If They Didn't Have Bad Faith . . .

They'd have no faith at all

Photo: Austin American-Statesman. Police arrest students at UT Austin.

Why the sudden wave of campus protests? Why are police being called in to break things up? Why now?

And what do bad-faith actors have to do with this?

Mulling over the spate of student protests, the media coverage, political reaction, and commentary by the punditocracy — I am stymied. I should be able to write up an analytic overview, at least. But I can’t. Amid a tsunami of news reports, official statements, analyses, and editorials, I cannot discern an interpretable chain of events.

Sifting through the bullshit is the major challenge. There is a kernel of something real down there—with a ton of sewage on top. Searching for the authentic, we must first dispense with the performative. Let’s start by identifying the bad-faith actors, their motivations, and their effects. Political operatives like New York Representative Elise Stefanik, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gin up controversy, take advantage of the resulting chaos and then call for a violent crackdown. Do they object to DEI —Diversity, Equity, Inclusion? I oppose their DRT —Deflect, Reframe, Target.

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First Move (December 2023)

Two student groups on the Columbia University campus formed a coalition in 2016 to pressure the University to divest from Israel: the Students for Justice in Palestine and the Jewish Voice for Peace. After the Israel Defense Force responded to Hamas’ attack with a military operation in Gaza in October 2023, these groups organized a student walk-out. Classes were boycotted on October 25 amid student calls for divestment and a cease-fire in Gaza. The Columbia University protests might have remained a local, and not a national, issue. But Republican politicians saw an opportunity.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, who was not even the chair of the House Education Committee, scheduled a Congressional hearing concerning campus antisemitism for December 6. The Committee invited three female presidents of elite universities to testify: Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and the University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill. (Transcript here.)

The Washington correspondent to The Guardian explained:

At issue is how campuses are handling accusations of antisemitism on college campuses following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza that has triggered a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Stefanik – a Harvard graduate and former Republican mainstream conservative who has rebranded herself as a pro-Trump Maga Republican – ambushed the university chiefs towards the end of five hours of testimony.

Demanding “yes or no” answers, she succeeded in making them appear ambivalent or equivocal on the issue of genocide by posing general, broad-brush questions whose terms were open to competing definitions.

They were sandbagged. Ambushed. Off with their heads!

What happened next?

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said all three college presidents who testified at a House hearing this week on antisemitism should be fired for their “lack of moral clarity” on the issue.

Do you know anyone who can express moral clarity regarding the international relations of Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon? Please direct that Sage to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Appeasement

Four days after her Congressional testimony, and amid a growing furor of criticism, Liz Magill voluntarily resigned as U Penn president.

The rightwing outrage machine turned its attention then to Harvard President Claudine Gay. Harvard defended its first Black president for a time; nevertheless, President Gay was forced to resign within a month of her Congressional testimony.

The media portrayed these resignations as resulting from deficiencies of the two university leaders. In reality, the controversy was deliberately manufactured and amplified by a Republican operative. It was not, as they say, organic.

Politico’s Ian Ward got the 411 from Christopher Rufo, MAGA trickster extraordinaire:

Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. . . .

None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”

MIT’s Kornbluth is the last woman standing.

Still . . . Stefanik and Rufo got two out of three—not bad.

Second Move (April 2024)

What worked in December 2023 could work again in April 2024—a presidential election year.

The House Education Committee summoned Columbia University President Nemat Shafik to appear on April 17 to answer for (alleged) anti-semitism on campus. Know what else happened on April 17? Nine miles south of the Columbia campus, the first seven jurors were picked for Trump’s hush money trial.

Great deflection, Elise!

Great Replacement Theory proponent Stefanik’s antisemitism credentials are not great. No problem. What matters in DRT (deflect/reframe/target) is not principle, it’s performance.

Education writer David Bell reviews Stefanik in Dean of Faculty:

No matter what you think of American academe, you still should not want Elise Stefanik to run your campus. Unfortunately, over the past six months, this canny and effective five-term congresswoman from New York, chair of the House Republican Conference, and a zealously servile supporter of Donald Trump, has maneuvered herself into a position of dangerous influence over higher education. Anyone who thinks she is merely calling attention to the problem of campus antisemitism has not looked closely enough at the House hearings in which she has taken the lead, grilling four Ivy League presidents. Her goal has not been simply to humiliate these educators but to force them to accept her diagnosis of what is happening at their institutions, and to push them to change their policies. The consequences of her bullying became crystal clear last week at Columbia University.

