The Decibel - Police, campus unrest and the power of student protests

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Campus protests are spreading across Canada including at the University of Toronto and McGill. It comes after high profile demonstrations in the United States where students are demonstrating against the war in Gaza. And when police were called in to disband these protests, sometimes things got violent.The protests and tensions with police call back to student movements of the past. Dr. Roberta Lexier is an associate professor at Mount Royal University, and her research focuses on social and student movements. She’s on the show to explain the tensions between campus protesters and police and what history tells us about the protests today.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

We want that front! We want that front! Let's go! We want that front! We want that front! Encampments have been springing up on university campuses across Canada, protesting the war in Gaza. Walk with shame! Walk with shame! These protests have taken their cue from high-profile demonstrations across the U.S., from Columbia to UCLA.

And when police were called in to disband campus protests, especially when it comes to security and the police. So we're talking to Dr. Roberta Lexier. She's an associate professor at Mount Royal University, and her research focuses on social and student movements. She'll explain why police presence on campus is so contentious and what the history of protests can tell us about what's happening today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Roberta, thank you for being here today. Oh, thanks so much for having me. You study social movements and have actually studied student movements in particular, too. So I'm curious, when we talk about university campuses, college campuses, do police have the same jurisdiction in those areas that they do elsewhere in society, or how is it different?

This is one of the, I think, the really interesting pieces about studying universities and especially studying activism on university campuses. Because historically, since at least the time of Plato, but maybe before that, there's been a belief that institutions of higher learning, universities, colleges, are separate from the local community. So they were an autonomous kind of institution within a larger community. Partly this happened because they were often religious institutions run by the church. And so the church, of course, had some separation from political powers and authority. But even with secularization, there's long been this belief of a separation between what we might call town

and gown, so the city and the university. And universities generally had their own systems of rules and punishments. Police interference was actually referred to as double jeopardy, this idea that students could be punished twice for the same problem. So the outside authorities would charge them with an offense, and the university administrators would also punish them in some way. And this was seen as inappropriate. And I think the reason for this is that students are really encouraged to think critically about the world, their place in it, and how to change it, how to make it a better place. And it's long been believed that they need the freedom and the

security to learn those lessons without permanent consequences like criminal records or expensive legal fees or all those other sorts of things. Students are meant to be able to challenge the system. But this changed in the post-war period. That's, I think, a really important shift that happens that universities grow quite dramatically in the post-war period with first soldiers coming back from war and then baby boomers kind of flooding the institutions and administrators can't really handle the disciplinary side of things anymore or they don't want to it's a lot more complicated and so they kind of back away from that kind of distinction between campus and local authorities. They start calling the cops more often. They start kind of seeing them as interconnected. And part of that, I think, is exacerbated by this current context we're in, which is where universities are now not so much communities of scholars, which is what they used to be, but they're now businesses. they're brands, they're being run as these kind of big businesses. And I think that then changes the relationship with outside

authorities. So today, if there is a safety issue on campus, I guess, what is the protocol? Who is responsible there? It's a really tough question to answer, actually. And I think even if you surveyed university administrators or others, there'd be a lot of questions about how we do that. Most universities, at least from my experience, have internal security systems and functions. So campus police, which you often see on big. Yeah, security, campus police, they whatever that means, then now the turn is to the outside authorities rather than trying to work it out internally. And what I would say is that universities have a lot of structures and systems meant to deal with this kind of disruption, right? They're meant to have challenges and debates and discussions.

And so built into the system are ways to deal with those discussions and debates. And then when they do call the police, it leads to unpredictable and out of control situations. This gives power and responsibility to an outside group that presumably has different interests in the university community, right? And so we have different sort of reactions and interests at play once the police come. And I think, you know, what we've seen in the past is that when police come on campus, we see this sort of major uptick in the violence that happens or the tension anyway that's happening. They're not attempting to kind of resolve the Palestinian conflict or any of those issues. So, you know,

I think the police are limited because we see this this change that happens. So, yeah. So I guess in your view, you're saying here that calling in police into that kind of environment increases tensions, then it seems like is what you're saying. Yeah, absolutely. This is the thing. And then once the police come in, punishments are extreme, right? When you're arrested, this isn't just a fun little game people play, like let's get arrested. You may end up with a lifelong criminal record. And for anybody who has a criminal record, you know the effects that has on getting a job, traveling, all sorts of things.

