Coop Scoop: On "Outside Agitators," Corporate Campuses, and Forgotten Wars

The reaction to campus protests evokes Nixon '68

Violent Outside Agitators Prepare to Enter Columbia University

May 6, 2024

By Marc Cooper

Last week, I laid down a couple of thousand words on the good, bad and ugly of the campus protests.  If you missed it you can read it here. 

This week: some more stray thoughts on the campus demonstrations and police crackdowns taking place across America.  In no particular order:

A Severe Distraction from the War Itself

While it is certainly legitimate to praise the pro-Palestinian demonstrations for brining the issue of the war live into millions of living rooms it is a double-edged sword.  Yes, maybe some consciousness gets raised by the passion demonstrated by the youth.  But  we are spending way too much time talking about the protest rights and wrongs of future Ivy League doctors, lawyers and CPA’s and not nearly enough about what is actually happening on the ground in this conflict.  Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahu continues to blackmail his own western allies that if they don’t just assent to whatever he wants, he will go ahead and launch a “ground offensive” against the Gaza town of Rafah where some one million or more civilian refugees are nervously huddled while trying to fight off imminent famine.  We ought to be a lot more worried about the IDF crashing guns blazing into that human mass than we are about some 20 year old Gender Studies major wearing a Keffiyeh and pretending he’s a Palestinian.

The campus demos along with Trump’s trials have also diverted our attention away from the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.  Thanks to Trump and his errand boys in Congress led by the overgrown incel who runs the House, crucial military aid to embattled Ukraine had been held up for nearly six months in part allowing a Russian advance and escalation.  There were enough left-over cold warriors in the GOP to finally overcome Moscow Marjorie’s nihilist faction and Speaker Johnson finally capitulated and that aid was passed a week ago or so. Iy might be too little too late, though. And as the election nears, focus on Ukraine is faltering and if Trump is elected he will probably be riding in one of the first Russian tanks to enter Kyiv.  It’s a desperate situation and letting the Russians get away with a victory in Ukraine would be very very bad news.

Columbia President Shafik Tells You Everything Wrong With Elite Universities

No doubt it was a scared shitless moment when Egyptian-born Columbia University President Minouche Shafik got hauled before Congress with two other Ivy League presidents some weeks ago and got verbally reamed by the most horrible Elise Stefanik – who did an excellent impersonation of Stalinist show trial prosecutor Vishinsky.  Those other two presidents are now history and Shafik is clinging to her job by her fingernails as she has been exposed as a Total Incompetent.    

Her problems go far beyond not knowing how to answer what she thinks about kids chanting “Death to Jews” and now extend to having called in some rather rambunctious NYPD “special teams” to roughly evict some students from a building occupation.  Nice work, Prez.  If you can’t negotiate getting 50 kids out of a building how are her elite global buddies gonna negotiate peace in the Middle East.

Shafik’s bio tells us everything that is wrong and broken with America’s elite universities.  They are primarily bloated unaccountable corporations more than glorious centers of learning.  Shafik is and has always been primarily a global economist, an apparatchik in  multi-lateral financial institutions and that means, in turn, she’s one more cog in the most rarified climes of the international ruling class.  Or, in short, she should be running banks (as she has in the past).  I was going to comment on her bio but instead I am just going to reprint her official university bio (in part) as it is all you need to know.  The extract below picks up after she got her Masters in economics from LSE and her PhD in econ from that community college known as Oxford.  Here’s the key extract from her official bio:

“Following her Oxford years, Shafik began her career at the World Bank. By age 36, she had become the bank’s youngest-ever vice president. During the early 2000s, she held academic appointments at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Economics Department at Georgetown University. In 2008, she was appointed Permanent Secretary of the U.K.’s Department for International Development, where she led an overhaul in British foreign aid. Next, she served as Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and then as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, where she sat on all the monetary, financial, and prudential policy committees and was responsible for a balance sheet of over £500 billion (equivalent of approximately $605 billion). In 2017, she returned to academia as president of the London School of Economics and Political Science….

…Shafik serves or has previously served on numerous boards including as Deputy Chair of the Trustees of the British Museum, board member of the Supervisory Board of Siemens, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and BRAC. In recognition of her public service, she was made a Dame Commander by Queen Elizabeth II in 2015 and a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords in 2020. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, St Antony’s College at Oxford University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.”

