These are not the first students to become obsessed by an overseas war. A generation ago, the protests were about Iraq. A generation before that, Vietnam. A generation before that, Spain.
But something has changed. Student radicals were always angry, usually illogical, and often violent. What is new is their whiny hypersensitivity. Can you imagine anti-Vietnam activists complaining because the authorities were insufficiently respectful of someone’s banana allergy? Or demanding that the college authorities send them food?
There is something quite comical about the juxtaposition, demanding the right to disrupt and destroy while simultaneously insisting that everyone else defer to their minutest delicacies. The protesters at UCLA even stipulated vegan and gluten-free food (but, naturally, no bagels already).
Where previous generations of radicals covered their features to avoid identification, these are among the last people in the world still wearing lockdown-era face masks. They have, as Jonathan Haidt puts it, been overprotected in the real world and under-protected online.
They have spent more time alone than any previous generation. If you are over 30, a fair chunk of your childhood will have involved playing with other children. You will have learned, through these interactions, that life involves give and take.
How different is the experience of the children who grew up glued to screens, isolated, overstimulated, solipsistic.
From the moment these children went to school, they were taught to define bullying as any kind of behavior they disliked, regardless of whether offense was intended. At the same time, they were being bombarded through social media with faddish identity politics.
How did we expect them to turn out? By the time they get to college, they are emotionally fragile, permanently outraged, upset at the slightest thing. This makes them, to use a phrase coined by my British colleague Julie Burchill, “cry-bullies,” ready to cancel people or end their careers over an inappropriate word, yet convinced of their own victimhood.
And what happens after they get to campus? Do the authorities tell them to grow up and show some responsibility? Of course not. Their sense of constant woundedness is indulged. If anything, the universities exaggerate the idea that victimhood, especially if it is racial, trumps everything else. In 2017, Stanford (which has an overall acceptance rate of 4%) admitted a student whose application essay consisted of the phrase “#BlackLivesMatter” repeated 100 times. Note the hashtag, by the way: such attitudes could not have taken root in a pre-Twitter world.
I’m afraid the universities are the authors of their own travails. In 2014, Columbia told its students not to dress up in foreign costumes. It may have seemed like a small thing at the time, a way of avoiding what the then-dean called “racially or culturally based insensitivity.” But encouraging ethnic narcissism and divisiveness never ends well. You go in one decade from banning Mexican sombreros to inviting violence against students who sport kippahs rather than keffiyehs.
Even now, the teachers want to be in with the cool kids. At Northwestern, the university leaders caved in, agreeing to offer fully-funded scholarships to Palestinian students. The full-scale embrace of identity politics — no one even asks anymore why scholars should be chosen on grounds of ethnicity rather than ability — makes the kind of unrest we have seen inescapable.
Listen to Khymani James, now banned from Columbia’s campus: “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill. … The existence of [Zionists] and the projects they have built, i.e., Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
Does Khymani sound to you like an intellectually curious student benefiting from the Enlightenment traditions that places like Columbia came into existence to preserve? Or does he sound more like an isolated Gen Z kid who has spent too much time playing video games and too little talking to flesh-and-blood humans?
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Those earlier generations that protested against the Iraq and Vietnam wars were at least mobilizing against an actual U.S. policy that there was some prospect of reversing. A generation before that, many students actually volunteered to fight in Spain (on both sides, though that is nowadays often forgotten). But this lot has grown up in a virtual world where action and consequence are not obviously connected. Why not tell UCLA or Columbia to stop the war in Gaza? And why not have a tantrum when they don’t?
In those face-masked, neurotic features, we see a horrible glimpse of the future. A generation screen-addled, aggrieved, socially inept and, ultimately, lost.