Clarence Page: Campus protests carry echoes of five decades ago
As pro-Palestinian protests, along with some arrests, have spread to colleges across the country in recent days, I have a feeling akin to what Yogi Berra is said to have called “deja vu all over again.”
I’ve seen this rodeo before. We’re a long way from Vietnam and more than a half-century from the military draft that probably galvanized more young war resisters than any other single issue.
By Friday, pro-Palestinian protests had expanded to college campuses across the U.S. The total number of people detained last week topped 500 as officials tried mightily to quell the unrest, clear encampments and even close buildings. The University of Southern California canceled the school’s main commencement ceremony scheduled for May 10 following protests there.
Since April 18, police also have detained protesters at Emerson College in Boston, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin and Ohio State University, among others. But even as law enforcement has moved in, students — many demanding that their institutions cut ties with corporations doing business with Israel — have gathered on campuses, defying exhortations and threats by administrators and calls for crackdowns by politicians.
In Atlanta, the police department said officers used chemical irritants to clear demonstrators from Emory University. They denied using rubber bullets, as reported in some outlets.
Students are showing little appetite for folding up their tents and signs as the academic year comes to a close. In some places, the police action is drawing recruits to their cause.
Unfortunately. we’re seeing much of the same anger and outrage over the relentless bombing of Gaza and the cruel hostage dramas of Hamas that led to mass arrests and graduation cancellations that some of us old-timers easily and unhappily recall from the Vietnam era.
I am reminded in particular of 1970, a year recalled by my fellow Ohio University alumni as “the year without a graduation ceremony.” Students were sent home early at all of the state’s public universities after a tragic encounter at our sister university, Kent State, between armed Ohio National Guardsmen and unarmed student protesters. If you’re not old enough to remember that episode, perhaps you at least remember the protest song “Ohio,” written by Neil Young for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with its haunting refrain, “Four dead in Ohio.”
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
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