Let Us Reason Together: Notes on the Encampments

INTRODUCTION

WHAT WAS AT STAKE

by Jadon George

Jadon George served as assistant news director at WHIP during Temple’s 2023-’24 academic year.

Sohrab Ahmari, the Catholic integralist cofounder of Compact magazine, first entered my consciousness in 2019, amid a row with David French over “Drag Queen Story Hour.” French, a conservative Christian lawyer read out of both movements by backers of Donald Trump, defended drag performers’ right to read in libraries in terms Ahmari found naive — “unsuitable,” he argued, to meet social liberalism’s scorched-earth march through the fields of Christian sensitivity. To orient society to the “Highest Good,” Ahmari argued, elements of traditional, small-L liberalism and tolerance needed to recede. (Ross Douthat wondered to Ahmari’s face if this wasn’t the kind of talk that led the latter to flee Iran in the first place.)

Five years have passed. Israel’s military is in the Gaza Strip and has killed tens of thousands in search of the terror group Hamas — and in search of vengeance for the October 7 terror attack, in which Hamas murdered nearly 1,200 Israelis. And university students, perhaps for the first time in their lives, have risked limb and livelihood to express their rage at the war and their institutions’ support of the nation prosecuting it.

Ahmari, that critic of liberty, visited Columbia University, “the movement’s [sic] epicentre,” in April. Beneath the thunder of police helicopters, behind the phalanxes of armored officers, he found no justification — no “Highest Good” — in the sheer volume of force deployed against the protestors. In conservative circles and even many liberal ones, Ahmari stands alone in his findings.

WHIP News did some visiting, too, this spring — to the encampment that brought Penn and Philadelphia to a rumbling stutter for fifteen days. It’s our second try at capturing this movement in its fullness. This time, we brought backup — our beloved colleague, decorated investigative journalist Allison Beck — and this time, antiwar activists joined their critics in speaking with us on the record. I can’t say we captured all the fear, agony, and action of the college conflict, even in a piece roughly half as long as James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” (You can, if you find that to be the case.) But I can say that we moved heaven and earth to care — whether that meant occasionally redacting names, so campers and counterprotestors could speak freely, or reviewing photographs, to ensure they didn’t unnecessarily endanger those who had simply decided to stand in a public place. (The press has freedoms, too, and attendant responsibilities.)

Salman Rushdie often advises his students not to write something if there’s any conceivable way to avoid doing so. We couldn’t avoid this one.

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PROLOUGE: THE SONG

by Allison Beck

Allison Beck is an award-winning investigative reporter and photojournalist. The images she captured of the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania appear throughout this piece, including on the above cover, which features a Hasidic layman and an antiwar protestor in the midst of a heated conversation at the barricades. Beck’s work on pool closures for the Inquirer was recognized by a Keystone Award in the spring of 2024; TUTV’s “Queer Temple,” of which she is executive producer, won a Telly Award for its episode on the relationship between Black and LGBTQ+ communities; and she’s been a member of two Edward R. Murrow Award-winning investigative teams for Temple’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting — one on the history of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy, and another on the issue of youth homelessness in Philadelphia. On May 1 and 2, she watched the protests on College Green, at the base of the Ben Franklin statue in front of College Hall, and typed up her observations.

The sun was down; most of the spectators were back in their offices and homes. But the campers and their supporters were still buzzing, led by a pink-skirted, platinum-afroed alto in “We Shall Not Be Moved” — the spiritual popularized by the Civil Rights Movement in its drive to end the Jim Crow regime in the South.

We shall not, we shall not be moved,

We shall not, we shall not be moved,

Just like a tree, standing by the water, we shall not be moved.

Even as I tried to hover in the crowd — a press pass, traditionally indicating non-affiliation, hanging from my neck — the melody tickled a corner of my memory: A Christian summer camp, with three hundred barefoot children on candy-colored gym mats, singing hymns in unison.

A helicopter ducked low overhead, the sound of its blades cutting through the twilight. But no one even stuttered, or glanced skyward; the song continued, joined by the beat of drums and tambourines. Some were makeshift creations, of old plastic water jugs or bright orange buckets. Others looked like the real deal — music emporia, antiques stores, artifacts from long-forgotten music classes. A young man with a keffiyeh around his neck strolled to the front of the group, strumming an acoustic guitar with a kind of youthful, guileless gusto as the parting crowd around him chuckled and cheered.

Were these the “violent agitators” striking fear into the hearts of college administrators, cultural critics, and law enforcement officers?

Perhaps officials thought them more fearsome a few hours before, as they shouted for — among other things — Palestinian liberation, police abolition, and for UPenn to divest from Israel as counter protestors snapped flash-bulb photos to keep records of exposed faces. But, in that moment, they were arm-in-arm, singing.

One counter-protestor had been there at least as long as I had, filming the speeches and chants on his phone. He stayed long after the news cameras packed up. When “We Shall Not Be Moved” began, he lowered his phone, glued his eyes to the pavement, and sank, silently, onto a nearby bench.

After they finished, I made a beeline for the impromptu chorus’s leader. “Hey,” I pulled out my own phone and waved. “Do you have a minute?” 

Their name was Samantha Rise. They earned a music degree from Temple University in 2016, but they spoke of an even more valuable education along the way: Over the years, Rise learned about Philadelphia’s rich Black radical tradition; about mutual aid organizations; and “community care.” Soon, they were participating in social movements themselves— long before the encampment appeared on Penn’s campus.

Why come out for this particular protest?

“I really feel like our world is so much better off and more thoroughly equipped to lead itself into a future we all belong to if the people who are directing us are young people,” Rise said.

“The way that they’re implementing it as they grow — through mistake-making, adapting and evolving to accommodate new people, to make it accessible, to make it creative to make it nurturing — it’s a microcosm of the world that I want to be a part of,” they continued.

The next day, another protest would ignite the campus — the kind that you can hear from four blocks away. It was seared through with the raucous sights and sounds of rage, painting a vivid picture for the photographers, TV reporters, and writers who flocked from across the region to cover College Green.

They saw students and community members crowd around a statue of Ben Franklin, which protesters had decked out in a keffiyeh, Palestinian flag, and hand painted signs the night before. They witnessed the speeches and the revolutionary chants, some of them in Arabic, backed by baselines and drum beats.

Disclose, divest, we will not stop we will not rest 

PPD, KKK, IOF they’re all the same 

Ali ali ali ali, ali alam el thawra ali (Translation: Raise raise raise, raise, raise the flag of the revolution)

They also saw clashes with counter-protestors, ranging from controlled conversations to clusters of people yelling over one another. Everyone in attendance that day saw everything that scared them — including the press, often standing in front of the library, 20 feet away.

They missed Samantha Rise — and the song.

Instead, they heard the debate that broke out between members of the encampment and the counter-protestors. In the breach between one speaker’s point and the other’s, a middle-aged man with a megaphone on the sidewalk lifted it to his mouth and thundered, “If you are gay, Hamas will throw you off a roof.” Members of the encampment laughed at what must have sounded like a threat, trading sarcastic jabs with one another as Megaphone Man drew more eyes to himself.

A conversation between counterprotestors and camp-appointed marshals, describing themselves as trained in de-escalation, bubbled into a lungs-out argument, deflated into a hushed, sharp debate, then bubbled up again. A TV cameraman caught every second; so did I, as the University of Pennsylvania police looked on.

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FIFTEEN DAYS IN SPRING

by Jadon George

College Green turned into Philadelphia’s most controversial campground, a canvas commentary on foreign and domestic events. Teenagers, middle-aged veteran activists, and everyone in-between milled about the grass, around Bronze Ben Franklin. Spectators dangled from park benches like Cub Scouts clinging to Rickety Bridge. And, in the shadow of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, a detachment from the University of Pennsylvania Police bore silent testimony that one person’s beloved community is another’s menace.

