Warm Spring at Columbia University

We know that spring is popular with major protest movements. We can think of the Prague Spring of 1968, the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Maple Spring of 2012. And if we are to believe the wind that is blowing, we are seeing the first buds of a protest spring bloom in the United States.

And this time, it’s the country’s elite universities that are at the forefront.

Columbia University, camped in Harlem in New York, is currently the epicenter of this revolt which has been brewing for months, but which has intensified over the past week.

On April 17, the president of the university called the New York police to dismantle the occupation camp of student demonstrators who denounce the Israeli military intervention in Gaza and ask the well-heeled private university to withdraw its investments in companies that benefit the Jewish state government and its army. Around a hundred students were arrested. They were accused of having “disturbed the order”.

Far from calming things down, the police intervention added fuel to the fire, targeted some of the university’s professors and brought to the surface memories of the police repression which had sowed chaos on the campus in 1968, in the heart of the movement against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. A movement that led to profound changes within American society.

Within days, tents reappeared at Columbia and protests spread to other campuses across the country. Yale, New York University (NYU), Tufts, Emerson, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the famous University of California at Berkeley, also known for its activist past, are among the lot.

In front of the doors of Columbia – closed to all those who do not have a university ID card – the street is also involved.

And across the country, two camps are digging their trenches on their own. One advocating order and security for all, while denouncing the anti-Semitic content of certain comments. The other defending the right to free expression and dissent in the face of the American government’s almost unwavering support for the Israeli intervention which left more than 34,000 dead, according to Gaza health services.

Two camps that have difficulty speaking and hearing each other.

Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Hagar Chemali notes that some slogans used today have nothing to do with those she heard while she was a student at the same university and that the second intifada was in full swing in the Middle East.

“Already in my time, I was horrified by the protests and the polarization that accompanied them, but it never became so bad that we could not continue our studies. We never talked about students having their yarmaka (Jewish headdress) taken away or the flag they were holding burned,” she told me on Wednesday, reached in New York. “There are words – like apartheid and genocide – that are completely normalized and that we would never have heard before,” she argues.

Furthermore, the one who has worked for a long time in national security circles in Washington perceives that the American political class does not feel at all the same urgency with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip as within the academic ranks. . In Washington, she said, there are believed to be greater national security threats from China and Russia. The demonstrators have the impression of being faced with a new Vietnam, a conflict which calls into question the morality of their country.

“What I hope is that with the end of the academic year, the campuses will be dormant this summer and things will calm down,” says Hagar Chemali.

This is a possible scenario, but it is not the only one.

If the past is any guide to the future, Columbia’s warm spring could turn into a scorching summer.

During the Vietnam War, campuses were the spark plugs of the anti-war movement – ​​with the University of Michigan leading the way – but protests quickly spread to major cities and spilled over into the House campaign. White.

“The Chicago Democratic convention this summer could resemble the 1968 convention in the same city. The anti-war movement made a lot of noise there. What is happening at Columbia University is perhaps the beginning of something that could prevail in the electoral campaign until November,” believes Frédérick Gagnon, professor of political science at the University of Quebec. in Montreal (UQAM), where he is also director of the Observatory on the United States. I reached him after he had just participated in a Columbia University conference on the upcoming US elections, but held off campus.

Current events – in Washington and the Middle East – will be the other factor that will determine whether the student movement dies out or turns into an inferno.

If we rely on yesterday – during which Joe Biden spoke of a “great moment for peace” by announcing that his government can finally release 26.4 billion in aid for Israel in addition to aid to Ukraine and Taiwan – we have not left the conflagration zone.