There might be expensive legal fees as well. We have now the real problem of injuries, possibly death, other sorts of things. And what happens then is that this can draw other people into a movement. People who weren't committed to the original cause, in this case, the war in Gaza, they're now kind of getting drawn into this movement because they're concerned about this police response. And so then we've now escalated this event to a much bigger protest movement, a much bigger issue. What about the other side of that, though? Because we just talked about kind of how, you know, it can be difficult to see who's in charge in certain situations like this on campuses. If you've got two groups and maybe tensions are increasing already on their own, like, you know, I guess what is the answer to that, though? Is there not an instance when you would need that kind of force to step in? This is always the big question is how, when do the police have a role to play in all of this? And I think what I would say is that we really need to think carefully about how we define violence, how we define obstruction, how we define kind of the role of protest and demonstration within our society,

because let's be honest, the purpose of protest is to be disruptive, right? That's the whole purpose of it. Strikes are meant to disrupt the economic system. Protests in the street are meant to disrupt our regular operation of society. That's the point of them. But that doesn't make them inherently violent. So I would argue, first of all, that these encampments aren't violent by any means. Occupations have long been used as a nonviolent form of protest. We can think of sit-ins during the civil rights movement. But your point about the other side, when we have two groups that are facing off against each other,

I think my response is because we're working in a university context and we're talking in particular about students and in particular about higher education, the goal here has to be to create moments of dialogue, discussion, and debate. And so instead of having two groups yelling at each other across a quad or whatever it happens to be, the universities, I think, need to create spaces where those dialogues can happen in real places that's really actually effective rather than just shouting at each other. So, yes, conflicts are happening. But I think that there's ways to deflect some of that by encouraging the kinds of things that we're supposed to do on university campuses. We'll be back in a moment.

Roberta, something you've also talked about before is the militarization of police. What do you mean by that and how does that fit into what we've been talking about? Sure. So what most scholars say is that since at least 9-11, but really a little bit before that, lots of police across North America have been increasingly militarized. And what we mean by that is basically they're getting a bunch of surplus equipment from the military that they are now using for local policing. In the United States, this is a much bigger issue. We've seen it much more visibly, but it's also happening in Canada. So the levels are a little bit different. Canada is not quite at the same level as the US, but we're getting there too. And so from this level, what we're seeing is a shift to this real sense of military operations rather than kind of local

policing. They have tanks and they have snipers and they have tear gas and they have rubber bullets. They have every possible thing you can imagine on a battlefield. Columbia, I'm sure everybody saw those pictures of the big staircase thingy that they built to go into the second floor of the campus building. And I mean, that's a military level piece of equipment. And this is important because not only are students threatened by arrest and expulsion from the university, but now they're facing heavily armed police in riot gear. And so like at Kent State in 1970, when we saw four students shot and killed by the National Guard. This was during anti-Vietnam War protests. Yeah. So during the anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent State, this was a huge moment. Students were being shot in the United States. I'm really actually quite concerned about how authorities are dealing with young people and protests. And I think ultimately, at the end of the day, when you send police into campuses to deal with protests, to deal with these kind of discussions, it shows the rest of society, it shows the rest of us that our rights

actually don't really exist, that we don't have the right to peaceful assembly or freedom of expression or freedom of assembly, that these rights are really limited, including on university campuses. Yeah. And I mean, I guess, you know, the Kent State situation like that, that's a pretty extreme situation where people were actually shot and killed. You know, we're talking, I guess, more about these extreme moments and the militarization in general. But there must be different gradations of this, right? Not every time when police go into a campus, is it that violent? There are definitely gradations when police go to campus, but it is always disruptive. So, for example, one of the kind of big moments in Canadian student movement history is at Simon Fraser University, which was a very radical campus in the 1960s. It was brand

new. They had tons of protests happening right from the very beginning. And so, in 1968, a bunch of students get together to protest admissions policies. It's kind of a small topic. They're really just worried that the university is excluding certain groups from campus is what they're arguing. And they occupy the administration building on campus. And the university, rather than discussing this issue with the students, decides to call in the RCMP. The RCMP clears out the building and arrests 114 students. Of these 114 students, eventually 104 are charged with basically mischief. It's a smaller charge than what they'd originally had. A couple others are actually fined a pretty heavy amount. But the reality in that

case is that the police or the RCMP sent in hundreds of police officers, but they were all unarmed. And so, you know, we can see that that's very different than what's happening now where they're going in basically fully armed and fully militarized. Not so much in Canada, we haven't seen that yet so much, but others. Another really good example is Sir George Williams, which is now Concordia University. There was a big debate or a big conflict going on around race and racism on campus, in particular, concerns that one faculty member was discriminating against a number of Black students from the Caribbean who made up a decent proportion of the population at Sir George Williams. This was in the 60s as well, both the SEC and this one is also in the 60s. Also 1969, this happens. And so ultimately,

at the end of the day, students occupy a building on campus. The police go in. A bunch of damage is done to a computer center. And this becomes kind of the big discussion of the protest that all this damage was done, millions of dollars of damage. But also 97 students were arrested, most of them Black Caribbean students who ultimately then had to pay a ton of money in legal fees and bail. Some spent time in jail, had criminal records, all of this. So the police are kind of involved that way, but not sending in like fully militarized cops and riot gear. So we see a kind of different level there. But when you're talking about the impacts on student protesters, those can be pretty

significant, right? If you're talking about, you know, 20 year olds, 22 year olds who have to pay bail, who are, you know, have a record here, those are consequences that are serious. Absolutely. And this is why I actually suggest that police have no place on university campuses, barring, you know, something really significant. There are probably places where we want cops to come on campus. But in general, to deal with these kinds of issues, I think police cause more problems than they solve. What about the effect these protests have, I guess, broadly here, Roberta? When we look at these historical examples that you mentioned here, have protests in Canada resulted in creating the change that they're looking for? I always love this question about kind of the success of social movements. In some ways,