Several organizations claimed responsibility for the camp, among them the Freedom School for Palestine, Penn’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Temple University’s Students for Justice in Palestine, and a multi-chapter student group called Jewish Voice for Peace. When the press asked Penn’s demonstrators why they camped, they returned three answers: For their institution to list its investments, cross the names of Israel and its affiliates from the roster, and refrain from prosecuting or sanctioning the activists who asked them to. Protestors even developed a chant: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!”

Hundreds of colleges and universities maintain “ties” and “investments” in Israel — a term covering everything from endowments used to fund Israeli companies to exchange programs with the Holy Land’s universities and tourism partnerships with Hillel chapters. But rarely do “ties” refer to entanglements quite like Penn’s, where Ghost Robotics peddles greyhound-shaped sentries from the school’s Pennovation tech research lab. Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces, bought several shipments of the bot-dogs, dubbed Vision 60, and deployed them as scouts in the battlefield. When the encampment began, “STOP ENGINEERING GENOCIDE” entered the congregation of Gaza-related rallying cries.

Penn’s leaders read the tent village’s demands and offered to negotiate it out of existence. While they did, they prepared to levy sanctions against the camp’s press representatives.

On April 26, Penn’s student paper reported that someone in camp spray-painted the base of Franklin’s statue in red: “Zios get fuckt.” An organizer covered the paint, reached for a megaphone, and asked the gathered activists “not to do that.” It was already too late: Penn’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson, ordered the encampment to disband in a statement, accusing its members of “harassing and intimidating behavior” and “antisemitism.” The activists stayed put.

In the scramble for leverage, university administrators served notice that they planned to keep records of students’ I.D.s, known as PennCards. Starved for details, the notice entered the campers’ minds as a threat to sweep the Green with police and jail anyone the school lacked the power to discipline themselves — the so-called “outsiders.”

America’s disdain for traveling activism stretches farther back than this article can cover. In 1856, for example, pro-slavery activists poured into a pair of Midwestern territories to rig referenda on human bondage. Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts Republican, damned them as “the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization” in a vivid flambeau of a floor speech that sparked his caning a day later. As antislavery Northerners journeyed south in the postbellum era to oversee the old Confederacy’s postwar reconstruction, white supremacists dragged them as “carpetbaggers” — Klan-speak for vultures and crooks. In 1960, Georgia college students ran an ad reviving the call for racial equality; the state’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, groused, “It did not sound like it was prepared in any Georgia school or college; nor in fact did it read like it was written even in this country.” Five years later, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leading demonstrations in Alabama, then-governor George Wallace directed Yellowhammers to avoid “agitation and demonstrations led and directed by outsiders.”

As in the South, appeals to insularity morphed into a pretext for state enforcement. Columbia University called the police on its protestors twice. On April 18, the school’s president, the baroness Minouche Shafik, testified in Congress on campus antisemitism. As she spoke, students upset by Israel’s war in Hamas formed the first encampment. When Shafik emerged, she called the NYPD; officers booked the demonstrators and hauled their handiwork to waiting dumpsters.

Not to be deterred, the advocates of the Palestinian cause pitched a second encampment on another of Columbia’s Manhattan lawns and drew pilgrimages from activists, intellectuals, and journalists. Writers from the Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker toured the tents and speculated on why, exactly, the students were out there. Cornel West, the philosopher/theologian-turned presidential candidate from neighboring Union Seminary, hopped the fence and took up a megaphone to commend the crowd for demanding peace. And Shafik sent the protestors a statement from her office: No divestment was coming. Amid the impasse, the tent village morphed into a base, from which activists stormed the campus’s Hamilton Hall. (The storming, which occurred at roughly 1 a.m. on April 30, involved booting several New York sanitation workers from the premises, prompting a lawsuit from the workers’ union and a write-up of two facilities staffers in the New York Times.) At the twentieth hour of the indoor encampment, thousands of New York police officers — sheathed in enough armor to turn Camelot green with envy — stormed the hall, arrested 109 protestors, and dismantled the tents.

Hours later, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of information, Tony Sheppard, ladled a gold-plated bicycle chain and orange lock onto the translucent table at the center of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Officers allegedly disentangled several of them from Hamilton’s doors. “This isn’t what students bring to class,” Sheppard speculated. “This is what outsiders and professionals bring to universities and campuses.” Representatives from the Department repeated the claim across cable news. Not once were they interrupted with the news that Columbia sold the lock through its own public safety department.

When Jameson and administration brought the “outsider” line to Penn, the encampment’s activists began to wonder if Columbia’s fate awaited them, too. “We’ve had, like, hundreds of people here since the start of our encampment,” said an encampment representative the night Penn announced its plan. “We’ve had Philly community members, Penn students, Drexel students, Temple students. We’ve seen, like, a ton of community support.” No one seemed to know what, exactly, Penn intended to do once it had separated students from the “outsiders” — not least because school officials never publicly acknowledged any such plan.

At the University of California-Los Angeles, counterprotestors assailed an encampment with cudgels and fireworks. (Police stood by during the attack; after it ended, they pushed in and broke camp.) At Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire, officers appeared in shields and visored helmets within hours of a tent village’s construction. And at the University of Texas-Austin, state troopers thundered into a protest on horseback — spraying gas, swinging batons, and brandishing handcuffs to shatter a temporary, tentless gathering in which every criminal charge issued by police vanished within hours.

Across the country, faculty and administration argued about an invisible line, over which a demonstration demanded the power of the State. But each protest, each encampment, was different: Jameson’s warnings reached a Penn campus far from the chaos of Columbia, and even farther from the violence that marked the sectarian clash in LA. Police’s first two arrests in the camp were of counterprotestors — one for strolling into the tent village with a holstered knife during its Passover Seder, another for spraying its storehouse of food with an unidentified sulfuric substance. And Penn experienced several encampments in 2022, when environmentalists took up residence on College Green to pressure the school to take its endowment out of the oil industry. No barricades bracketed the camp’s edges. No officials, from Penn or anywhere else, condemned the activists or their cause. Police only acted in that case when several anti-fossil-fuel protestors stormed Franklin Field during a Penn football game.

What made this encampment different? Why let law enforcement hover? Why not commit to the table, as Brown and Northwestern did? Or, at least, why not speak the language of the University of Chicago? (“Given the importance of the expressive rights of our students, we may allow an encampment to remain for a short time despite the obvious violations of policy — but those violating university policy should expect to face disciplinary consequences.”)

Politicians, commentators, and counter-activists called these encampments “disruptive” and “unsafe.” But students horrified by the violence in Gaza often found more conventional avenues of dissent closed off. (At USC, for example, groups aligned with Israel pressed officials to cancel the university-wide commencement rather than platform a pro-Palestinian valedictorian.)

Even the quietest camps, administrators insisted, made parts of their universities impassable; rallies and dueling demonstrations rendered studying impossible. But, for many colleges, the most important problem the camps had little to do with what they interrupted — and everything to do with what they didn’t.

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Rebecca Stein peered across the library’s front lawn through sharp, glinting eyes, the windows to her soul like the headlights on a Ferrari. Glancing back and forth for a place to rest, she slung her multicolored backpack next to mine on a bench behind the Button. An Israeli flag peeked through the zipper.

She’d taught giant economics sections at Penn for decades, educating half of Penn’s undergrads at her peak. In 2019, she left the lecture hall to promote online learning — a concept that still drew few sniffles in elite academia. “Then, the pandemic came,” she said, “and everything fell into our laps.” Now, Stein runs the university’s renowned Online Learning Initiative.

