‘The Antisemitism Is Absolutely Disproportionate’ – Intv with UC Regent John Pérez

Worth reading:

….UC Berkeley, in particular, is in the national imagination as a place of protests — during the Vietnam War in particular. Do you feel like these current protests on campus are different than protests in the past? And if so, how?

I do think they’re different.

In each of those waves of previous protests, there was a notion from students that engaging in the protest had to serve the purpose of bringing people along in an area of debate, creating space to protest, but also to change minds and bring people in the direction of the justice that they were trying to seek. But there was also a concept of consequences associated with protest. If you want protest without consequence, what you really want is performance. And I think that right now we’re seeing folks engaging in disruption, without an understanding or appreciation for what consequences can come up with it, which I think can sometimes be performative.

Second, it feels like much of the protest now isn’t, at least from my perspective, effective in trying to move debate and create space to find a new common ground that aligns with the justice that the protesters are seeking. When it’s disruption for the sake of disruption, as opposed to civil disobedience to capture attention and create space for debate, I think it serves a fundamentally different [purpose].

When you look at the Free Speech Movement, it was about creating the space for all debate, including debate that one disagrees with. What we’ve seen of late is something very different, which is shutting down debate. Last year, at Berkeley Law School, student groups passed a series of resolutions, essentially banning debate, saying that holders of “Zionist viewpoints” would not be allowed to come [to their events]. That’s very different. It’s one thing to say any given organization shouldn’t be compelled to invite somebody who has a viewpoint that’s contrary to theirs. But to say that we want to ban a whole section of debate is inherently problematic in society. It’s particularly problematic in law school, and particularly problematic in a law school centered in a place that in many ways was the birth of the free speech movement on university campuses.

There has been a horrible spike in antisemitic activity across college campuses across the country, but particularly at elite universities, and there’s been a spike in the community more broadly as well. And I don’t think that we, societally and we, as university leaders, have done enough to push back against this spike in antisemitism.