US campuses and the October 7 anniversary

I recently spent a couple of days trying to gauge the temperature among students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It was like trying to get blood out of a stone. Though other campuses — notably Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles — saw greater turmoil last spring, Michigan is a razor-close swing state. U of M’s students tend to vote in high numbers. They could make the difference on November. Rarely in my career have I spent as much time hunting down interviewees to such little effect. I tried the panoply of various pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist groups, U of M’s Hillel chapter (Hillel organises Jewish cultural and pastoral life on campus), radical professors, the university’s president and others. Barely anyone was willing to talk. So fruitless was my quest that I began to doubt my journalistic instincts.

Thankfully I found more plausible explanations than personal ineptitude for U of M’s wall of silence. Of these, the fact that Michigan’s attorney-general had just charged 11 people in connection with the spring protests at the university was clearly one. While I was there the issue blew up into a national controversy after Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democratic lawmaker and only Palestinian-American in Congress, accused the state’s attorney-general Dana Nessel of anti-Palestinian bias. Tlaib did not state that Nessel was Jewish but some, including the CNN anchor Jake Tapper, interpreted Tlaib’s comments as implying that was the source of her bias. In an interview with Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, Tapper tried and failed to get her to condemn Tlaib’s comments. Shortly afterwards Whitmer issued a statement that said: “The suggestion that attorney-general Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is anti-Semitic.”

Another reason for student reticence is the university’s clampdown on protests. The chilling effect is nationwide. There are dozens of ongoing federal investigations into colleges across the country for alleged infractions of student civil rights, according to the US department of education. Roughly 80 per cent of the investigations the department’s civil rights division undertook stemmed from antisemitism complaints. Let me state two things clearly. First, anyone who harasses a student because they are Jewish — or for any other identity — is breaking the law and should be held to account. Two, there is often a thin line between getting into a fracas with pro-Israeli counter-protesters and implicating their ethnicity. A lot of this is grey area. Let me also add a third — I would rather eat cold vomit for breakfast than be a university administrator. In theory it should be a simple matter to uphold students’ right to free speech and enforce anti-discrimination laws. In practice, it is anything but.

One of the few people who was happy to talk candidly was Jordan Acker, a member of U of M’s elected board of regents, the governing body of the public university system. Acker, who is Jewish, was singled out by protesters. They went to his home at 4am, and daubed his law firm offices with painted slogans such “Fuck Jordan Acker,” “UM kills”, and “Divest now or leave”. He points out that other regents were not targeted. One, a non-Jewish regent who owns a well-recognised pizza chain, would have been a far easier mark. That Acker agrees with the widespread criticism of how Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has handled the post-October 7 war on Hamas is a telling irony. He suspects it was his ethnicity — and the fact that his law offices are located in a well-known Hasidic neighbourhood — that made him a target. That U of M’s faculty issued a resolution condemning the Israeli government but not Hamas is also telling. Sometimes protesters are their own worst enemies. The goal ought to be to build broad coalitions. Too often such movements fragment into a Monty Pythonesque version of the Judaean People’s Front. “Fuck off,” John Cleese’s anti-Roman radical replies when asked if he belonged to that group. “We’re the People’s Front of Judea.”

I have been visiting campuses more than usual this academic year. I’m a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, where I am teaching a study group on “the revenge of geopolitics”. Like U of M, Brown also has a divestment drive. Rather than predict where that will end up, or discomfort my undergraduate study group by canvassing them, let me turn to Brown’s Mark Blyth, one of the best political economists in the business, and a truly original brain. Mark, you are closer to the student pulse than most. Are the campus protests past their peak? What do you expect today on the first anniversary of the Hamas killings?

Recommended reading

• My colleague John Burn-Murdoch made an interesting call: the US has passed peak obesity — and it’s all down to Novo Nordisk, the Danish company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy. John observes the irony of the fact that America is the least propitious environment to regulate waistlines but has by far the most efficient system for distributing pharmaceuticals. “There has been a tendency in some quarters to view taking drugs to lose weight as cheating, not virtuous, not the way it’s meant to be done,” he writes. “But here’s the thing: it works.”

• Always read Politico’s Jonathan Martin — this time on American politics’ “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville. As Carville approaches 80, Martin profiles the legendary architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election victory who also played a role in pressuring Biden to drop out in July. There is a new movie on Carville called “Winning is Everything, Stupid,” that will be a must-see.

• Finally, a minor self-indulgence. I adored Maggie Smith and felt her passing last month like the end of an era. Most adults remember her for Downton Abbey and the younger generations for Harry Potter. But from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Gosford Park, Smith always stood out as having slightly more to offer than anyone else. In spite of her stardom, she bore no trace of self-importance. Read this collection of tributes in the Guardian.

Mark Blyth responds

Hello Ed. I was on sabbatical last year and so I absorbed the campus protests via the media rather than directly. On both of your questions I have no particular insights so instead I would like to focus on how these protests are being addressed. Much of that has boiled down to a question of divestment. Universities have a track record on this issue, having divested from regimes such as apartheid-era South Africa, Sudan and in some cases fossil fuels.

But university endowments these days are complex beasts. Rather than being a pool of equities that the university directly holds, universities tend to hire money managers to manage these funds whose strategies vary from algorithmic trading to private equity. The former manager might hold an objectionable stock, for a second, and then not own it in the next. The latter will have almost all their holdings in real (brick and mortar) domestic assets. The actively managed equity portion that can be adjusted may in most cases be vanishingly small. In the case of managers trading derivatives and synthetic products such as “owning” the S&P via passive vehicles, divestment would be harder still.

In sum, not only is it hard to divest from that which you do not own, if you can identify it and divest from it, it’s probably a very small portion of the funds involved. Given the passions raised by these issues and the vehemence of the demands involved, I’m not sure if such small beer results will be seen in a positive light. But if they are rejected, the next target for universities to “do something” is far from clear.