A life promoting peace in Israeli politics made Stein a veteran of unpopular fights. Her parents, Stein recalled, hoisted her onto their shoulders during the debate over Israel-Egyptian relations. “It was a very lonely movement,” she recounted. When Britain and the United Nations elected to solve violence between Palestine’s Jews and Arabs by partitioning the territory, India-style, in 1947, the tract’s neighbors reacted by storming Mandatory Palestine to snuff out the paramilitaries claiming to stand for the region’s Jews. Israel and the Arab states clashed thrice between 1948 and 1967; Egypt spent all three wars on the side trying to snuff the new country out. But the two nations put decades of bad blood aside and inched towards a peace pact, at America’s urging, in 1978. “Both our countries are far more prosperous and secure than they were before peace was accomplished,” in Stein’s telling; when Israelis, disillusioned with the promise of peace with their closest neighbors, elevated Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime minister’s role, she entered a period of extended mourning.  

Did she find kindred souls among the campers — unpopular, nominally peace-loving, unimpeachably progressive? Stein shook her head and patted the Israeli flag in her backpack, sending her silvery coils bobbing in either direction. “They don’t want an Israel without Netanyahu,” she charged, peering sadly at the tent village through dark-button eyes. “They want a Middle East without Israel.” 

The chants — intifada; from the river to the sea — struck Stein as almost hand-picked for their hurtfulness to Jewish passersby. After all, the Anti-Defamation League, chief of the megaphones against antisemitism, denounced such language on its website. Stein lost friends and family in the first two Palestinian-Israeli intifadas. Most of all, to her, the notion of Israel as an injustice, a dissoluble injustice, put the Jewish state on tilted ground. Americans, anglophone or Latin? The ever-toppling Arab states? Europe, the cashbox of empire? Arguing about stolen land?

“To suggest that Israel, alone, ought not exist because of its past,” Stein said, “is antisemitic.”

David and Solomon’s Unified Kingdom, the oldest archaeological record of Jewish governance on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, splintered and faded under the thumb of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after two centuries. The Hebrew community forged for itself a dual identity in the millennia to come: First, the perpetually-conquered province, a stud in the nostrils of Assyria, Greece, Rome, and the Ottomans. Second, what the conservative commentator Bret Stephens extolled as “the oldest continuous anticolonial movement in history” — resistance to conquerors, whether in the form of the biblical Judges, Judas Maccabeus’s purification of the Second Temple, or the Zealots whose defeat marked the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. as that same temple charred beneath the Roman torch. Europe, defined by its theocratic ruptures and repeated ethnonationalist realignments, persecuted Jews relentlessly from the Middle Ages on, but the dream of a forever refuge never died. (Lord Arthur James Balfour fanned the flames in 1917, when the British pledged the Palestinian portion of the vanquished Ottoman Empire to a Jewish homeland.) When the Holocaust brought the cold-blooded murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews — and other Western nations, cowed by hatred in their own ranks, lowballed the continent’s refugees — many of the survivors fled to the British territory then known as Mandatory Palestine. Millions of Jews, hailing from everywhere from Uganda to India, would join them, often not by choice, in the decades to follow.

Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2020, Pew polled America’s Jewish adults on their attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East. Less than half — 45 percent — said that their concern for Israel formed the core of their religious identity. A separate survey, from the Jerusalem Post and the Ruderman Group, found that two-thirds of Jews felt connected to Israel “on an emotional level”; four-fifths described themselves as at least “pro-Israel.” Israel’s promise of refuge for a long-persecuted people, half of whom currently take it up on the offer, prompted the Anti-Defamation League to declare anti-Zionism “antisemitic, in intent or effect,” in part for rendering “Jews less worthy of sovereignty and nationhood than other peoples and states.”

But more still goes unsaid: Of Palestinian Arabs, the ADL’s entry on anti-Zionism merely notes, “Some Palestinians may call themselves anti-Zionists because of how they perceive Zionism has impacted them personally.” Which is to say, the endless procession of dislocating wars and the presence of a state next door that never saw them as much more than a problem to be solved.

Also telling: 37 percent of Jews in that Pew survey, taken three years before October 7, reported experiencing antisemitism firsthand at some point in their lives, and 34 percent said they heard, at least once, an antisemitic trope uttered in their presence.

Was the rage over Gaza just well-disguised Jew-hatred? The press liaison we met at camp that first Sunday dangled a glittering Star of David from her neck. We asked. She answered: She didn’t see the encampment as antisemitic at all. On the contrary, it offered her an opportunity for faithfulness. “I was raised on the values of Mitzvah, and taking care of your neighbors,” the spokeswoman said. “I can’t sit back when so many innocent people are being killed in my name.”

One night, a wiry undergrad wrapped himself in an Israeli flag and chattered with two spectators from far across the Green. He gave his name as Orrin; he found the demonstrators ignorant. “I don’t think they know why they’re here at all,” he scoffed. “A lot of them are just along for the ride.”

Did he fear the encampment — at all? Orrin shook his head. “Nah.”

Perhaps the most eloquent case against a show of force came from an organizer of the encampment, curled across a library bench in exhaustion during a rap session on the first Monday night. I wondered, aloud, whether the antisemitism claims gave her any pause about the cause. In response, she recounted a claim from President Joe Biden — “our president, America’s president, not Jameson” — at the UN General Assembly, three weeks before October 7. Biden, in conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, remarked that “without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure.” That, said the spokeswoman, was antisemitic.

“It implies that Jewish people do not have a place in the United States, or France, or the United Kingdom, or Canada,” the press rep contended. Elevating Israel, a nation-state, to a very centerpiece of Jewish identity made it harder to combat antisemitism, she said.

But at least one Penn student sensed danger, enough to make America feel it with him. Hamas tore into Israel, and the Israelis launched their 35,000-death Gazan response, as Eyal Yakoby hashed out the details of an incoming consultancy at Bain Capital in his native New York. Yakoby, a student of political science, became college-aged America’s leading narrator of the peace movement’s discontents. On the morning of then-Penn president Liz Magill’s cataclysmic, career-derailing congressional testimony on antisemitism, Yakoby joined a House Republican press conference and tied his schoolmates to Nazi Germany.

“At first, I believed this was hysteria,” Yakoby recalled, with House Speaker Mike Johnson standing rapt at his right-hand side. Then, Yakoby said, antisemitic sidewalk chalk began popping up on the grounds, and Penn sent its students an email warning them against Jewish-coded attire and accessories. That — for Yakoby and untold numbers of Jewish Penn students — marked the pro-Palestine activists as an existential threat. 

U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the former Maryland Community College president who chairs the House’s education committee, did not summon Yakoby to answer questions under oath until May of this year. (House leaders launched their probe into universities’ treatment of Jewish students in December.) Though two of Israel’s chief congressional critics, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, sit on the committee, the testimony unfolded behind closed doors — where no cameras, press, or even congresspeople themselves could relay what Yakoby said under oath. The testimony that sank Magill and launched the “scalping” of then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, by contrast, unfolded on live television, where New York representative Elise Stefanik could very publicly accuse both schools’ chiefs of blessing “calls for Jewish genocide.”

Even so, optics and experience became one. “I do not feel safe,” Yakoby announced to the assembled media, while standing at a podium flanked by a security detail.

“I refuse to go back to 1939,” he said, in part, with House Speaker Mike Johnson rapt at his side, “when Jews had to hide their religious symbols and who they are, due to intimidation and harassment.” Penn, and other elite schools, needed to refuse, too — to enact some nebulous policy of more, to assuage his concerns.