Is it worth even noting that someone with this background does not live in a different world than her student body but rather in a different universe? I’m not stupid as I seem. I know any big university needs a competent business administrator at the top.  Too often those CEO types are now university presidents as their principal task has been to raise money and to keep the fat cat funders content.  The day to day university life is left to the Provost and other top execs.  Of course, this is the reverse of how a university should be staffed.

The president of any prestigious university should be a star educator, someone with vast experience teaching and working with young people, not with corrupt international bankers.  Replace the provost position with a lead business affairs person who raises the money.  Not gonna happen but helps explain why so many American universities have become so dysfunctional.

The Myth of the Outside Agitator

It was white racist Neanderthals like Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond and J. Edgar Hoover who, in the 60’s, used to routinely blame “outside agitators” like “commonsits” and “fereners” for getting those usually placid Negroes all whipped up and uppity.  Seeing as how Negroes were not smart enough to rebel against the apartheid of Jim Crow, it took some New York Commie Jews to manipulate them and get them to go into the streets to march and sometimes riot.

Well, who says we have not made progress since then? Just a few days ago, the Black Mayor of New York City Eric Adams was talking to the press and might have been wearing a sign around his neck saying “Hey, I’m a good ole boy, too!”  Adams told reporters he was “certain” that the Columbia demos were the work of “outside agitators” and “professionals” who manipulated “the children” into becoming pro Hamas demonstrators and neo terrorists.  They were, according to lunkhead Adams, “radicalized” by these un-named agents of disorder.  The yokels from the NYPD were, fo course, on the same page, of course. One of their lesser lights showed up in uniform and showed the press some heavy-looking chains found when police entered the occupied building and somehow said this proved outside agitators were involved.  Don’t ask me how he figured that.  But I can tell you that we learned shortly thereafter that this supposedly professional outside organizer chain was actually the same bicycle chain that is sold at a discount in the Columbia University bike store. None of these actual facts matter as one TV reporter after another, employed because of their looks and not their smarts, continue to parrot the police without bothering to corroborate.

Apparently, there were a number of non-students among those arrested inside the occupied building.  And so what?  We have freedom of movement in the US and unless there is a lockdown, universities not only are but should be open to the community.  Having taught at one of these over-rated schools for 20 years, I witnessed scores of events of all sorts where “civilians” – no-students participated and were encouraged to do so. My favorite was Parents Weekend when hundreds of parents set up tables and umbrellas and mega-coolers on campus and got shit-faced with their student kids before that afternoon’s big football game. What a an unappealing disgrace.

Just be aware that that there is a cynical semantic game being played here where the simple presence of non-students is being conflated with professional outside agitators pushing and manipulating these students in action. Well, the average SAT score at Columbia is an astronomic 1540 out of 1600 with a range of 1490-1580 for the middle 50% of enrolled students.  Hmmm. I don’t think these kids need to be told to be upset about the mass carnage now underway in Gaza.  They can probably read ok.  (BTW I got a fairly miserable 1052 on my SAT but then again I took it after being up all night on LSD. And I my GPA was high enough to not need the test as I opted for a state college).

Get Ready for the Counterattack

We don’t have to guess whether or not there is going to be revenge for this movement.  It’s already here. And it’s not just armed riot police pulling kids down the stairs. Both the US congress and several local governments are frantically passing a barrage of hysterical “anti-antisemitic” laws that clearly infringe on free speech and free assembly.  Put simply: there’s an increasing trend to criminalize any criticism of the state of Israel, its’ government or its action as being antisemitic and therefore punishable by law.  This is an outrage that is sweeping the country with virtually no resistance.  I am particularly concerned as we continue to hear the campus demos described as dangerous and even violent.

I cannot vouch for what has gone down on each of the 60 campuses or so that have seen encampments but without being cute about it, I have seen no violence at all. With two exceptions: the violent entrance of police to make mass arrests in several schools and the attack by 200 unidentified assailants who invaded and trashed the UCLA encampment in the middle of the night (Outside agitators perhaps?). 

