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Unless the theory is "make demands that the college won't meet" -> "cause attention-catching disruption" -> "Biden admin finds it embarrassing" -> "Biden maybe pressures Netanyahu", in which case the specific demands are completely arbitrary?

one of the primary demands is disclose: the financial investments are not transparent information, thus the demand for the administration to reveal what they are. second, as i've mentioned before, university divestment is an established practice dating back to apartheid. there's nothing crazy, controversial, or quixotic about the demand. students are not making the demand with the idea that it will be the final straw that will finally crush the war effort, but with the understanding that it's their money, their community, and that a boycott of israel is the morally correct choice in line with the BDS movement. would you be comfortable attending a school that was investing in russian assets? i wouldn't. even if it's not a ton of money (we don't know how much) it's still likely to be significant given columbia's $14 billion endowment (and i find your phrasing unnecessarily condescending here.) harvard, where an encampment has been set up, is worth $50 billion. some of the ivies, like cornell, invest in raytheon—setting aside israel, why should any university have investments in the military industrial complex to begin with?

here is the preamble to the most recent currently available columbia divestment resolution:

not exactly pie-in-the-sky stuff here. the apartheid protests resulted in successful divestment and even the 1968 protests resulted in all demands met by the admin. it's a very practical goal. it's also one that happens to be morally righteous and just.

furthermore, i don't know where you have been for the past week, but who have you seen escalate the protests? the reason why there is now a worldwide protest movement is because, for the thousandth time, minouche shafik called the cops to arrest 108 students. the NYPD itself said the students were peaceful and offered no resistance whatsoever, even as police also arrested legal observers. it was not the intention of the protesters to get national or international attention. "hard wholeheartedly support the protests" is an exceedingly strange comment to make that i, frankly, have a hard time understanding. i find it extraordinarily easy to wholeheartedly support fellow graduate students and professors i personally know at multiple universities who are meeting the ire of a lying media, lying administration, and lying government in the form of a police baton for the crime of sitting on some university's lawn.

at this point, given the sheer level of violence the police has unleashed on students and faculty across the country for showing up to said lawns, a portion of the protest support for them stems from the defense of free speech.

additional demands in light of the arrests and suspensions include the reinstatement of SJP and SJVP and amnesty for all arrested. again, not absurd, not without precedent.

[I]n the face of such dire circumstances, it’s stunning that some of the most visible criticisms of these laws have reduced them to the realm of identity politics, as if the difference between pro- and anti- trans is whether or not you rhetorically bless trans people. Identity politics has become derogatory. At its best, supporting trans youth takes the form of a material politics focused on providing housing, redistributing resources, and removing the police from our communities. Rather than responding to the right’s endless litany of moral panics, which sap attention and energy from the central problems facing many trans people, we need affirmative visions of a better future.

…

In our current moment, the two loudest speaking positions are egregious and excruciating, but they are complementary in their antagonism. One burns our homes down; the other tells us not to protest in front of the ruling class’s houses. “Political depression,” which is a term I’m happy to borrow from affect studies scholars and others, is the feeling of not knowing how to get in the middle of that screaming match when there’s so much actual destruction, loss of quality of life, and death hanging in the balance. There’s a pressure towards limiting our imagination and it reinforces a false division between so-called “cultural politics” and “material politics”—between identity and materiality.

…

Once you realize that there are no limits on what we’re allowed to want, wanting is what we deserve to do. It is an active process without finality. What’s valuable about your life is your ability to desire beyond even your own wildest dreams. Otherwise life would be predestined and fossilized. Let me put it via my own biography. I grew up in a working class, immigrant suburb, and I was trained in the immigrant arts of stoicism, self-renunciation, and survival. It’s a very conservative worldview conditioned by scarcity: about setting aside what you want, and what you know to be true, in order to have just enough to get by. You hope the future will be better. One of the ways that I have found myself at odds with that sentiment is in my queerness and my transness.

In being queer and trans, the most powerful thing that I have learned is to think about the virtue of where desire unexpectedly leads in life. That desire can lead to building alternative kinship structures, or modes of care and solidarity, but it also builds the very materiality or flesh of my body. I don’t frame myself through a deep internal identity that must be satisfied, or some sort of moral dilemma. I don’t agree to say that I only deserve to transition because I have suffered. It’s far more wondrous and enjoyable—and actually far more effective—to think about it based in “want.” What kind of life do I want? And as a subsidiary of asking what kind of life do I want, “What kind of body do I want?” Not “What kind of body do I deserve?” I had to set aside that moral quandary so long ago to take myself seriously in a world that wasn’t taking my desire seriously.

…

We like to think that if we assemble around the right people, or if we hold up the right sign, or say the right names, or if our politics are righteous, for the right reasons, then our perfection will secure our deservingness. But perhaps it’s more important to say that we’re all good enough.