At the end of the conversation with Rebecca Stein, the economist-turned online learning pioneer, I asked about Yakoby’s requests: Had the encampment crossed enough lines to summon the police, or even — as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and the attorney Leo Terrell had suggested — the National Guard? Stein’s silver coils bounced side-to-side as the wizened professor shook her head. 

“I don’t see how that could possibly be helpful at this point,” she remarked. “It sounds like an unfortunate escalation.”

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William Albert “Bill” Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and Harvard Business grad, first fretted about the politics of college when his daughter returned home to say she planned to write a thesis on Western Marxist thought. Ackman told New York magazine, “I didn’t know if that was just my daughter or what. I didn’t think, like, the biology department was involved.” When anti-Israel sentiment reached the fever zone on college campuses in the wake of October 7, Ackman’s fears of an unhinged academic world drove him headlong into politics and the public eye. Ackman, who married the Israeli researcher and design specialist Neri Oxman in 2019, arguably became the country’s most vocal defender in the business world. After Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, hedged on antisemitism in Congress, Ackman called for her dismissal and got it when conservative online sleuths discovered plagiarism in Gay’s academic papers. When Business Insider noted that entire passages of Oxman’s research appeared to be cribbed from Wikipedia, Ackman cried foul to BI’s parent company — the leaders of which he counted as acquaintances — and got the outlet to launch an investigation of its own reporters. When Harvard began the process of replacing its first Black president, Ackman chimed in with a 4,000-word essay denouncing DEI hiring initiatives, published on a blog run by the political commentator Bari Weiss. (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” not to be confused with Dale Earnhardt, Inc.) And when the Columbia protests ratcheted up in the spring, Ackman and several other billionaires clustered in a WhatsApp chat with the goal of influencing New York mayor Eric Adams against demonstrators. The chat Zoomed Adams during the Hamilton Hall takeover, urging him to send in the police, and at least one member noted how much money he had gifted Adams’s political campaigns.

America’s fraught relationship to higher education dates to the 1960s, an era that saw student movements against the Jim Crow regime and the Vietnam War. Protests alone were enough to ruffle Cold War hawks in the North and segregationists in the South. But the furrowed eyebrows over education became a distinctly Republican pastime as its midcentury conservative core pushed East Coast liberals (think Nelson Rockefeller and James Lindsay) off the party perch. Besides, controversial left-wing academics abounded: Bernardine Dohrn made the FBI’s Most Wanted list for her leadership of the militant Weather Underground movement, then became a law professor when the federal case against her disintegrated in 1973. Angela Davis — a self-declared Communist who studied in East Berlin and successfully defended herself against felony murder charges in 1972 — taught philosophy sections in the UC system over the objections of then-governor Ronald Reagan.

But “hard” sciences and business, often naked of the liberal arts’ white-hot social commentary, often escape the Right’s wrath in the battle over education — “No politics,” as the author Gish Jen once wrote, “just make money.” One reason: In 2014, engineering and business schools staffed twice as many conservative faculty as the humanities.

Businesspeople, including Ackman himself, can’t seem to shake the sense that the humanities leave their incoming employees less worried about making bank and more worried about, say, setting the bank aflame to replace it with a system they see as more just. But the kings of the business class — not just Ackman, but figures like Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, and Jamie Dimon — also rarely speak on the derelictions that revived American radicalism in the first place: How the fast-and-loose mortgage lending of the late 20th century and early aughts shattered young graduates’ idea of what free-market economics could be, for example, or how the decades of racially-charged killings undermined this country’s understanding of race and racism. How slow the arms of organized religion could be to wrap themselves around new ways of living and loving — and, not at all coincidentally, how those same stiff limbs could nonetheless find room for corruption and hatred. Where revered institutions prayed their silence could pass for absolution, the critics vouchsafed an explanation and a way forward.

Milton Friedman, chief of economics’ revered Chicago School, believed Adam Smith’s invisible hand could balance the scales of justice: Profit-seeking institutions would pursue the greater good for the sake of their own financial good. Once the 21st century revived the image of that hand attached to nothing — as a ruse, governed by self-interest to the doom of all else — the revolutionary morality of an Angela Davis was waiting. In other words, intellectual conservatives earned a reputation for chasing their pocketbooks; the radicals earned a reputation for chasing their consciences, even when the pursuit of the highest good led them astray. Perhaps business schools and the hard sciences offer students a way to survive. But, in their very radicalism, demonstrations like the encampment and ideas like Marxism offered what the profitable college experience could not: A way to live. It offered a near-religious experience.

When the campers saw no enemies at the gate, the peep of sparrows wafted above the gentle hum of laughter on the Green. Amateur foodies from the campus and the community sat covered dishes on a table near the back of the barricades. And researchers’ children roamed both sides of Locust Walk, tossing footballs in camp and climbing on the modern-art Button beneath the library.  

“I haven’t found it aggressive,” a Penn post-doctoral fellow mused as her toddler darted between us, across the Walk, and into the Button. “I just walked up and was like, ‘Hey, can I come in?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah. Sure.’” The camp’s openness doubled as an initiation: In the ensuing days, the postdoc hauled food and first-aid equipment past the stout metal barricades that split the Solidarity Zone from the rest of Penn.

But the encampment, and its brethren across the country, revealed the limits of the press: News is not meant to cover the everyday, or the mundane, so much as the novel — it’s in the name.

On the morning of May 2, Yakoby gathered a procession at the door to Jameson’s office and asked the administration, via a 2,000-name petition, to clear the encampment by force. After a brief presser (“as you can see, we did this very respectfully”) Yakoby vanished; the stringers, camera crews, and news trucks stayed put to watch several dozen of his allies march to College Green.

For six hours, the press captured footage of a cacophony: Orthodox laymen paraded blaring shofars, Israeli flag-wavers thundered into megaphones, and more subdued critics argued about self-determination as the encampment rose to full song — screaming intifada into the blazing sun, arguing with their interlocutors via vocal cords and amplifiers, rapping spare wooden sticks on hollow jugs and buckets.

In the afternoon, the frenzy overran the police barricades separating Bronze Ben Franklin from the crowd. For the second time in two days, Franklin found himself made a stage — shrouded in a keffiyeh, draped in the tricolor Palestinian flag, taped with slogans seen on signs across the camp.

Philadelphia’s reform-minded district attorney, Larry Krasner, strolled past the encampment just before the barriers fell. A TV reporter passed a copy of Yakoby’s petition into Krasner’s hands, then noted, repeatedly, how many names marked the pages as the city’s leading law enforcement official thumb through them for himself.

Krasner gave the reporter nothing: His first visit, the previous day, made the camp a pulpit, from which Krasner condemned New York’s circus of overreach and intemperance. “We don’t have to do Columbia,” he warned. “We don’t have to do stupid.” With the demonstrations underway, Krasner reflected, briefly, on Penn’s options: Northwestern and Brown cut deals to rethink their ties to Israel, he noted. True to their word, the protestors there packed up their tents. “Compare that to the fiasco at Columbia, where they made one bad decision after another that, frankly, increased the tensions.” Mistakes, Krasner clarified, on all sides — the initial riot-gear incursion, the molten lines of communication, the Capitol-style building-storming, the ensuing siege of campus.  

“I am hopeful that Philadelphia will go the smart route, which will be peaceful, where people will have their constitutional rights observed,” Krasner ventured, straining to be heard over the human hurricane. “But it remains to be seen.”

Just after 3 p.m., the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that J. Larry Jameson called city police during the bombast battle and asked them to help clear the encampment. PPD refused — without “imminent danger,” they said, to people or property, the city’s police planned to stay put.

