For Educators Grappling with Student Protests, Here’s how to Play a Supporting Role

As tent encampments have sprung up on college and university campuses — including my own at Swarthmore College — some, but not all, administrators have called in armed police to arrest student protestors. To date, police have arrested more than 2,800 students across the U.S. In some cases, law enforcement officers have forcefully arrested faculty members as well. Predictably, the repression has backfired, fueled solidarity among educators and led to the establishment of even more encampments from coast to coast (141 campuses in the U.S. at last count).

If you are an educator, you may have spent recent weeks grappling with your position with respect to student nonviolent resistance. You’re not alone, and in this moment, perhaps it is helpful to identify ways teachers and staff at schools, colleges and universities have supported students engaged in nonviolent civil resistance.

Below, I will share a range of options, progressing from familiar faculty roles to those with greater proximity to student nonviolent action.

Options

Students have long been pioneers in nonviolent civil resistance, and I don’t intend to focus exclusively on the particulars of pro-Palestinian and antiwar activism here — although there is much to learn these days. Instead, I want to discuss a range of ways faculty have supported students engaged in nonviolent action.

Whenever students organize and engage in nonviolent direct action to draw attention to  injustices or to press for policy changes, others — including teachers and staff — are pushed and pulled by the swirling social forces that such action generates.

As you might imagine, there is no one-size-fits-all guide for what educators can or should do, especially when students’ actions are disruptive and create tension, as Martin Luther King Jr. so often advised activists to do.

Faculty, staff and students inhabit various positions of power, privilege, and experience across intersecting lines of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, professional status, ability and other distinctions. A status quo does not bend easily, and its beneficiaries tend to protect it — so when norms and rules are disobeyed, everyone has to assess risk based on their own social position, politics and conscience. For example, tenured faculty at universities have more job security than staff or high school teachers.

Whatever one’s status, it’s probably uncomfortable. Do you feel the tension? If so, the nonviolent protest is working.

So, how have faculty members (and sometimes staff) helped to optimize conflict to reach the most constructive outcomes and to help preserve the social fabric of their learning communities? Can we help parties remain nonviolent and feel less defensive (not less determined), more informed, more grounded and more communicative? (Note that I’m not pushing for conflict resolution, though it is likely to play an important role at some point in the arc of any campaign.

In fact, as I write, Brown University and Rutgers University officials and encamped pro-Palestinian student protestors have come to a negotiated agreement.)

The emerging capacity for movement building and the willpower of the parties (e.g. administrators, students, supporters, the state) will prove crucial in the conflict’s trajectory and length — so buckle up, especially as nonviolent campaigns can be prolonged, sometimes for many years.

Teaching and Mentoring

Much of what educators can offer already falls within our vocations as teachers and mentors, which does not necessarily make the work easy, especially in the midst of a hot conflict. Sometimes, students seek us out for counsel, and we can serve as sounding boards as they try to assess their own positions with respect to protest. They are feeling the same centrifugal forces pulling on everyone else, and they have less life experience (at least measured in years) than most educators.

We must always be conscious of power differentials; we should be careful not to encourage a student, or anyone else, to take risks that are not in line with their own conscience. With peers, however, we can respectfully invite or persuade, and we can be supportive of one another as we discern our way(s) forward.

Many faculty teach courses that are relevant for understanding the issues that concern our students. Courses that address international politics, regional conflicts, racism, climate disruption, nonviolent struggle, and much more all help sharpen dialogue, debate and strategic action. Relevant teaching might happen inside or outside the classroom, for example in guest lectures, film screenings and teach-ins, or sometimes within sit-ins and encampments. Many faculty have expertise and experience in areas of practical relevance, such as surveillance, nonviolent civil resistance, education, public art and organizing. I recently attended an excellent teach-in at Swarthmore College’s encampment.

Similarly, faculty can draw on their wide range of expertise to educate and counsel administrators, who are under pressure from multiple fronts, including trustees, donors and parents. Sometimes, trusted faculty members can carry messages between student organizers, the faculty and administrators to help improve communication. My colleagues, Professor Steve Piker and other faculty members, played an important liaison role between students and administrators when students of the Swarthmore Afro-American Student Society occupied the Admissions Office in 1969, demanding the admission of more Black students. Consequently, the college established the Black Cultural Center and hired its first Black American faculty member, a Black admissions dean and a Black counselor. Subsequent efforts led to the creation of the college’s Black Studies Program.

Faculty Governance

While shared governance (by both administrators and faculty) at institutions of higher education has eroded over the 20th and 21st centuries, it has not disappeared — and hopefully it will be revived. Faculty senates, unions and chapters of the American Association of University Professors can serve as anchors in tumultuous times and reassert fundamental academic and humanitarian values. We can help keep our eyes on these commitments, and faculty governance can result in public responses, resolutions, censures and votes of no confidence in leadership, when necessary.

