A professor who knows his history is concerned local officials are about to repeat it – namely arrests and violence against protesting students.
Martin Blatt, a Cambridgeport resident and emeritus professor of public history at Northeastern University, said that he’s so concerned about actions that might be taken against pro-Palestinian activists and their encampments at universities that he spoke Wednesday with Mayor E. Denise Simmons and city councillor Sumbul Siddiqui to forestall potential violence.
“I said, look: If Harvard asks Cambridge to cooperate with arrests and Cambridge does so, you’re going to face a torrent of criticism for doing that, because these are peaceful protesters. They’re pitching tents on grass in an encampment and they’re protesting a genocide, right? Or what to me is clearly a genocide,” Blatt said. “I don’t want to see the City of Cambridge complicit with Harvard’s draconian measures.”
Blatt’s perspective took into account the context of past college activism across the country as camps have sprung up at Harvard, MIT and Tufts as well as at Emerson College in Boston, Yale in Connecticut, Columbia University in New York, New York University and more, and police crackdowns have arrested hundreds across New York and elsewhere in recent days.
Emerson saw its second wave of arrests late Wednesday. By Thursday, Blatt was on the scene at Northeastern, where a student activist camp had just been installed and was immediately the focus of a police standoff, with officers seemingly unwilling to make arrests but refusing to cede the space.
Blatt’s academic work focuses on violence and historical trauma. He has organized exhibits and events about the Haitian Revolution and U.S. Civil War, and served on Northeastern’s University Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Committee. On the recommendation of staff at History Cambridge, we asked him to talk about the activist camps springing up across the Northeast considering the biggest college protest movements of the past: Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Kent State shootings of students by the National Guard on May 4, 1970, and South African apartheid in the 1980s.
“One big mistake that people made during the anti-Vietnam War movement was to resort to violence,” Blatt said, noting a difference between now and then: the lack of direct U.S. troop involvement in fighting. “It was frustrating to protest year after year and see the South Vietnamese regime stay in power and the U.S. and its client regime imposing such death and suffering on the masses, but I fortunately do not see a parallel today.”
He recalled Students for a Democratic Society and other groups taking their Vietnam War protests onto Harvard property, leading to police action almost exactly 55 years ago.
“On April 9, 1969, there had been an occupation, a very different action by SDS and Allied Students for a Democratic Society in the protests against the Vietnam War, and high-level administrators were negotiating with the protest,” Blatt said. “But the president of the university got in touch with the Cambridge police and got them to go in and attack the people occupying the building. Hundreds were arrested and several dozen went to the hospital with injuries. It was quite violent.”
The aggressive arrest of 108 people at Emerson overnight is just the latest in a worrisome series of clampdowns on camps and calls for universities to divest from companies that work with Israel or its armed forces.
Looking at Columbia and New York University, “they completely overreacted, reacted with force – not just having people arrested, but many are threatened with or have been suspended or expelled from school. So I commend the students for their courage. They are taking risks. And the universities often act in concert with those that are part of the power establishments of this country, so I’m not surprised by what Columbia or NYU did,” Blatt said.
“And I worry about what may happen in our city,” Blatt said. “The acting president at Harvard, he’s been slavishly trying to toe a certain reactionary line. I fear that he and the university will move swiftly and with cruelty. I hope not violence, but arrest is a form of violence, and certainly suspending and expelling people is violence. And I worry about what’s in our immediate future.”
The interim president, Alan Garber, is in office because his predecessor, Claudine Gay, was unseated by pressures from Republican and right-wing forces. It began with claims that she wasn’t doing enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitism surrounding pro-Palestinian protests.
Blatt emphasized that his own experiences as a Jewish anti-Zionist professor had taught him the value of resisting dominant cultural narratives, and that seeking out humanitarian causes that bridged ideological boundaries was invaluable for any social justice movement, past or present.
“The multicultural, multi-religious nature of these movements is important, and it’s significant. And you can see it if you go to any of the encampments or any of the protest actions,” Blatt said. “If you’re arguing for justice for Palestinians, that does not make you anti-Jewish. It doesn’t make you a self hater, and it doesn’t make you a promoter of antisemitism. You’re advocating for your beliefs. And in this case, I think you’re speaking for social justice.”
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They already have at Emerson crews were cleaning blood from students injured by police. At Emory police tased someone already in handcuffs. From NYU to USC police have been brutalizing students already.
If any students are injured by the cops I hope they sue Harvard for the exact amount of every nickel that legacy Bill Ackerman donated and give it to WCK.
The Boston Police, from footage that has reach the internet, over reacted in regards to Emerson and it is likely to be the Mayor there who will pay the price for her support of the brutality they carried out when she comes up for re-election next year.
They lied to tv reporters about students that were take to the hospital or treated by EMTs at the police station. Boston Cops believe their Union and the Mayor will protect them from lawsuits, as they have before from over reactions at other protests over the years. They forgot that Emerson is a school of Journalists and Communications majors and that they have footage captured by other students of the events that have made it onto Democracy Now and other internet sites interested in exposing police misconduct.
In a thread on X Friday, Harvard Law School professor Stephen E. Sachs ’02 described the protest as “a bunch of people quietly hanging out and listening to a teach-in lecture, amid handmade signs glorifying violence and urging the destruction of Israel.”
“The University doesn’t have to allow this,” Sachs — a former Crimson Editorial Chair — wrote on X alongside a photo of the John Harvard statue, which protesters had draped in a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag.
Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker wrote in an email that he thought it would be “entirely legitimate” and consistent with free speech principles for Harvard to eliminate the tent encampment and prevent protesters from chanting through amplified sound systems.“The protesters are engaged in coercion: to make campus life as unpleasant as possible, by taking over pleasant public spaces and disrupting enjoyable events and ceremonies, until their demands are met,” Pinker wrote. Harvard, he wrote, “has a right to prevent its spaces and events from being forcefully expropriated by students.”
So much for free speech.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/opinion/protests-college-free-speech.html
But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness. No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others.
The end result of lawlessness is chaos and injustice. Other students can’t speak. Other students can’t learn. Teachers and administrators can’t do their jobs.
When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.
Professor Blatt,
“The aggressive arrest of 108 people at Emerson overnight is just the latest in a worrisome series of clampdowns on camps and calls for universities to divest from companies that work with Israel or its armed forces.”Divestment is the other aspect of this protest.
In your retirement account do you own any mutual funds? Do you own an S&P ETF? Or are you only in municipal bonds. You, and all of you here that call for divestment, probably own stocks outright or through mutual funds or ETFs.
Do you own or use Google? Google has a large presence in Israel. Do you use an iPhone? Apple also has a large presence. What about Meta? Do you ever shop at Whole Foods or use Amazon? A very large presence in Israel. Do you have an account with Fidelity, Vanguard or Charles Schwab? They do a lot of business in Israel.
If any of these apply to you Professor Blatt, you should definitely get rid of them. You, too, Slaw and all those who call for divestment from Israel. If you don’t you are aiding the country and you don’t want to be labelled a hypocrite, do you?
The only rights being violated are the rights of people to assemble and voice their dissent.
It has been the decision of universities to cancel classes or go online where that has happened not the students. That is also an attempt to silence the speech of those protesting.
“They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”-Howard Zinn