Hour by hour, counterprotestors petered away, leaving only a few stragglers to debate at the barricades. A colleague in radio news realized he’d gone way over time and hustled back to the newsroom around 4 p.m. Television stations, loaded with all the video they needed and no way to air it between broadcasts, folded their tripods and walked off the Green after the 6 o’clock news. Starbucks, where an Inquirer webmaster had holed up by the window and a procession of roving reporters used a semi-public restroom, managed to close its doors on time at 8 in the evening. (The coffee shop’s baristas offered me a tender mercy: When my phone’s charge began to die out around 7:45, the staff let me plug it into the wall and walked it out once they’d finished closing up shop.) Only a freelance stringer from the New York Times remained in front of the library late into the night.

 Philadelphia’s best broadcasters must have spent eight hours walking College Green beneath the sweltering, allergenic atmosphere. Ultimately, less than 10 minutes of what they saw and heard would have aired in a standard TV news cycle. Media criticism’s patron saint, Marshall McLuhan, famously quipped, “The medium is the message.” 

Message taken: How much of this matters, really? Everything? Or just the spectacular parts?

Around 9 p.m., a pro-Israel remnant unfurled a projector screen on the library’s lawn and ran footage of the October 7 attack — to little fanfare, on either side. The attention the screening did get largely came from the fitful technology: Protestors could be heard applauding, sarcastically, when the reels malfunctioned, distorted themselves, or vanished altogether. When the men responsible for the screening devised temporary fixes for each problem, the protestors chuckled and clapped as the machine and its imagery whirred back to life.

Counterprotestors had made a habit of showing terrorism-related snuff documentaries on the library lawn. Perhaps they truly wanted to persuade the campers that they ought to explicitly condemn Hamas, or even to abandon the calls for an end to the war. But the screenings mostly ended in silence and frustration, or with op-eds from counterprotestors accusing their opponents of cheering the carnage.

One of the Hasidim, deep in debate with a camp-commissioned “de-escalator,” crossed the stout metal fencing and made his case among the tents. As the human chill pill engaged, the layman realized where he stood and glanced around — waiting for the gathering demonstrators to notice his attire and boot him off the premises.

Volumes varied and temperatures changed. Once or twice, the debate grew loud enough to turn heads on either side of the barricades. But at argument’s end, the counterprotestor returned to the encampment’s entrance, nodded at the more-or-less self-declared security detail, and waded into the night of his own accord.

As the hour passed 10, the screeners packed up, and several watchmen — satisfied with the night’s safety — trudged across College Green, through Locust Walk, towards the bike rack at the library’s base. One turned to the camp and waved to someone invisible beyond the streetlights. “I love you!” he called into the darkness as he sped towards the street.

“I love you, too!” a voice called back.

///

As I sat on the edge, or paced in front of the library, or peppered protestors with philosophical conundrums (hey, it was Penn), I pierced the sea of nothingness — of endless, opportunistic waiting — with a nagging thought. Bill Simmons, the Boston Sports Guy and revered nine-figure media mogul, used to have a running feature in his column for ESPN’s Grantland vertical: The Worst Contracts in the NBA. In 2014, Simmons opened his league-wide lampoon with a story about his then-elementary-aged daughter and then-toddler son. “In December, I gave my kids $20 for a toy store trip and they picked out $90 worth of stuff,” Simmons lamented. “They had no concept of money. They didn’t know if our house cost $2,000 or $2 billion.” His intro rattled around in my head; I Googled it in the Grantland Archive at 3 a.m., multiple times. It was like a night terror in some apocryphal religious text, desperately needing a collision with reality to give it any form or meaning.

I got it the morning of May 3, Samantha Rise, the activist, wheeled a gargantuan, pearly grease board behind College Green’s ever-growing nest of barricades. Among its first inscriptions: A running tally, scrawled in simple, black, block numerals.  

34,596 — Gaza’s war dead. The cost.

Gaza’s Health Ministry, administered by Hamas, collected the tally itself, neglecting to separate mothers, fathers, and children from the militants whose ambush began the calamity’s current phase. Officials, including in the United States, questioned the count’s accuracy. Still, that number — 34,459 — was the only statistic anyone had on the toll exacted by the landlord of death in Gaza since Oct. 7; Israel, though it estimates militant deaths, only tallied those lost in the attacks: Roughly 1,200.

“Seven months after October 7th, it is still October 8th, the day after, in the State of Israel,” wrote New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick in his second profile of the Holy Land’s oldest newspaper, Ha’aretz. “The country remains in mourning, a depressed state of being that alternates among rage at Israel’s enemies; rage at its leaders; anxiety about the hostages in Gaza; excruciating doubt about the future of the country; and bewilderment that so much of the world has turned its attention to the horrific, ever-growing number of dead and wounded Palestinians.” Bewilderment, at the world’s concern for human life — the kind of calloused attitude that even the conservative columnist David Brooks decried during one of his weekly P.B.S. appearances.

Revolutionaries often judge their work by what they displace: Bestial imperial regimes, sustained by delusions of racial grandeur. Economic orders that burrow chasms between the haves and have-nots. Unresponsive, nominally-democratic political setups — run by sightless bureaucrats, rewarding cynical gamesmanship. Rebuilding a society after the old way dies gets a lot less airtime. Perhaps it shouldn’t: A new system’s discontents tend to outlive whatever it overthrows. (Coincidentally, none other than Haaretz published a think piece, in Hebrew, asserting that the end of the Jewish state might not be a catastrophe for the Jewish people, after all.)

During the encampment, I quizzed the activists and their discontents on the matter of postwar Gaza — its government and guiding principles if Israel won, withdrew, or dissolved. “We’re a diverse group of people,” they regularly said, driven to the streets by the sight of bleeding children, or the fear of a national, personal annihilation. “We haven’t thought about that yet.” To the activists on either side, perhaps God — the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian God — could have written Simmons’s intro himself: My kids have no idea what anything costs.

The Pentateuch’s oldest, best-preserved manuscript is Numbers: A travelogue of the ancient, and I mean Moses-era-ancient, Hebrews’ journey. A series of censuses. A holy travelogue. A history of public sin and a ledger of its collective cost, in lives. For nations, even mundane history forms a central chord, sealing self-willed individuals within a common origin and cause. For the intermittently stateless, history — the story, of a brother, a long-lost grandmother, of those who loved and shared lives and cultures — is all that exists, no matter how mind-numbing.

Before 1967, the Gaza Strip was Egyptian territory. When Israel captured it in the Six-Day War, the Strip assumed the awkward status of a conquered province, an enclave. When the Israelis pulled out, to much fanfare, in the mid-aughts, Hamas slaughtered their political rivals en masse and forcibly tore Gaza from the West Bank’s relatively-moderate government to reflect the geographic split in the region’s elections. Ironically, Hamas’s so-called “resistance” project so thoroughly tangled the Strip’s nest of refugee camps, public services, and militant dugouts that Israel leveraged it as justification to blockade the enclave in 2007. Netanyahu’s repeated ascents brought with them a policy of allowing the enemy to fester outside the gates, so his Likudniks and their ultra-right — theocratic, even — allies could keep pointing to burgeoning terror cells as a reason to deny Palestinians everything from statehood to potato chips. And now, the invocation of Hamas’s “human shields” has become a kind of blank check, whipped out and written up every time an IDF operation sweeps scores of civilians from the face of the earth — icing international condemnation, quelling Israeli discontent, and leaving the true ranks of the dead a subject of perpetual doubt and controversy.

