At Northwestern's Student Encampment

Once, I went to college at Northwestern University. It was 2011, the year of the Occupy movement, and Chicago had an Occupy of its own downtown outside the Board of Trade.

Almost no one mentioned the Occupy movement on campus that year, except for one art history professor in a throwaway mumble after class. I wanted to go down to the Board of Trade, but I felt too shy to go alone, and no one would go with me.

I remember a small group of six or seven students holding signs on the side of Deering Meadow that said "Occupy NU.” They were passing out flyers about the university's investments. The rest of the student body walked past them, disinterested, or, in some cases, making fun of them. 

I think people who were young in the 60s and 70s imagine colleges as never-ending eruptions of confrontational leftist activism, but that was not the case when I went to school. The political environment felt timid, chilly. I don't remember any protests, even during the first wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. When a therapist told me about Northwestern's Vietnam-era barricade of Sheridan Road, it seemed unthinkable to me that that was the same college I went to. The feeling I got from the students I knew was that those types of things were melodramatic, disruptive, and unnecessary. The real way to make change, they thought, was to enter the system and become successful in it.

I went to Northwestern University's divestment encampment last Thursday at 6 PM. It was a cold, cloudless day. Around a hundred students were sitting on the damp grass of Deering Meadow (a green field enclosed by the old library where I used to work, carting file boxes of Charles Dawes' ephemera up and down an ancient elevator shaft). The students were working on laptops, eating dinner, playing cards.

As I walked past the meadow's fence (which had been decorated with protest signs), I heard a student shaking her head and muttering to a friend: "This won’t do anything except make the trustees more pro-Israel." That comment is more like the Northwestern I remember.

Earlier in 2011, I saw my first real protest movement: the Wisconsin protests against Act 10, the state bill that banned collective bargaining for public employees. One hundred thousand people gathered around the State Capitol and occupied the building for days on end: teachers, state healthcare workers, firefighters, students. I remember the signs people were holding and singing Solidarity Forever and the cheers when the Teamsters showed up in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, blasting the air horn. I remember the protest chants: "Tell me what democracy looks like? This is what democracy looks like," and wearing a shirt I'd made, an old black t with "Workers' Rights are Human Rights," painted on it in red acrylic paint. 

I also remember lying on the marble floor of the Capitol in a sleeping bag the night the bill was altered so it could be passed without the Democratic Senators' support. According to the governor, the protesters simply did not understand the great benefit of the bill to the state, which would help the government “improve operations” and balance the budget. Meanwhile, the protests were “mob rule and thuggery.”

This is a theme running through the criticism of many protests: that protesters are melodramatic and destructive while the people against them are polite, pragmatic, and rational. Those people shout and feel, while we strategize, reason, and calculate for the good of humanity. If they understood our reasoning, the critics suppose, they would understand that their agenda is not worth their disruptions.

For the next couple of hours, the encampment was relaxed and quiet. An Imam talked about mindfulness and the protests. He said that he had deep respect for the students, that uniting across difference is crucial to their cause, and, regarding the war, that "hurt people hurt people." It's strange to hear this particular self-help koan, which I'd heard several times in group therapy this year, out on the field. 

Around 8 PM, there's a seder, which is paused for the Muslim students' sunset prayer. The seder resumes, and the students sing dayenu. The students from Jewish Voice for Peace lead chants to keep energy up while waiting for the organizers to start the big rally. Their angriest chant is about Northwestern's president: "Schill, Schill, what do you know, where does all the money go. Schill, Schill, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today."

That morning, police had arrived to take the protesters away, but the protesters linked arms and surrounded the tents until the police left. More police were expected that night.

There is an implication in Northwestern’s statements about the protests that the point of the demonstrations is not, as the students say over and over, about financial divestment. The statements address students’ right to protest and they address hate speech. They mostly ignore the questions about finances, even in their recent deal with the protesters, which only slightly addresses the issue of financial transparency and avoids divestment entirely. They do not take the students’ reasoning at face value, so they do not think to make a statement about it.