it's impossible to answer because social change takes a really long time and it comes in very strange ways and sometimes in ways you don't expect. I would say that we can see some places where student movements have had real direct effects. One of those is internally to university campuses. Student participation in university governance, student evaluations, the expansion of course offerings to things like Black and African studies, women's and gender studies, these sorts of other areas, those all largely come because of pressure from students inside the university. So in the 1960s, they say, we should have a say

in how our institution is run. And now they have a partial say in how universities are run. Students sit on the boards of governors, students sit on decision-making bodies. And I think another example of that is the tuition fee issue in Quebec, where Quebec has by far the lowest tuition fees in Canada, because every time administrators try to increase tuition at Quebec universities, Quebec students say, no way in hell are you doing that. And they go out in the streets and they protest. This is 2012, the 2012 protest. People will remember these ones, right? Because these were massive. Exactly. Yeah. Most of the listeners here probably remember in 2012, we call it the Maple Spring, where thousands of Quebec students and supporters basically shut down much of Quebec,

protesting what really was a tiny, tiny increase in tuition fees. It wasn't even going to be very much, but they said, no way in hell are we going to let that happen. It actually resulted in the resignation of the premier. I mean, they actually have limited this. And the real effect of that is that Quebec is cheaper to go to school than any other place in Canada. So a lot of these examples, these are very kind of local school examples, right? Creating change for your own campus, your own university. What about kind of the bigger protests?

So like the protests we're seeing now or the anti-Vietnam War movements, what have we seen there in terms of affecting actual change? It's hard to judge to a certain extent how much change came about because of students and how much comes for other reasons. This is where historians and scholars will debate for years and years about, you know, what actually causes these changes, because I think apartheid is a good example. Apartheid comes to an end in South Africa, largely because of the work of the people on the ground in South Africa who put their lives on the line to try and actually end the system. But part of the reason it ultimately comes to an end is because students in Canada, the United States and elsewhere start protesting and start demanding that their universities divest from the South African apartheid system. And we're seeing the same argument now, right? That students have power

in the sense that their institutions are embedded in the economic system. So apartheid students do help lead to, I think, the end of the system. Vietnam is complicated. It ends for all sorts of reasons, but I think largely because of the unrest that happens across the United States, but also in Canada. And interestingly, in Canada, the fight against Vietnam was also a question of divestment. Canada wasn't on the ground fighting in Vietnam, but we were supporting the Vietnam War by supplying armaments, diplomatic support, all sorts of different things. Again, this may all sound very familiar. And so students demanded that universities divest from the military-industrial complex. At U of T, for instance, there was a big protest in 1967 about Dow Chemicals coming in and trying to hire U of T students. And Dow Chemicals was the main

manufacturer of napalm, which was basically used to destroy much of Vietnam and many of its people. And so students said, hey, we shouldn't be supporting Dow Chemicals, who's dropping napalm on Vietnamese people. And while I wouldn't say students themselves ended the war in Vietnam, I'd say that those protests and those demands really did have a big effect. And the last one I'll mention is around climate and the climate issue. And this is, I think, a really important issue, of course, in particular for young people who are coming of age UBC, Laval, Concordia, Lakehead, Victoria, and more have actually divested their university investments from fossil fuel industries and companies. And so I think this is, you know, we see these moments where they can actually have

an effect because in reality, students are powerful. They have a voice within their institutions. Outside of it, they're often silenced, but inside they have a lot of power and we can see that change happen. Roberta, we've talked about a lot of stuff here, but before I let you go, I guess I want to ask you to look back at your historical, your research here and how it compares to what's happening today. How do you see a difference between the movements of today, the protests on campus, compared to the movements of the past? Students have always been involved in social movements. Any social movement that you look at, basically students have been involved in some capacity or another. And I think that says a lot about students and also about social movements

and how they operate. So I think a couple of the differences are really important. One is the value of social media and the sort of ability to watch these events happening on the ground in real time. Television was really important to the 60s movements. People could see what was happening, but I think social media really emphasizes this. One of the, I think, interesting things to watch here is that in my view, students have a very different perspective on the world than students in the past did. In particular, what I'm seeing is that students have a lot less hope about the future. And social movements are largely driven by hope, the idea that something could be different and something could be better.

And in my sense, students, they've grown up in a really crappy time. They don't have a sense that there's going to be a job waiting for them. They'll never own a home. They know all of these things, right? And so perhaps operating from a more nihilistic or cynical perspective might actually change the outcome of some of these movements. They might blow up in different ways. They might evolve in different ways. Because if you're at the kind of screw it, burn it all down phase, who knows what's going to happen, right? And so I wonder how that might play out. Roberta, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. No problem. Really a pleasure to chat about these things. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Zura Jabril

joins us as a fellow of Carleton University's Brooke Forbes Award. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.