To note that Hamas oversees crossing guards, first-aid centers, and schools in the midst of its totalitarian regime and never-really-ending assault on Israel is not to indemnify any of the above, so much as to state the obvious: Palestine’s memory — grievances and sins, lost lands, unattainable recognition — is, in a sense, the only permanent Gaza there is. Everything else, volatile and endangered, could be gone tomorrow. Maybe that would be true sans Hamas, as a growing number of the Arab world’s rank-and-file seem to believe. Or maybe we delude ourselves, and every nation is one catastrophic day away from vapor.

A street artist from Penn’s faculty first considered the cost of the Israeli idea during a “birthright trip” with the Hillel chapter at her venerated midwestern undergrad alma mater. American by birth, Eastern European by ancestry, a progressive Jew by faith, she never summoned a connection to the Holy Land, even as she hiked its roads and toured its historic streets. What struck the artist, in fact, was an unscheduled trip out of Israeli territory.

“I was able to see that there was also this place called Palestine,” she explained, “and I was able to actually visit Ramallah, and start to get a sense that there was a whole history and narrative that I was not being told.” Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, has become a tragic symbol of sorts for liberal Israelis and the Arab world as an ever-growing patchwork of Netanyahu-blessed settlements encroaches on Palestinian ownership and authority in the hinterlands. The artist had heard whispers of such a place, but never anything so concrete. She had never seen the costs of statehood before. Though she never joined the encampment, or advocated the abolition of the Jewish state, the antiwar movement offered the artist a chance to process her relationship to the Israeli idea. “So, the encampment was the first time I felt like there was a space for open dialogue, and for grieving and mourning,” she said.

So much of the debate around the encampment — around the war, around its international aftershocks — circled stories like the artist’s. For four-fifths of Jews worldwide, the state of Israel completes and undergirds an ethnic identity purpose-built to follow the faithful across the earth; for half of the Jewish faithful, it’s home. But The Land is also a country. It’s led by a government most Jews didn’t elect and defended by a military most Jews didn’t have a hand in building. And every government, no matter who it claims to represent, lives subject to public opinion. 

“Netanyahu has got to go,” David Zelnick, a Penn-educated veterinarian who stood watching the barricades (“I know for a fact I couldn’t walk in there…”), told me. “I thought that before October 7. I think he’s corrupt.” On Zelnick’s side, the pro-Israel side, I met not a single person in Netanyahu’s corner. Nor did I ever hear a demonstrator encourage Israelis to flee to Europe, or anywhere else. But I also never heard either side of the barricade paint a bright, clear picture of the postwar Middle East — of the future for Israel’s Jews, or the structure of the oft-referred-to Free Palestine. And though much has been made of Hamas’s goal of pushing most Jews out of the region, few in the West are aware that some Israeli government officials have pushed the vision of a “Greater Israel,” where Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are pushed out of their homes to make way for Israeli settlements and real-estate development. (Past and potentially future American officials even referred to Gaza as “waterfront property.”) Where was the pressure to condemn that?

It’s easy to comb through a crowd for hateful, violent opinions and turn an entire movement into a referendum on its worst members. (Why try to defend Israel’s conduct in this war if you can accuse its critics of antisemitism instead?) Opponents of the war, on the other hand, would certainly rather think of the press’s focus on bigotry in their ranks as a distraction than address it and splinter their coalition. But the world is finding out — the hard way — what the Middle East knew for decades: Derailing a conversation that needs to happen doesn’t make it go away. It takes it out of the hands of the people who need to have it, and opens the door for cynics and opportunists to seize control instead.

“ALL EYES ON RAFAH,” read a banner in the camp, from late April onwards. In the weeks since it first hung, the little city in Gaza’s southeast corner stretched into the sticker-shock price tag of the war’s costs. Roughly a million refugees huddled in Rafah as the war scorched everything else. Then, in the spring, Israel parked its forces at the gates. The nations had seen enough: President Biden canceled an arms delivery to Israel over the planned assault, and pantomimed drawing a red line over the sheer density of civilians there. Several European and Spanish-speaking nations declared a Palestinian state. And the International Criminal Court put out warrants on Netanyahu and Hamas’s political chief, Yahya Sinwar. 

Meanwhile, all signs of the encampment disappeared within two blocks of College Green: Lovebirds toured University City’s mix of natural and manmade beauty, hand in hand. Best friends embraced, for perhaps the last time, and gameplanned their study schedules for Finals Week. Past the overpass on University Avenue, Past the silent solitude of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, a grizzled gentleman in a flannel shirt sat sentry in a used bookstore on 40th Street. “Firsthand?” he grinned and shook his head. “I haven’t seen anything about the encampment.”

The media wondered aloud if young and Muslim discontent doomed Biden’s reelection chances. Columnists noted anti-Israel zealotry spreading through book publishing, awards ceremonies, and literary magazines. And temperance eluded television, where sensational scenes gargled forth from the encampments as fast as cable news’ aging audience could swallow them. In other words, America turned its eyes to, well, America. 

And to spots like College Green.

///

From the encampment’s late-April advent, the demonstrators and administrators shared a table for hours at a time. Penn’s representatives remained, even as the Franklin statue became a kind of activist canvas and ever-louder, more public demonstrations served as sonic flights over exams. The campers kept negotiating, too, even as the school processed their disciplinary cases and periodically beseeched the police to get rid of them. (“Every day the encampment exists, the campus is less safe,” Jameson wrote. “Some have aimed to characterize this as a peaceful protest. It is not.”)

On May 7, Penn held a closed-door session with a detachment of campers affiliated with the university. (Krasner and a state representative, Democrat Rick Krajewski, had been requested by the organizers, but Penn decided against their presence.) The organizers’ groups put out a blast on social media: “Negotiations have not been productive.” That evening, activists began pitching tents where they never stood before — the opposite end of College Green. 

Philadelphia’s Inquirer would later report that Mayor Cherelle Parker opposed police action against the encampment, instead waiting for Penn and the campers to negotiate themselves out of crisis. The encampment’s growth brought the waiting to an end: By Thursday, state and local officials knew the police planned to move in.

Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, weighed in from clear on the other side of the state. Since negotiations broke down, he said, “the situation has gotten even more out of control. More rules have been violated, more laws have been broken. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

Then, the governor got to the point — the point, perhaps, of all of this: “All students should feel safe when they’re on campus. All students have a legal right to feel safe on campus.”

On May 10, the PPD’s trademark white Chevy vans jammed the corners of 34th & Market streets, freezing half a block of University City traffic at the first sign of sunlight. Officers on bikes collected at the front of the camp, warning protestors to disperse. An ever-growing crush of activists hugged the base of Franklin’s statue. 

Around 6 a.m., the earliest possible moment to catch subway trains to University City, a colleague fired off a text: “they’re arresting people,” they wrote. 

For the next several hours, law enforcement cleared the Green of humanity — press off the lawn, out of the library, and across the street as armored officers ordered the encampment and its people to disperse, and perpwalked protestors down 34th if they refused. Some of the demonstrators stood there, too, and resumed sloganeering as the police paraded by: Who do you serve? Who do you protect? Eventually, they followed the police to the precinct on 61st & Girard, where officers booked 33 arrested campers and turned them out onto the street.

“How long have you been here?” Someone spied Katie Bartlett, an editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian, huddling with two other DP editors in front of Fisher-Bennett Hall, opposite the Green. 

“Since 11 o’clock last night,” Bartlett shrugged. She and the other editors — politics editor Diamy Wang, photography chief Ethan Young — staked out the space between the Green and the library for the length of the encampment’s two-week run. They occasionally gnawed on QDOBA’s closing take-out orders in front of the Van Pelt Library. They consistently clustered, the three of them, on the lip of the grass at the farthest edge of College Green, from streetlights to sunlight. And the stakeout paid dividends: I often awoke several times a night, like a wailing newborn, to read their wee-hour observations, and the Inquirer wrote up the DP’s staff for their dedication as student-journalists across the country showered in praise. 