But even if you believe that Congress has a legitimate role in overseeing the issues covered in the hearings, that legitimacy still depends on the good faith of the committee members. Stefanik and her colleagues have been acting in transparently bad faith, with entirely obvious ulterior motives. [Emphasis added—m.o.]

What ulterior motives? So many . . .

War Cries of the Disingenuous

It’s sad how easily bad-faith political actors can manipulate university administrators. Fearing their students, university officials call in the cops. Which is the fastest, simplest way to exacerbate tensions on campus and to spread a student uprising.

Not wanting to be the next (female) university president to resign, Nemat Shafik tried to placate her Republican antagonists by playing hardball. She called in the NYPD; campus disturbances grew, threatening the university’s graduation ceremonies.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott’s go-to move in any situation is to call for reinforcements, knock heads, and arrest migrants protesters.

Administrators overreact. Right-wing politicians take advantage. The situation escalates.

Political scientist Don Moynihan:

There are the protests, and what the people off-campus want to turn the protests into: sites of disorder and violence, a basis by which to discredit and control campuses, a reason to fear leftist radicals and a campaign issue in the presidential election.

Down with DEI DRT!

The MAGA Republican strategy is obvious. It’s the same strategy that Rufo deployed in Virginia and Florida. 1) Initiate a propaganda campaign about a niche issue unfamiliar to the general public (critical race theory, diversity/equity/inclusion programs in business and academia). 2) Characterize the niche issue as a dangerous threat to society. 3) Enlist the rightwing propaganda organs in a campaign to amplify a negative reframing of the issue. 4) Encourage Republican politicians and organizations to campaign against this (newly conceived) liberal threat (to education, families, religious “freedom”). 5) Lobby lawmakers to oppose the “liberal” agenda, making DEI programs illegal or threatening the tenure of professors teaching critical race theory.

The strategy has three tactical components:

Deflect. Don’t pay attention to the Trump trial in New York—look at Columbia students protesting!

Reframe. Press release: Campus protests prove that free speech is suppressed by universities and that antisemitism is rampant!

Target. A female, Black university president at Harvard could only have achieved that position because of DEI. She must be forced to resign!

MAGA Republicans use DRT to drive wedges through the cracks of the loosey-goosey coalitional structures that comprise the Democratic Party. It’s not just me that says so. Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. . . .

Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose . . . but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage. [Emphasis added—m.o]

I may be cynical (I am) but it seems to me that, at every step, the good-faith actors (free speech defenders, morally outraged students, and anti-racism advocates) make the exact moves that the bad-faith actors want them to. The good guys take the bait; the bad guys achieve their goals.

And now, your moment of . . . Adjustment

Writing—and reading—about serious subjects can be fairly depressing. Grounded will conclude each week with a lighter story so that you may leave with a bit of joy in your heart.

Chiropractor works on giraffe, is thanked

Whitley . . . assessed Gerry’s neck and jaw because the giraffe’s owner said he had been chewing oddly, though did not seem to be in pain. Whitley applied pressure in spots around Gerry’s jaw and neck to help restore motion to his joints.

‘His jaw was not moving to the left,’ Whitley says in the video as he works on Gerry. What happened next might be why three quick videos Whitley posted on TikTok have been watched collectively more than 48 million times: Gerry leaned over and nuzzled Whitley, seemingly thanking him.

“So let me get this straight … giraffes are just giant dogs??” one person commented.

Related Grounded articles:

Lower Higher Ed (January 31, 2023).

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Notes:

David A. Bell, Elise Stefanik, Dean of Faculty. (In The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind a paywall. If the link doesn’t work, email me and I’ll send you a pdf.)

Maggie Hicks, MIT’s President Is Still Standing. (In The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind a paywall. If the link doesn’t work, email me and I’ll send you a pdf.)

Don Moynihan, Manufacturing Dissent.

Lily Kepner et al., At least 50 arrested at UT Austin for pro-Palestinian protest.

Adam Serwer, The Republicans who want American carnage.

Robert Tait, What’s behind the antisemitism furor over college presidents’ testimony?

Ian Ward, How a Conservative Activist’s Crusade led to Claudine Gay’s Resignation.