The Impact of Campus Activism on National Consciousness

We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for its pattern. Columbia and USC have cancelled graduation ceremonies. Many more schools are threatening suspensions or worse if students don’t remove their encampments. In our neighborhood, Harvard Yard is encamped, closed to people without Harvard ID. Harvard students are catch-as-catch-can.

Zachary Samalin and Sophia Azeb.

We are dropping in conversationally on faculty players we know on either side of the country: Sophia Azeb at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Zachary Samalin at New York University in Manhattan. Santa Cruz is encamped in tents and abuzz with notably civil and inclusive debates about rights, wrongs, and history—all the arguments about Palestine that Congress doesn’t have. You could wonder: what if the 19-year-olds who have preempted the conversation from the campuses are, in fact, the leaders we have been looking for?