Even after the events of May 8, the police allowed the Penn camp to stand two more days. Locals might know why: A different kind of encampment, a homeless encampment in a section of Kensington — part of a vortex, pulling souls struggling with substance into a working-class neighborhood’s vast drug scene — commanded law enforcement’s attention for the early part of the week. Parker, the mayor, wanted to be sure the partial clearing of Kensington brought no immediate fallout before she turned the police anywhere else. Ministers, city workers, and Parker herself spent months touring Kensington, warning those on its main streets to leave or be removed. Officials called press conferences and unveiled plans for treatment centers and temporary housing. And the police issued a hard date and time — the morning, ironically, of Wednesday, May 8 — at which they wanted the streets emptied. Theirs was a seesaw of a job, balancing the lives of the voiceless and infirm with the clout of families, officials, and developers who wanted the suffering out of sight. But it was a job undertaken by Philadelphia’s government, nonetheless — to the ire of harm-reduction groups who insisted that addiction needed to be treated rather than simply enforced.

Those without homes are not known to write lists of demands regarding foreign wars, nor do they ever have $21 billion at their disposal, nor do journalists from across the country tend to broadcast their movements for days on end. Point being, no fallout ensued: Those with the most at stake in the Kensington conversation generally moved out of sight, onto side streets or into shelters; the city cleared what remained on a swath of the main thoroughfare and turned its attention to next steps. And to Penn.

By 9 a.m. on Friday, May 10, the Penn encampment’s disbanding ceased to be a police matter. Facilities crews set about dumping every earthly possession in the camp, and a network of chain-link fencing bordered College Green on all sides. Some of Penn’s faculty howled; the antiwar movement organized protests throughout the city. But the scene didn’t become Columbia, UCLA, or Austin — at least, not right then.

Eventually, the protestors on the corner decamped. Most went home, or returned to the course of business they followed on an exam day. Several of the faithful, however, walked or rode to the corner of 61st & Girard, just outside the police precinct where 33 campers were finding themselves accused of property and compliance crimes. 

Krasner stayed away, at least that time. Parker, Jameson, and University City, having braced for the chaos, embraced the promise of calm.

That evening, I boarded Philadelphia’s serpentine Market-Frankford Line, the El, two blocks west of the Delaware River and something like 32 blocks east of Penn’s campus. It was a ride I’d taken at least a dozen times since the antiwar movement first pitched tents at the end of April — each trip pregnant with the possibility of confrontation, a mild gamble on a Columbia-esque windfall. 

As I rode, I found myself missing the things that made the El, well, the El — the shopping carts left bereft between Spring Garden and the Old City; the shadows cast over corner stores by gentrification-spec high-rises in Fishtown; the teeming masses from all walks of life, fidgeting along the yellow line under City Hall.

Instead, I’d notice a woman who regularly boarded below the Weitzman Museum, how her eyes would widen and dart if a keffiyeh-clad demonstrator slipped into the caboose. I’d zero in on the keffiyehs themselves, framing the eyes of would-be protestors in repose. And I’d note the wheel of emotions, from indifference to bemusement to slight annoyance, that flickered across the faces of late-night line cooks and security guards as they found their evening commutes crammed with humanity.

As we approached 15th Street — and West Philadelphia beyond it — a passenger standing by the doors fished something out of his backpack. A keffiyeh. Hands buffeted by the El’s rumble under the streets of Center City, he slowly affixed the scarf around his head, half-shroud and half insignia.

I finally popped out at 15th, under City Hall. The train plunged on, into the falling darkness.

///

A week later, nearly two dozen activists tried to storm Fisher-Bennett Hall and set up a second encampment. Hail, Columbia.

In minutes, Philadelphia’s forces converged on the scene in enough armor to turn Camelot green — visored helmets, batons, shields, the works. Where the NYPD took a day to clear Hamilton Hall amid a busy semester, the police had hands on the Fisher-Bennett activists before the news cameras could even converge. The protestors gathered almost as fast: During the clearing, they thronged outside Fisher-Bennett Hall and hissed, with one accord, their disapproval of the police’s conduct.

Even the spectators that particular night seemed swept in, accidentally and unhappily: A man sat staring at a phalanx of police marching in front of the Hall and said, “I’m just trying to get as far from this as I can, as quickly as I can.”

So was the city: Between the first encampment and the attempt at a second,  The next night, more activists set up a third encampment, wedged behind Drexel University; in lieu of a menacing-sounding robot-dog operation on campus, the demonstrators instead asked Drexel to disband the campus chabad and its chapter of Hillel, the largest Jewish student organization in the United States. Replace them, the protestors’ statement read, with “non-Zionist Jewish organizations.” (Hillel sponsors “birthright trips” to Israel, of the sort that disillusioned the artist at Penn.)

A day later, a fourth encampment popped up in Clark Park — five-ish tents on a city-owned green space with no clear ties to Israel.

Drexel’s encampment disbanded because, well, the police pulled up a few days later and asked it to; Clark Park’s camp simply vanished from the headlines, like a boat, unmoored in the night, floating towards a distant horizon.

///

Commencement Friday at Penn’s Franklin Field brought two denials. First, Penn turned several attendees in keffiyehs away from its graduation at the College of Arts and Sciences, prompting a mild social-media blitz from the organizations at the center of University City’s antiwar movement. Under further scrutiny, the school’s PR office said the students they had moved to discipline — including nearly all of the press representatives from the encampment — had left Penn’s hearing notices unanswered, prompting an “expedited process” that culminated in the decision to withhold their diplomas for the time being.

That afternoon, Eyal Yakoby and a handful of his classmates took note of a second denial. After police first cleared College Green — the sort of action Yakoby requested in his petition — new chain-link fencing lined Penn’s central lawn and prevented more protests or gatherings in front of the Van Pelt Library.

Yakoby and his companions posed for pictures at the fence, backs to the camera, hands gripping the wiring. “My friends and I at grad photos,” he posted on X, “but here’s a thread on how @penn ruined traditions for students.”

Not that Penn’s administration would have been taken aback by the critique: Two more students joined the case against Penn on May 7, the Tuesday before the encampment went down. Yakoby himself was in the home stretch of a monthslong circuit through Fox News’ regularly-scheduled programming. And House Republicans, his initial promoters, placed narrators like Yakoby at the center of an effort to turn longstanding suspicions of higher ed into a 21st-century justice struggle. However Penn responded to the unrest within its gates, there were too many people involved to care. A conversation that certainly concerned the university had moved, nonetheless, beyond its territory.

///

Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the chair of Columbia’s revered journalism school, tried to venture onto one of the university’s lawns during the Hamilton Hall clashes; Cobb quickly found himself threatened with arrest by the NYPD. Images and insights from his students and academic colleagues ended up everywhere, anyway: When the New Yorker published select photos of the demonstrations from Columbia photojournalism instructor Nina Berman, Cobb introduced it himself with a stirring, first-person reflection that, even in its narrative intimacy, centered the photographer — and the world contained, clickety-click, between her thumb and pointer.

TIME magazine’s issue from May 27 featured three different cover concepts: The first, the one featured on most American newsstands, portended Eric Cortellessa’s profile of former U.S. president Donald Trump — certain to win Republicans’ presidential nomination, favored to topple Biden and resume power despite, inter magnus multi alia, his own reaction to losing it last time. Actor Ncuti Gwata, the new Dr. Who, served as the gateway to a section on “Next Generation Leaders.”

Finally, there was a third cover — taken not by a staff photographer, or even a professional freelancer, but by the George Washington University student-photojournalist James Schaap.

