A Mischaracterization on Student Protest

To the Editor:

In his letter in response to my essay (“The Rise and Fall of the Campus Left”), Henry Giroux demonstrates the bad faith argumentation that unfortunately so often characterizes political debate on campus. Rather than accurately representing my claims and responding with specific criticisms, he broadly mischaracterizes my argument as an effort to slander pro-Palestinian campus protestors. These protests played only a small role in my essay, which focused on a historical analysis of broader political trends on the left through the lens of Shalom Lappin’s excellent book.

As regards the protests, which I see very differently from Giroux, what I did was to point out the likely consequences of some of the protestors’ actions in the current political environment. To borrow the words of the eminent civil-rights activist Theodore Bikel in response to an earlier wave of anti-Zionist militancy, what groups such as Student for Justice in Palestine and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) have wrought “will be with us for a long time to come.”

To state plainly where I disagree with Giroux, I see these groups as engaged not in principled “resistance” but unprincipled coercion. In my opinion, their calculated disturbances have achieved little but harmful disruptions of campus life while creating a hostile environment for groups they disfavor.

Giroux offers not a rebuttal of this view but a disingenuous ad hominem attack: To suggest that my work is “complicit” with the Trump administration’s policies is an almost laughable misreading that does no credit to a scholar of Giroux’s stature.

Robert S. Huddleston