At Brown University, the Experiential Learning of Arrest

My alma mater, Brown University, advertises opportunities for experiential learning to prospective students. Funny that alongside experiences in Barcelona, Oxford, and Rome they don’t advertise being detained, booked and charged with trespassing by the Providence Police Department for asking to speak to university leadership about what the students feel is complicity in war crimes in Gaza.

A year ago, 20 students sat down and sang in the hall of a Brown University administration building to challenge their university’s support of war crimes in Gaza through endowment investments. The group of students, under the banner “Jews for Ceasefire Now,” wanted to talk to the leaders of their university. They refused to leave when the buildings closed at the end of the workday. Less than an hour later, the students were being walked out by police, arrested for willful trespassing.

Brown University president Christina Paxson made a choice. She could have tolerated the civil disobedience like Wesleyan president Michael Roth did. She could have joined her students like Amherst president John William Ward did in 1972 when students were protesting the Vietnam War. She could have created a safe space for her students to explore protest and the spectrum of ways to engage the powerful just as she creates a safe space for students to pursue academics and the spectrum of ways they could change the world.

But, instead, Brown jumped to the tools of a repressive state as so many universities across the US in the last year have. We’ve seen universities quickly enact new or stronger limits on free expression, such as disallowing masking for identity concealment (just a few years after masking was required for public health). We’ve seen universities step up overt surveillance, setting up spotlights, hiring observers and installing new camera towers at protest encampments. And we’ve seen universities exact punitive punishments both on and off campus – over 3100 students across the US were detained or arrested by law enforcement for their participation in pro-Palestinian campus protests last spring.

Largely those arrests and academic sanctions were for non-violent, non-destructive, getting-in-the-way-of-business-operations actions – that is, civil disobedience. The type of protest that people generally engage with when the powerful are not listening. The type of protest that has a rich history at US universities, from civil rights sit-ins and anti-war protests to anti-apartheid and #occupy encampments. When universities aren’t listening, their students get in the way to demand they listen. But universities aren’t tolerating civil disobedience over Gaza because they may lose funding from their disapproving donors. They cave to the demands of their donors, but they don’t even listen to the demands of their tuition-paying students.

Students are easy to identify for arrest or academic sanctions. They are on a campus covered with security cameras. They swipe their ID cards to get into buildings. They connect to wifi hotspots with their college accounts. They participate in discussions on social media. That surveillance begets easy-to-target students begets other students who don’t feel safe to engage in the conversation, ever more so when they see their universities quickly reach to punitive measures for relatively minor legal and policy infractions.

To be clear, colleges do have a choice over whether to enforce such infractions. The actions we’ve seen universities take silence student engagement rather than encourage exploration. Colleges continuing down the road of stifling student voices will only contribute to higher education’s crisis of legitimacy.

Ultimately Brown asked for the charges against those 20 students to be dropped so as to not be “distracted by other things that are divisive.” Brown also agreed to put a divestment resolution up for vote in exchange for students ending the encampment that followed the fall protests, but ultimately did not divest and condemned the protests that followed the divestment vote.

But did those 20 students – and 41 more on December 12 – need to have the practical experience of being arrested? Or do we want them to have the practical experience of shaping people’s minds and effecting change in the world?

Rather than drawing the line for acceptable engagement at the point of “not interfering with business operations,” universities could set the line at “no property destruction,” and give students the space to experiment with civil disobedience. Students could practice building support. They could learn from their professors how other social movements have done this. We could give them the space to make protest mistakes, and we could let them recover from those mistakes just as we let them recover from mistakes in the classroom – without permanent consequences. We could teach them about the risks they would be taking if they did so off campus, but we can do that bit with powerpoint rather than police.