Schaap spent the evening of April 25 and the wee hours of the 26th hauling a camera around GW’s campus, as Washington D.C.’s assorted police departments stared down an encampment mere blocks from the White House. Around 12:42 a.m., one of the more impassioned congregants flashed the peace sign amid a deluge of artificial light that bordered on sunshine. She said it with her chest, as the cool kids might say, head tilted towards the crook of her arm as the midnight special coalesced in a pocket around her. 

TIME magazine’s iconic red border sprang from the advice of an advertising guru who believed the only magazines that sold featured babies, beautiful women, or the color red. “Only one seemed appropriate,” wrote the publication’s creative director in 2016. Whatever seemed appropriate, Schaap snapped all three — rapturous beauty, childlike innocence, the earth-shattering imagery of confrontation — in the dark-circled fervor of a young woman who chose to reach for something none of us can fully grasp.

TIME magazine captured it, too, wrapping one of Schaap’s shots in the red border and selling it as an alternate cover to its May 27, 2024 issue.

///

The weekend of June 7, the Israel Defense Forces announced the recovery of four hostages from central Gaza. In Israel and across much of the West, war-watchers rejoiced: Innocent people, bystanders in the conflict, improbably reunited with their families for the first time in eight months. Another element of the story got much less press: Because the hostages were being held in a refugee camp, the expedition that saved them actually culminated in a massive firefight between Israeli forces and armed militants that killed nearly 300 Palestinians in the process. Eventually, Israel acknowledged as much — but only to turn the blame back to Hamas, for operating in, around, and under civilian infrastructure since before this current phase of the war even began.

Much of the criticism swirling around the encampment referenced fears at the center of the Jewish experience: Worry that allusions to loyalty, blood, and money were callbacks to the antisemitic tripe of past pogroms. Fear that the West had lost its stomach for welcoming Jews, or vigorously opposing those who wanted them dead. The sense that fading memories of the Holocaust or the first two intifadas had dragged the world past a point of no return.

But both sides of the barricades — Israelis, Palestinians, and their advocates — never seemed to shake the sense that their pain had gone unseen. For the pro-Israel side, that manifested in the searing frustration of hearing campers demur, repeatedly, when asked to condemn Hamas — or when their attempts to relive the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust were met with indifference at best and horrific acts of bigotry at worst. (See: The debacle in New York outside an exhibit centered on the Nova Festival, which bore the brunt of Hamas’s assault on 10/7.) Palestinians and their allies sense that neglect whenever they open mainstream Western papers, see news of the war on TV, or hear the White House utter “human shields” as a shibboleth to excuse the IDF’s battlefield practices. In that way, the attempts to dismiss the Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, or reports of rampant rape on 10/7, miss the point: It’s not just about human suffering itself, so much as the link between empathy and sectarian sympathies. And with American colleges besieged by Congress and their major-dollar donors to suppress antiwar activism, that dissonance won’t disappear — even if the war ends tomorrow.

In the weeks after Hamas’s attack sparked war in Gaza, the estimable British philosopher Amia Srinivasan found herself signing things she previously wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole: Open letters, defending the livelihoods of right-wing scholars with racist or xenophobic views under the banner of “academic freedom.” Srinivasan had thoroughly eviscerated the speech-absolutist case in the pages of the London Review of Books just in July. Some ideas, she had argued, simply don’t deserve a pedagogical platform.

“Indeed, that is the whole point about academic freedom,” she wrote in the Review, of which she is also editor. “It is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods.”

But Srinivasan softened late last fall, as colleges cracked down on pro-Palestinian activism or conjured police-run paramilitaries to do it for them. She wondered: Why hadn’t Greg Lukianoff, the face and voice of academic freedom at FIRE, hit the sawdust trail in support of the protestors’ freedom? Where was NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, who fretted so much about students’ ability to ingest controversial ideas that he exhorted governments from Provo to Paris to ban smartphones in class? Of the prominent conservatives, Srinivasan saw few besides Sohrab Ahmari, an editor at the theological journal First Things, stick his neck out to defend the right of people he found suspicious to say things he found disturbing.

Srinivasan drew the only conclusion she felt she could: For the likes of, say, Douglas Murray — among Britain’s most vivid voices of anti-Muslim sentiment, tucked behind Areopagitica’s paper mask — “academic freedom extends only to those who aren’t ‘indoctrinating the youth’ with their criticisms of Israel or the US.” Awakened by the seeming hypocrisy of her colleagues and interlocutors, the Oxford political theorist began sticking her own neck out for academics she didn’t particularly favor.

“There are always people around in whom [sic] anti-Semitism is a light sleeper,” quipped the Irish politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. Evidence of rising Jew-hatred has marred the West anew in the months since Israel returned to the heat of the battlefield, and the antiwar side has not been swift or decisive in dealing with the cases of bigotry and violent talk in its midst. But the protests against the Gaza war are broad; its members are individuals. To paint them all as antisemites, or even antisemitic collaborators, is to brush away the deep humanitarian anguish that haunts any war, rightly understood.

Just last week, the University of Pennsylvania released two documents related to the spring’s events. The buzzier document, “Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations,” was a rules package, seemingly designed to push the cease-niks out of sight and earshot in August: Encampments were explicitly banned. Officials set clear limits on posters and voice amplifiers. But other guidelines also limited the ability to photograph protests, and gave Penn discretion to toss unaffiliated or uncredentialed journalists from the grounds. (Because WHIP doesn’t seem quite wealthy enough to issue laminated credentials, I shoved a badge from an old internship in my cargo pants’ back pocket every time I headed for the Green. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d ever been compelled to pull it out.) Officials couched each regulation, each clarification, in language that left the door ajar to historicity — the notion that Penn has maintained and enforced the same regulations, since it first adopted an Open Expression policy in 1989. Even if it didn’t.

Penn published a second set of guidelines, from its Task Force on Antisemitism, at the end of May, designed to chart an ideological path forward for the university. It does not attempt to disentangle the Jewish faith from the state that it predates by several thousand years; instead, the report declares, “It is hateful to target Jews or Zionists, individually or as a group.”

To combat antisemitism, the task force advised Penn to “become a leader in Jewish studies” — accumulating not just experts in a faith or a people, but “scholars who specialize in aspects of Israeli society.” It recommends that Judaism be elevated to the level of Blackness, womanhood, and membership in the LGBTQ+ community in the University’s DEI efforts. And it asks Penn to revive and re-issue a statement first released by former president Amy Gutmann in 2011, condemning and rejecting any efforts to sever ties between higher education stateside and the institutions of the state of Israel.

I’m too embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize what we mean when we discuss “human shields”; my teenage self imagined gun-toting terrorists in ski masks, lifting the body weight of a woman or child to stand between themselves and an onrushing bullet. (My teenage self didn’t think about this too deeply, as you can see.) But the last seven months have provided a crash course in just who a “human shield” is: Schoolchildren and surgeons, stranded in harm’s way as buffer between clashing armies. Innocent life, bushwhacked by the powerful for indemnity’s sake. A less direct connection, perhaps, but no less vivid an image.

One might say the guidelines reflected a certain understanding of how antisemitism works, how conversations about hidden dangers and scattered allegiances can morph, over time, into hateful mania. But the reports also infused themselves with a kind of innocence, not so different from the peace-sign lady on the cover of TIME: Bewilderment, as an enterprising journalist might say, at the high cost of seeking acceptance at home while searching for it, frantically, far away.

We care, and stress, a LOT when it comes to getting things right. If something is weird, wrong, or otherwise notable about this piece, let us know ASAP: jgeorge@whipradiotu.com.

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