With war continuing in Gaza and the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, last spring's campus protests will no doubt be renewed.
As college presidents mull over how to navigate tensions between students protesting Israel’s pounding of Gaza’s thousands and other students who protest the Palestinian October 7 th attacks – victims of which included peace loving Nova festival goers and kibbutzim families - they would do well to look for guidance to Vanderbilt University and Sewanee College.
It was disheartening to find out last spring that we did not have the depth of freedom of speech in this country that we thought we had. As April greened students were enthusiastically pitching tents from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
One would think that college presidents would have embraced their students’ tent actions as a clever protest parallel to the tents the Palestinians of Gaza must endure. In college students are to learn, read, study, reflect, discuss, and think, enriching their minds and spirits, such that, when conscience demands, they can take principled and creative stands. Just as countless hours of exercise form the basis of Olympic athletes’ accomplishments.
How Vanderbilt handled campus protests
In short – the campus Gaza encampments are just the kind of thing college presidents should want to see. Tennessee leaders of Vanderbilt and Sewanee certainly get that.
In a Wall Street Journal article of April 2 Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier wrote that universities bring together talented students to “help them grow and learn as part of a community,” and that protest can play a role in the contesting of ideas.
Back on May 3rd, bicycling from a bank errand, I wheeled over to check out the Vanderbilt encampment. Beneath the towering Oaks before Kirkland Hall, about 15 to 20 students were just getting seated on the grass before their tents for what was essentially an outdoor class sans professor.
Opinion: Supporters of Palestinians challenge Vanderbilt's neutrality stance on Israel-Hamas war
One youth struck up a conversation. From him I learned that the VU encampment had been the longest running in the United States. Behind us a student with laptop at his side had begun to teach his tent city classmates. So attentive were they that one student stepped over to gently admonish us to speak more quietly. Exactly what you want – engaged self-directed learners.
Sewanee leader said protests enriched campus
At Sewanee, a statement from Vice-Chancellor Rob Pearigan gloried in how the university’s tent city and protests had contributed richly to the education of the Sewanee learning community. The university even committed to financial transparency and to divestment over time.
In contrast to the leaders of Vanderbilt and Sewanee, “organization presidents” razed their students’ Gaza encampments. Predicted by William H. Whyte in his 1956 book “ The Organization Man ,” organization presidents do not know what a university’s essential mission is and hence cannot recognize what its most successful students do. To cite one example.
The day after I visited with Vanderbilt’s students, University of Virginia President James E. Ryan - and stunningly on May 4th, the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State killings - had police push aside his students and take down their tents.
Notably, the University of Virginia on May 4th exercised a force that it had conspicuously not carried out against the non-student, neo-Nazi torch bearing marchers who in 2017 had traversed with impunity the Lawn at the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Ironic how UVA’s Ryan – unlike his students – failed to heed university founder Thomas Jefferson’s clarion call for protest: that through rebellion Americans avoided “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty...”
The students of the Vanderbilt, Sewanee, and other Palestine solidarity encampments are Jeffersonian patriots. They eloquently demonstrated that nothing is more alien to the grand ideal of the American project – that of securing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - than is the Gaza War project: which destroys and displaces; which kills by weapon, disease, and starvation; which entraps against coast and walls; and which crushes children’s aspirations to grow up.
Fred Jordan has taught world history at Nashville State Community College since 1999. Holding the International M.B.A. degree from the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis, he earned master’s degrees in history and Spanish from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Vanderbilt, Sewanee leaders rightly said campus protests are part of learning
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