{"id":25094,"date":"2024-05-09T10:19:33","date_gmt":"2024-05-09T09:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=25094"},"modified":"2024-05-09T10:19:33","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T09:19:33","slug":"comparison-1960s-us-student-demonstrations-with-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/comparison-1960s-us-student-demonstrations-with-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza campus protests: why understanding 1960s student demonstrations and police reaction is relevant\u00a0today"},"content":{"rendered":"

For anybody interested in the history of the 1960s, the ongoing protests at US universities have a peculiar resonance. <\/span>Dr Sinead McEneaney<\/a>, Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in History at The Open University, tells us why.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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In the past weeks, riot police have entered several college campuses at the behest of administrators to break up unauthorised encampments of students<\/a> protesting the war in Gaza and calling on their universities to divest from companies supporting Israel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The scenes of police arresting hundreds of students at Columbia University<\/a> and UCLA<\/a> are reminiscent of police and National Guard actions against students protesting the Vietnam war<\/a> in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to draw easy parallels with the worst examples of overreach against those anti-war students in the 1960s. Just over 54 years ago, on May 4 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of anti-war protesters on the campus of Kent State University<\/a>, killing four students and injuring nine. Eleven days later, city and state police fired on protesters at Jackson State College, Mississippi<\/a>, killing two students.<\/p>\n

The violence in the way those events were handled galvanised public support for students, and opposition to Richard Nixon\u2019s illegal bombing of Cambodia<\/a>. While public support for the students remained<\/a> quite low, a massive student strike<\/a> followed.<\/p>\n

Photographs<\/a> of the aftermath of the Kent State shooting captured public attention, and were at least part of the reason why some members of Congress sought to rein in Nixon\u2019s powers<\/a>, by passing a law limiting the scope of the president to declare war without congressional approval.<\/p>\n

But what are the similarities between then and now? What lessons have been learned, and ignored, from past experiences?<\/p>\n

In UCLA, Columbia<\/a> and Kent State, campus administrators claimed that calling in the police was to keep students safe<\/a>. Most American universities have their own campus police, so inviting external law enforcement onto campus is an extraordinary step. However, it is not clear that police actions are always proportionate or effective, if their purpose is to keep all students safe.<\/p>\n

For example, there have been accusations that police on the UCLA campus<\/a> used tear gas and fired rubber bullets at protesters <\/a> and counter-protesters, including one man being shot in the chest at very close range<\/a>, as they sought to clear the pro-Palestinian encampment on May 2. The Los Angles Police Department (LAPD) said it did not fire rubber bullets<\/a> or other less-lethal rounds during this incident.<\/p>\n

However, this is not the first time that the LAPD have been accused of misusing rubber bullets. In 2023, a man was awarded US$375,000 (\u00a3298,000) after an LAPD officer shot him with a rubber bullet during a protest<\/a> over George Floyd\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Despite the high-profile nature of the protests, the majority of today\u2019s students<\/a> have been opposed to the disruptive encampments. According to the recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey of Young Americans, only 2% of young Americans<\/a> cite the Israel-Palestine conflict as the issue that concerns them the most. It is possible that images of injured students in zip-tie handcuffs may change that, but it is unlikely.<\/p>\n

Learning from the past<\/h2>\n

In the aftermath of Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton chaired a President\u2019s Commission on campus unrest<\/a>. Much of the commission\u2019s report was underwhelming, and its central conclusion \u2013 that there was a fundamental crisis of understanding between the older and younger generations \u2013 is trite and quite pedestrian.<\/span><\/p>\n

Significantly though, the report debunked the idea that \u201coutside agitators\u201d were to blame for escalated violence. This trope has been much repeated by critics of today\u2019s protests, including the New York mayor Eric Adams<\/a> and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more importantly, the 1970 commission claimed that the root of campus unrest lay with the university\u2019s faltering moral authority \u2013 or what protesting some students at the University of Chicago today see as hypocrisy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then, as now, university authorities have found it very difficult to balance competing interests: freedom of speech, different constituencies of students and student activists, donors, and politicisation of higher education<\/a>, including congressional interference even in private university spaces.<\/p>\n

Some universities have handled protesters better than others. Brown University in Rhode Island \u2013 like Columbia, an Ivy League institution \u2013 negotiated an agreement<\/a> that ended the unauthorised encampment there. Several other universities<\/a> have taken a similar approach. Indeed, Columbia itself negotiated a settlement with the anti-apartheid students of 1985<\/a>, so it is not unreasonable to expect an alternative path could have been followed to defuse the current situation.<\/p>\n

Looking back to the protests of the 1960s, it\u2019s clear the campus shootings at Kent State and Jackson State were avoidable<\/a>, and police and state responses did not need to be so draconian. Something that law enforcement should be keeping in mind today.<\/p>\n

Can we look to the Scranton report for lessons to inform the present day? Perhaps. The commission\u2019s final conclusions may be even more useful now than they were in 1970: \u201cThe university must pull itself together\u2026 Any academic institution worthy of the name must protect the right of its students and faculty to express themselves freely \u2013 outrageously as well as responsibly.\u201d\"The<\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Main picture: Charlotte May for Pixabay<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For anybody interested in the history of the 1960s, the ongoing protests at US universities have a peculiar resonance. Dr Sinead McEneaney, Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in History at The Open University, tells us why. In the past weeks, riot police have entered several college campuses at the behest of administrators to break up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":25095,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[860,869,1525,1640],"class_list":["post-25094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-social-sciences","category-history","tag-faculty-of-fass","tag-fass","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}