The Times is On It, Student Protest Edition

Another banger of an otherhander from the Ga-Ga Grey Lady

We the Times editorial board note with concern the demonstrations on the nation’s college campuses. This concern is sufficiently grave that we will not, at the outset at least, characterize these demonstrations as “anti-Israel” or “anti-semitic,” despite the insistence of most of our columnists.

We are told that some of our readers have come to believe the Times has taken a side in the matter. We remind these readers that as a journalistic entity the Times is constitutionally incapable of taking sides in national politics unless a politician refuses to give us regular access and interviews, in which case the ghost of John Peter Zenger demands we draw a line in the sand.

In case the point has not been made strongly enough, we are trying extra hard in this instance to adopt an appropriately neutral tone. Board members were required to watch Spencer Tracy’s final speech from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, again, and answer a quiz on it, before setting to work on this editorial.

First, let us be clear: Protesting the world’s wrongs has been a rite of passage for generations of American youth. And, like other such rites, these are not meant to have an actual impact on the political agendas they are putatively about; the War in Vietnam, for example, was not ended by campus chaos, but by the realpolitik of the late, lamented Henry Kissinger, just as apartheid in South Africa was ended by the hard-headed negotiation of P. W. Botha with the ANC.

These rites are not meant to be politically effectual, but simply to “blood” the young people involved so that they will not have to trouble themselves with such matters once they graduate. Some day these young men and women will — if they have not been found guilty of felonies — take their place in the leadership of our nation, having learned the valuable lesson of the futility of their agitations.

Regrettably some students are not learning these lessons quickly. In addition to jeopardizing their future careers, especially if they are attending one of the less prestigious institutions of higher learning, they are also actually, and ironically, jeopardizing free speech on campus.  

How so? we hear our more churlish commenters ask. For one thing, by persisting in their protests the students are forcing their administrators to bring waves of riot police onto their campuses, arrest and beat them, and disrupt their classes, which is the opposite of free speech. Look at the schools where this has happened — students must navigate checkpoints to enter their own campuses. If you saw this happening in, say, Russia or China, surely you would say that the students are at fault.

Also, what about conservative students’ and professors’ free speech, cancel culture, chilling effect, can’t you see that you’re giving Republicans just what they (and we) want, etc.

In short, we realize that slaughtered children are more telegenic than IDF officers dancing around in the underwear of young Palestinian women whose homes they have destroyed, but if today’s obstreperous students are to find a place in a world where Trump is president for life (oops, did we say that out loud) they must learn — as we assure them every member of this editorial board did in their salad days — to stifle their emotional reactions to what, in the hot blush of youth, seems like obvious, horrifying injustice, and nurse these stifled reactions until they become cold grievances against future generations of protestors whose outrage will feel like a harsh rebuke against their own cowardice. The First Amendment demands nothing less!