On April 25, photos and videos from Emory University showed police officers pushing protesters to the ground and carrying some of them off the lawn, as young people washed what Emory called “chemical irritants” out of their eyes.
One of the videos to go viral that day was of a woman, her hands behind her back, being led away by an Atlanta Police Department officer. “I’m so sorry,” the person holding the camera says. “Is there anything I can do for you right now?
“Yes, you can call the philosophy department office and tell them I have been arrested,” the woman responds. She then identifies herself as Noëlle McAfee, chair of the philosophy department.
In the week and a half since the Emory pro-Palestinian encampment was cleared, protests have continued, Georgia politicians on both sides of the aisle have weighed in, and Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences faculty members have voted no confidence in Gregory L. Fenves, the president.
Fenves, in one of several statements to the Emory community, said a review of what happened would include how Emory engages with outside law enforcement.
“My goal was to remove a growing encampment, as allowing such an encampment would have been highly disruptive, affecting everything from classes and exams to our ability to hold commencement,” he wrote. “I remain firm that such encampments cannot be permitted at Emory.”
He added: “I am devastated that members of our community were caught up in law-enforcement activity enforcing the removal of the encampment. The videos of these interactions are deeply distressing.”
McAfee has gotten about 1,500 emails from people who saw her in the video, many of them media requests. She spoke to The Chronicle on Monday from Rome, where she was attending a conference. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me what that day, April 25, was like for you. How did it start?
I’m chair of my department, and we were having our once-every-10-year external-review process, so I went to pick up the guests, the reviewers — one of them was a professor at Columbia University — and on the way there I heard on the news, or maybe I heard from my phone, that there was activity on the quad. It didn’t say stay off. It just said keep your distance.
Students were chanting. It's so peaceful. Faculty were gathering around just observing. It's just a beautiful day. Then the Georgia State Patrol just run in and attack.
I go down around 10 o’clock, and I see a colleague of mine from the AAUP, and I said, “Oh, at least the Atlanta Police Department aren’t here.” And he said, “They are.”
It’s the Georgia State Patrol, and they come in a line of about, I don’t know, 25. The students are in a tiny little quadrant of the quad. The Georgia State Patrol come in and get to right where they are.
Before this it was sunshine. Students were chanting. It’s so peaceful. Faculty were gathering around just observing. It’s just a beautiful day. Then the Georgia State Patrol just run in and attack. I now know that their mission was to clear the encampment of three tents that had been there for two and a half hours.
They were also clearing anybody who was right there. Students are just being pummeled. And so I go walking a few steps over, and then I see this child on the ground, a 20-year-old being pummeled by the police. There’s like two of them pulling and pushing. Her head is on the ground as she curled up in a ball, trying to put her arms over her head to keep them off of her. So I’m standing back six feet holding my camera at them, and I started yelling, “Stop, stop!”
I know the police, and I was very careful to have a nonconfrontational posture, to look calm. It’s a superpower of mine. I can look calm. I made a point of standing a good distance. I was on the pavement. I wasn’t on the grass, where they are.
Then they stood up. It was an APD. He steps a couple of steps closer to me and says, “Ma’am, you need to step back.”
And there I very consciously made a decision. I knew I could have taken a step back, and probably that would have been enough for him. But I was fed up, and I just said, “No.”
Then he just comes around and arrests me. So then they take me around the back to where they have the wagons. Somebody stops, a graduate student, and says, “Ma’am, are you OK?” So you’ve seen this, along with 22 million other people.
They had wagons that they put the prisoners in. I was in the first one, and I was like, “You know, I have an external review going on. I was just standing there. I have a meeting. Can you just give me a ticket and let me go, and I’ll go to court?”
I was taken to the jail. They decided that they would just give me a ticket for disorderly conduct. They released me. I mean, they opened the fence so I could leave. I waited for another student, who got the same thing. It was weird. I called an Uber. We took an Uber back to campus. I go in and finish up. I go to the external-review committee. It’s so surreal. Of course, they were also very worried.
What has been your experience before this with protest movements?
I was part of the generation that protested for divestment from apartheid-supporting regimes. I studied at the University of Texas at Austin. We were engaged in civil disobedience to get the attention of the university. If you go to what they say is a speech zone, they’re not listening. They’re not paying attention. So you have to disrupt things.
This time I was there in support of student expression. For me, civil discourse includes chanting and yelling. The aim is to bring civil matters to public attention. And that is a vital part of a larger political process. It also includes deliberation and more measured kinds of taking up of issues. But what students do when they chant and seem to be very — others might say — extreme, they’re actually putting things on the agenda that people don’t want to hear.
Do you see similarities here, or are there more differences between this movement and the anti-apartheid movement?
I think this one is more fraught because of the difficulty of talking about it and being construed as being an antisemite. I’ve gotten some hate mail, calling me all kinds of vile things. But I have to say, much less than I would have expected because this issue is so fraught and everybody will assume that if you’re standing up for protesters, that you’re standing against Israel, and that’s not what I’m doing.
Now my part as a political philosopher is to think about what is happening in higher education.
What are some of the conclusions that you’re drawing about what is happening?
It’s overreach. There are students peacefully demonstrating at Emory, and they’re engaging in an issue of public concern, and the administration is irritated because they’re on the quad where they’re going to hold a commencement next week. [Editor’s note: The university has moved commencement to an arena and convention center in Duluth, Ga., about 20 miles from campus.] They see their job as encroaching on the academic work of the faculty. This is not their business.
It’s also vitally important for people to be able to try to create a space to make a political change. And then what faculty want to do is help create dialogue corners and things like that. It is a way to take an issue that might be oversimplified for the purposes of a demonstration and complexify it through conversation and deliberation with other people that are concerned, to find common ground.
What’s the mood on campus now?
Everybody, whether they were on campus or away, is really shaken, especially students. They’re feeling quite traumatized by this. That, I think, will have reverberations.
The main question I’ve been asking is, If you were able to do this all over again, with the same level of information about the facts, but with the hindsight, what would you do differently? I’ve now asked the president that question three times, and his answer is basically that he would try to disband the encampments maybe more peacefully. For him, disbanding the encampment was the thing he had to do. They’re not even considering alternatives.
This line of work is to help young people become engaged, informed citizens, and arresting them, beating them up is the opposite of that.