As an historian, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the 1960s and 1970s. And I’ve thought a lot about, not just what was different in the political imaginary of people joining the counterculture, or women’s liberation, or gay liberation, or the Black Power movement, but also what was so different in the political mood of the time. In the emotional atmosphere that greeted people. I’ve read stories about young queer and trans people who heard a rumor, in the beginning of the 1970s, that something was happening in San Francisco. And so, they hitched a ride across the country on a whim and a desire. There was this kind of belief that, despite the chaos and the violence of the era, that something was about to happen. And that wasn’t necessarily a romantic experience. But there’s just something about that grammar, that mood, that sense of what is okay to feel in the face of a world that, you know in your bones, is deeply, deeply unjust, and inadequate. I’m not arguing for a kind of left nostalgia, where we need to reclaim that feeling from that era, but what is our feeling about what could happen? What is our “feeling” in this era?

— You said in an interview several years ago that modern young people don’t have a sense that they’re living in history. Will they start feeling differently now, given current events?

— […] It’s clear that the type of postmodernism that prevailed for the second half of the 20th century is going away. When the very existence of truth and clear moral guidelines are denied, when everything is seen as a mental game and is subject to deconstruction, and an appeal to etiquette looks like an act of repression.

[…] It’s scary and tragic that Eastern Europe has once again turned out to be the place where these global transitions are happening.

— This question is probably naive, but I'll ask nonetheless: Was all of this bound to happen? Or did someone’s personal idiosyncrasies bring us here?

— This is really a question for a philosopher, not for a historian. In my view, history always gives multiple possibilities and forks in the road. Events can’t happen if they don’t have deep foundations and reasons behind them. But there's also no absolute predestination in history. It can take this or that path, and the choice depends on decisions made by individual people or groups of people.

You can’t say retrospectively that something was inevitable. Things could have gone differently. There were thirty years in which this development could have been prevented. But perhaps it was precisely because this seemed so unlikely that nothing was done to prevent it.

I’ve noted in retrospect that my evaluations of the situation as a person and as a professional were completely different. Everything I’d written suggested that this kind of war, while not inevitable, was quite likely. But at the same time, as a human being, I kept saying, “Oh, come on. What, are they going to bomb Kyiv? Please, that’s impossible.”

—People adopt their main ideas when they’re young. Both individuals and even whole societies or countries are capable of changing ideological benchmarks because they’re conscious and must be articulated. But that layer of semi-conscious ideas — cultural and political mythology — is very difficult to change. The transitions do happen — myths are not innate to any human society and are not passed down genetically; they arise, they’re maintained, and then they die. But in order for deep transformations to occur, you need either decades of cultural and social shifts or monumental catastrophes. That’s why, once a generation has spent its adolescence and youth in a certain era and then become the next generation’s political and cultural leader, it will reproduce in new conditions what it was once taught.

— So it’s not just Putin’s personal resentment after all?

— Ideology, official ideology, ideological struggle — these are all important things. But the most important thing about ideologies is how they are consumed. Why do some ideological constructions sell well while others remain mental exercises? One decisive factor is a person’s ideas about the world, which are often difficult for him to reflect on. That’s what I refer to as political and cultural mythology.

Resentment arises from disappointment. I often quote Yeltsin’s last speech, in which he bid farewell to the people and announced that he had chosen a successor. That’s one amazing paragraph: “We thought that in one tug, one swoop, we could jump out of the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilized future. I believed it myself. But one tug didn’t work. In some ways, I turned out to be too naive.”

Myths work especially well when they resonate with one another. The great transformation and the true czar — those are two important mythologems. But there’s also a third myth that’s no less important: the body of the people. The people, as a whole, make up an organic entity — a collective identity with one soul and one body. That idea is the basis for the idea that Russia’s historical defeat consisted of this body’s dismemberment.

If you read Russian folk tales, you’ll remember the bogatyr who was cut into pieces and doused with dead water to join the pieces back together. Then live water is poured on him — and he gets up. But he can’t get up if his hands and feet are cut off. First his body needs to be fused together again.

September 25, 1952 - December 15th, 2021

“In our small-town segregated world, we lived in communities of resistance, where even the small everyday gesture of porch sitting was linked to humanization. Racist white folks often felt extreme ire when observing a group of black folks gathered on a porch. They used derogatory phases like “porch monkey” both to express contempt and to once again conjure up racist iconography linking blackness to nature, to animals in the wild. As a revolutionary threshold between home and street, the porch as liminal space could also then be a place of antiracist resistance. While white folk could interpret at will the actions of a black person on the street, the black person or persons gathered on a porch defied such interpretation. The racist eye could only watch, yet never truly know, what was taking place on the porches among black folk.”