These are tools that can help shift the dynamics of a campus conflict. Faculty at Columbia University have grappled with whether and how to sanction President Nemat Shafik for her instigation of the arrests of more than 200 students.

Presence and Monitoring

When students occupy space on a campus in ways that break routines or disrupt business as usual (think sit-ins, encampments, flash mobs, etc.), administrators may choose, or be compelled by Boards of Managers or politicians, to prioritize their managerial roles over educational missions. They may lean on disciplinary measures and even turn to the state’s agencies of physical force, from law enforcement to the national guard. The results can be dangerous, and even deadly, as we know from the National Guard killing and wounding of antiwar students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 and the killing and wounding of demonstrating Jackson State University students by city and state police on May 14, 1970.

There is a long tradition of educators serving as observers and reminders of educational and humanitarian values.

Witnessing and certifying violence and repression, especially when security personnel use physical force, can help defuse violence and encourage nonviolent discipline among student activists.

As co-governors of our institutions, one would expect that college and university faculty have the liberty to be present and monitor collective actions on our campuses. However, even observation can carry risks, as Professors Noëlle McAfee and Caroline Fohlin recently discovered on Emory University’s quad when police arrested them as they observed and questioned the police subduing their students.

De-escalation and Third Party Nonviolent Intervention

Beyond monitoring and observing, if student organizers agree, faculty might seek to help de-escalate tensions by calmly engaging and, if necessary, redirecting counter protesters, uninvited participants, police, security personnel and even agents provocateur.

This kind of active role is best undertaken with preparation, and organizations such as DC Peace Team and Training for Change offer training. Of course, this kind of work carries a risk of arrest and even physical harm when trying to engage people whose emotions are running high or who are professionally trained to use physical force. Law enforcement officers recently hospitalized Steve Tamari, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville after they arrested him as he videotaped arrests of students at an encampment at Washington University.

Educators have sometimes engaged in third party nonviolent intervention. At the invitation of student protestors, teachers have lent their social statuses as respected educators and accompanied students to help increase their security. Recently at New York University, faculty held hands in a circle around student protestors. One faculty member cleverly wore their regalia to make their position as a faculty member fully visible, thus raising the cultural and political costs of any attempts to repress their students. As with de-escalation work, training is recommended.

Educators’ Nonviolent Action

Finally, educators may actively participate in students’ campaigns through planning, organizing supplies and even taking nonviolent action alongside them, as faculty at UCLA have done. Faculty at the New School in New York established the first faculty encampment to protest violence in Gaza. In such situations, educators share many, if not all, of the same potential risks of social disapprobation, professional marginalization, reprimand, suspension and termination.

Conversely, it is also true that students support staff and faculty in their campaigns. Around the turn of the century, students initiated or supported a wave of living wage campaigns on their campuses. When several faculty members at Swarthmore College undertook sequential week-long water-only fasts while calling for divestment from fossil fuels in 2018, Sunrise Movement students took up a one-day solidarity fast and joined a delegation to try to meet with board members.

No one educator can take on all of the roles laid out above. In fact, it would be suboptimal if everyone crowded into the same roles, leaving important work undone. And again, it is hard to overstate the importance of taking into account differences in power, privilege and responsibilities.

Conflict is hard. Period.

Might we wish that we could be queen for a day to ensure that conflicts go the way we prefer? Sure. Is that realistic? No.

The messy, dangerous and beautiful world about which we teach and learn is painfully real, and our students know it. Often, they or their peers come from some of its most dangerous and precarious corners.

When students in our learning communities take disruptive nonviolent action to address pervasive inequalities — and especially when they face repression — educators have to reckon with the charge that civil rights movement leader and Congressman John Lewis delivered at the 2014 commencement of my undergraduate alma mater, Emory University. Directly connecting the value of higher education with nonviolent struggle, he exhorted students:

I come here to say to you this morning on this beautiful campus with your great education, you must find a way to get in the way. You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble. Use your education. You have wonderful teachers, wonderful professors, researchers. Use what you have. Use your learning. Use your tools to help make our country and our world a better place, where no one would be left out or left behind. You can do it, and you must do it. It is your time.

Students have often been at the forefront of important peace and justice movements, which is a testament to the liberatory potential of education (not to mention the biographical availability of young people). Working with bright young students coming into their responsibilities as adults and leaders in a world of gross inequalities and climate disruption, which has been handed to them, is one of the privileges of being an educator.

Thankfully, we’re not the first educators to become caught up in student-led nonviolent struggles, and we can play roles that may matter in the trajectory of what are, sometimes, historic movement moments.

Explore Further

• Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit
• Violence and the Backfire Effect
• Backfire Manual: Tactics Against Injustice
• Affinity Groups for Non-Violent Direct Action
• Police Brutality and Activist Trauma Support
• Staying Safe: Protective Strategies for Activists
• Street Medic Pro-Tips: Medical and First Aid Support at Protests and Direct Actions