I want to be very clear about my view of speech: I am for unrestricted speech to the point that while I understand the concept I completely reject the legal category of “hate speech.”  If a couple of dozen dopey kids want to sit in a circle on campus and chant from “The River to the Sea” or “Kill All Jews” I am going to tell you I really do not care. I do not care unless some or one of them is representing an actual identifiable incitement to attack identified individuals. If there is no threat of immediate violence to humans or even property, then in my book it is free speech.  You might not like it. It might piss you off. It might scare you.  Tough thingies! That’s life.  Free speech means next to nothing unless it is the most uncomfortable sort of free speech.  You should never be arrested for chanting anything unless you are immediately threatening identifiable individuals.

During the anti-Vietnam war protests one of our chants was “Turn the guns around! Bring the war home!”  A catchy if somewhat romantic and juvenile notion of revolution.  Funny thing. We were never arrested or charged with inciting sedition or advocating the killing of US Army officers. No. Because that’s not what we were doing. We were merely chanting.  Try chanting something like that nowadays about Israel on a US campus and you’re gonna get busted --- for speech.

While we’re on the topic of the 60’s: I can tell you exactly where I was on November 4, 1968 when Dick Nixon was elected president and it has some relevance to this story.  I was a freshman on the campus of San Fernando Valley State College (now CSUN) and I was a member of SDS, the activist Students for a Democratic Society.  For that election day, SDS had organized a national day of protest to boycott the election putting out the call: “Vote With Your Feet, Vote in the Streets.”  We were opposed to Nixon of course but also opposed to his opponent, then Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.  I had just turned 17. And like my peers, we had been radicalized by the Democratic administration of LBJ and had no love for Humphrey who had been a loyal lap dog for Johnson and who we did not trust to end the war.

That day at noon we had a rally of about 200 like minded students, relegated to a corner of the campus known as the Free Speech Forum, and we never asked ourselves what exactly what we were going to accomplish except have our views ratified by the speakers but we knew it would be fun. What I remember most about that time is how we paid so little attention to electoral politics and therefore to the different power mafias that ran the state and national governments.  We were truly a radical subculture and one of our touchstones of faith was that both parties were not only similar but also identical in their support of US Imperialism. And therefore it did not matter who was in the White House, or congress or any other government office.

We were, of course, only partially right.  There was indeed nothing very redeeming about Hubert Humphrey except for one thing: He wasn’t Richard Nixon and (also, he was not surrounded by a pack of criminal advisors).  Whoosh. This went right over our heads.  We just could not do the political math because we were too young, too emotional, too immature to realize that voting for Humphrey did not have to mean a damn thing about us except our desire to block Nixon and his gang from entering office.   It’s purely speculative if Humphrey would have ended the war sooner.  Given that Kissinger told the Vietnamese to hold off agreeing to a major peace deal until after Nixon was re-elected, it surely seems Humphrey would have acted sooner. And we would not have had John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew, and the other miscreants on Team Nixon.

If you think the 60’s was all fun and games and sex and love and rollicking free politics remember it was in 1968 and again in 1972 when Nixon was elected.  He was elected in great part because of popular weariness of the anti-war and civil rights movement by the reactionary “silent majority.” And also, at least in 1968, Nixon’s victory was clinched by putatively progressive youth and liberals turning their back on and boycotting Humphrey because he was the “Genocide Joe” of the moment.

Can we please not repeat that history? ++

Thanks to all who contributed to last week’s mini fundraiser. It was at least moderately successful but there will probably be one or two more hard pitches before the election.  You can short circuit those now by contributing today. Again, I am struggling to keep ALL edition of the Coop Scoop free. But I can only do so if we have a strategic minority of ten percent of subscribers upgrade to paid status. Please do so. And thanks.

One of the reasons I want to expand funding for the Coop Scope is to have the ability to pay other writers to occasionally contribute. I don’t want to bang the cup too hard but we are in an emergency funding crunch and it is not clear if the Coop Scoop can be properly sustained till November.

We Need You to Convert to a Paid subscriber.

It costs literally pennies a day. Please step up today and and bolster this independent news source.

One year subs are now discounted to $31.00 (or $5 a month)

You can also become a strategic monthly donor for only $4 a month via Patreon.

A $25 donation or more via Paypal, Zelle or Venmo would be just as fab. So would smaller or bigger donations.

ZELLE ————————>marccooper.usc@gmail.com

VENMO ———————→ @marc-cooper-56022