Report From The Campus Wars

When you hear helicopters, it means negotiations with pro-Palestinian encampments failed. But its not clear yet what success looks like for either student radicals or university administrators

This is a subscriber-only post. For the whole post, including video and images, you can subscribe for:

Or subscribe for $50 a year and get a free copy of my 2020 book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books: 2020),

Entrance to the pro-Palestinian encampment at The New School, April 29, 2024. Photo by author.

---

This morning I was drinking coffee in my Greenwich Village apartment when I heard the helicopters overhead.

This is something that friends who live on the Upper West Side have lived with for weeks now, but it is new to my neighborhood. In New York City, helicopters mean riot and tactical police, and this spring, riot and tactical police mean that pro-Palestinian student protesters are being busted.

At first, I assumed the police were at NYU, roughly five blocks to the south, where students—and faculty who had linked arms to form a line to protect them—were cleared from a plaza in front of the business school last week. I went to graduate school at NYU, so color me unsurprised that the administration elected to erect an enormous, ugly plywood wall to prevent another encampment from going up. And color me super unsurprised that the students returned anyway.

Yes, it was NYU, but as it turns out, it was also The New School, where I am an emeritus professor. I checked my email and saw a message on the faculty listserv that police were massing at the pro-Palestinian encampments (plural, that is not a typo.) One was at the University Center, a huge modern glass and steel structure meant to look like a cross between the Bauhaus style of the main New School building on 12th street and the Pompidou Museum in Paris. What it really looks like is a space ship that crumpled a bit when it landed.

The second encampment (and the one that I am told was where the less confrontational students were gathered) was across the street in the Parsons School of Design lobby. Unlike the UC, it’s a completely nondescript, twentieth century office building that normally serves as home for some of the most innovative designers, artists, and culture workers you will ever meet, whether faculty or students.