I don’t think the university does this because of some conspiracy or even out of malice. They do it because it is very difficult for successful people to take the idea of divestment seriously. They think it is a symbolic and trivial request at at best and a naive and impossible request at worst. A trustee is trusted with making sure a university is financially responsible, which entails maximizing the size of the endowment, which entails making the endowment as profitable as possible. As bad as our economy’s entanglement with war and violence might be, financial irresponsibility that risks the institution’s existence is worse — is unthinkable.

But the justification for protecting the endowment is itself based on naive faith. Faith that, as morally compromised as the source of that money may be, its origins are outweighed by the good the university can do with it. It is to estimate that the gains of those returns amount to more good than the evil. And it is to estimate that all of the deaths entangled with that wealth, and the effort it would take to untangle the endowment from them, amount to less than the usefulness of the money to the institution and, through the institution, to the world.

Needless to say, those deaths are accounted as particularly worthless because of the civilians’ race. The atrocities of war are unfortunate, but at least we can manage this money better than those people could use their lives: a British Museum of children’s deaths. 

This faith in financial stewardship is particularly worth questioning given the immensity of the endowment that sits unspent and unused, accumulating returns: 13 billion dollars. If Northwestern wanted to, it could liquidate a fraction of that and evacuate a hundred thousand Gazans and still have billions left over.

The reasoning behind not doing that is much more irrational than the protesters’ reasoning for staging their demonstration. In short, the burden of proof is not only on the protesters demanding that universities divest their money; it is also on the universities to defend why they shouldn’t. But the people at the helm of the institution do not even think to justify it. You have to internalize a way of seeing reality in order to be part of a power structure—in order to enter the system and become successful in it. 

The crowd slowly accumulates as it approaches 9 PM. There are many people there with young children, babies in strollers.

The organizers of the protest come back from their meeting with the administration. The meeting was a failure: Michael Schill said he didn't know where the money is invested. Protesters boo and call for his resignation. 

The organizers also received the message that the police will arrive soon. They ask the protesters from the community to surround the students, arms linked. Their voices are awkward over the sound system, stuttering, skating on adrenaline. They aren’t sure if the administration is about to tear gas them or is bluffing.

At one point, someone near me points behind the library. There are two cop cars. Sometime later, the organizers announce that the police arrived but have now left. The camp is left alone for the rest of the night. As I leave, more students are still arriving with sleeping bags. They are playing music, eating, and dancing. 

A week later, Northwestern is one of the few universities to broker a deal with its protesters: resources for MENA, Muslim, and Palestinian students, and a certain amount of transparency regarding investment, in exchange for removing the tents. The students can still protest. I’m glad that they made this deal, and I’m glad for the students that their university held back from the violent policing that Columbia and Emory have chosen, among others.

Cynically, though, I notice that NU hasn’t budged on the actual prospect of divestment and I will be surprised if they do. NU has an unusually large board of trustees that is disproportionately made up of wealthy, WASPy legacy members. Admittedly, I do not have information on the intentions of the trustees. Maybe they are, at this very minute, considering a divestment plan. But the justification for keeping billions of dollars for yourself is the same as the justification for an institution keeping 13 billion dollars that are invested in war crimes. I would be happy for my cynicism to be proved wrong.

Student movements are good at questioning the silent premises behind the way institutions work: saying, but why do we do things this way, and isn’t this not only unjust, but stupid? They intuit that powerful people can make happen whatever they have a will to make happen, and that the passionate faith that pitching your tent and chanting might somehow change things is more substantial than the complacent faith that your money will somehow, someday, justify itself. And as long as that is true, no matter the complex specifics of investments and divestments and a university's relationship to its trustees, students have the right to camp in tents on university lawns, yelling at the top of their lungs, to demand their universities stop making money off the deaths of children.

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