“Where Have All the Student Protests Gone?”

It’s become a familiar refrain: something awful happens in the world, and a member of the commentariat asks, “Where are the student protests? Or did those only happen when Biden was president?” Deprived of student targets, they are forced to post ad infinitum about Hasan Piker. Who wouldn’t be bitter? The consistent thread is that kids these days, because they’re protesting or because they’re not, are the problem. “One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution” over Trump’s bombing of Iran, a writer for the Atlantic recently mused. After all, critics from Jonathan Haidt (“Instagram intifada”) to Jesse Watters (“Hamas influencers”) framed the students as the least impressive of Iran’s proxies. But the question itself is a fair one. Where are the protests? The real answer isn’t that students decided to shut up. It’s that universities, and a hostile federal government, have expended massive resources trying to ensure they do.  Between spring and fall of 2024—before Donald Trump’s reelection, let alone his return to office—the total number of campus protests dropped a staggering 64 percent. Then came Trump’s second term. Universities were terrorized and cuts dished out—but administrators who had been pulling their hair out in 2024 could now say their hands were tied. Soon after Trump’s election, dozens of schools fell over themselves to institute even more speech-suppressing policies, banning things like megaphones and musical instruments from outdoor areas of campus except with permits or during specified hours. Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of joining protests. University presidents dragged before Congress to prove their compliance with Trump’s half-dozen executive orders on education testified endlessly about why they’d allowed such chaos in their fiefdoms. In response to allegations of antisemitism—and threats to revoke federal funding—some schools, like the University of California, Berkeley, even turned over students’ personal information to the federal government.  Others simply turned the other cheek as the federal government bore down on their students. Some students who spoke in support of the Palestinian cause, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, were kidnapped by ICE. Others, like Momodou Taal, were pressured into leaving the country to avoid the same fate. Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of participating in the encampments. Schools like the City University of New York and New York University still aren’t allowing student commencement speakers… [TheTopNews] Read More.