring that institutions of higher education furnish federal law enforcement with names, addresses, and other information about all foreign students studying inside the United States, with any unapproved change in address or college major resulting in immediate deportation.

As some faculty objected at the time, this kind of blanket surveillance—as opposed to targeted investigations into specific acts of criminal activity—could only have a chilling effect on students’ willingness to participate in political debate, especially given the FBI’s well-known history of targeting student activists during the Vietnam era. But these objections largely went unaddressed. Hundreds of campuses welcomed the increased FBI presence, and, as the sociologist Lori Peek noted in her book Behind the Backlash, “about two hundred colleges and universities … turned over personal information about foreign students and faculty members to the FBI, most of the time without a subpoena or a court order.”

During this same period, the New York Police Department also established what it called the Demographics Unit, an intelligence operation tasked with gathering covert information on Muslim communities throughout the NYC metropolitan area. MSAs in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania were all subject to police surveillance. In one instance, the NYPD even sent an undercover officer on an MSA whitewater rafting trip to upstate New York in 2008. The officer reported back to his superiors that “in addition to the regularly scheduled events (Rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day.”

This surveillance didn’t just sow distrust within MSAs—how could students be sure that the new member wasn’t actually an undercover agent?—it also made it difficult and in many cases impossible for Muslim students at American universities to engage publicly in civic life.

“When it came to the MSA and the activities we would do,” one college student named Malaika said to researcher Sunaina Maira, who spoke to students for her book The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. “We tried to avoid all politics. We didn’t know where that would lead and we wanted to keep it strictly educational.” So instead of participating in debates on the day’s most important political issues, Muslim students found themselves simply trying to explain, over and over, that they were just as American as anyone else. Anything more ambitious than a friendly, anodyne presentation explaining how Muslims celebrated different holidays could draw an immediate firestorm of criticism.

This repressive atmosphere persisted for years. As late as 2013, for instance, when Students for Justice in Palestine organized a group of students at Northeastern University to stage a walkout at an event where Israeli soldiers were speaking, the university condemned the students, forced them to produce a “civility statement,” and put the campus SJP group on probation.

Read More: How the Idea of the College Campus Captured American Imaginations—And Politics

The parallels between America’s repression of Muslim student activity back in the 2000s and administrator attempts to stamp out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses today are striking. In both cases, university and government officials have worked to silence Muslim and Arab students whose families have been directly impacted by U.S. support for military violence abroad. In both cases, students who object to America’s role in fueling that violence have been slandered as terrorist sympathizers (and, today, as antisemites). And in both cases, these violations of students’ First Amendment rights have been justified on the spurious grounds that peaceful protesters and student groups present some unspecified but grave “threat” to their wider student communities.

The most vivid recent illustration of this mindset is NYU’s revised “Guidance and Expectations on Student Conduct,” which declares that Zionism is now a protected aspect of religious identity and suggests that the university may now treat criticism of Zionism as tantamount to antisemitism. If guidelines like these were actually about combating antisemitism, then universities would not also be evicting and suspending Jewish student protesters, or banning groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace from their campuses. By drawing a false equivalence between Zionism and Judaism, administrators are declaring that such a debate is bigoted by definition, and thus shouldn’t be allowed to happen at all.

At Columbia University, where the most unsettling scenes of police repression played out at the end of the last academic year, protests started up immediately upon students’ return to campus, with several dozen demonstrators picketing on the first day of the new semester.

Recent actions have not approached the scale of what occurred in the spring, but that should not be mistaken as a sign that student anger about the war has dissipated. For one thing, protests take planning, and students have only just returned to campus. For another, they no longer have the advantage of surprising university administrators who spent the summer developing new campus policies and security measures. At Columbia, for example, campus access has been restricted to people with university IDs, and the University of California system has banned both encampments and the use of masks.

If last spring is any guide, students who decide to defy these bans will face suspension, expulsion, and arrest—punishments, in other words, that can severely impact their ability to acquire a degree or find a job after graduation.

These threats may work—it’s not easy to keep speaking up when doing so may cost you a college degree, or when truck-mounted doxing billboards park outside campus, identify students by name, and identify them as “leading antisemites.” But student groups at Columbia have insisted they will keep going “no matter the individual cost,” and their promises should not be taken lightly. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scheduled to address the United Nations in New York at the end of September, and with a closely contested U.S. election to follow soon after, one should not be surprised if student protesters are move back toward the center of the political firestorm surrounding U.S. support for Israel’s war.

In the early 2000s, the repression of student political activity in the U.S. contributed to one of the most conformist political climates this country has ever seen and made it easier for the Bush administration to launch one of the most wasteful and brutal wars in American history. Today, many of our most prestigious universities are making the same mistakes.