Campus Protests and our National Amnesia

Over the past few weeks, we have see countless protests across university campuses calling for administrations to divest from Israel and for a cease fire in the Palestinian-Israeli war. We have seen the militarization of law enforcement, sometimes called on campus at the behest of universities and other times preemptively by governors, to squash these protests. We have seen students and faculty arrested, sometimes violently thrown to the ground. We’ve seen politicians work to spin the crackdown on the protests to play to their base. We’ve seen countless comparisons, as well, to the protests of the late 1960s, specifically the protests that erupted in 1968. I am not an expert on all of this, by any means, but I do know history, and I do know that what we see today carries with it echoes of the past.

In an interview with NPR, Frank Guridy, a history professor at Columbia University who teaches a class on the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War that occurred on Columbia’s campus in 1968, pointed out the similarities and also noted that even calls for divestment are nothing new because protests took place in the 1930s calling on institutions to divest and boycott Nazi Germany. What Guridy and others point out is that while there are differences between 1968 and today, namely because we do not have military personnel on the ground and there is no draft there is a lot that is…