American Maidan
The Authoritarian Response to Multicultural Democracy on U.S. College Campuses
Young people in educational spaces often attempt to bring new forms of community and identity into being as a result of their studies. Authoritarian movements often come into being by targeting both young people and educational spaces for their alleged offenses against the existing order of things.
On April 18, 2024, New York City police officers removed a makeshift pro-Palestinian student encampment from Columbia University grounds and arrested over 100 students, by request of university leadership. Students set up the encampment to demand that their school divest from “companies that operate in Israel” and support a cease-fire in Gaza. Columbia University president Minouche Shafik, the New York Times notes, broke a decades-long precedent by asking the NYPD to end a reportedly peaceful, student-led campus protest.
Columbia University is also home to a distinguished university press, which published Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity, by sociologist Mychailo Wynnyckyj, in 2019. Maidan literally means an open square or parade route, but has come to symbolize a people’s anti-authoritarian assembly. The Columbia University Press book description of Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War reads:
In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols.
The 2014 state assault on peaceful student protestors in Ukraine and the April 2024 use of police to end a peaceful student demonstration at Columbia University differed dramatically in severity, levels of violence, and geopolitical consequences. Yet authorities in both cases justified police actions with a common genre of invented pretext: claiming that allegedly dangerous student radicals were disrupting public safety and social order.
Indeed, Columbia University president Shafik justified her request that the NYPD remove nonviolent student protestors by invoking the “clear and present danger” standard. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruling that established that standard warns against the very way in which Shafik apparently invoked it. In his decision for Whitney v California (1927), Justice Louis Brandeis said that the government should use extreme caution, even in cases of anti-government speech and organizing, to protect free speech:
Propagation of the criminal state of mind by teaching syndicalism increases it. Advocacy of lawbreaking heightens it still further. But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on. The wide difference between advocacy and incitement, between preparation and attempt, between assembling and conspiracy, must be borne in mind.
Holding and sharing potentially criminal or anti-government ideas is bad, Brandeis argued, but there’s a difference between believing in or discussing those ideas and acting on them. State suppression of speech, he advised, is worse. The state should interfere with even “reprehensible” speech and assembly only in cases of demonstrable threat and emergency.
The true “crime” of the Columbia University students, like those in Ukraine of 2014, appears to have been trying to bring into public existence a new kind of sociopolitical community based on a radical affirmation of dignity and democracy for all. The notion of a Maidan here refers to the revolutionary power of a democratic idea, not an ideologically defined revolutionary movement. Like the Ukranian Revolution of Dignity, the Columbia University pro-Palestinian “tent city” seemingly consisted of a self-organizing effort to model a new and inclusive kind of civil society: “a temporary community with the spirit and values they wished existed on campus always.”
Over the past decade or so, glimmers of an American Maidan have emerged on U.S. university campuses throughout the nation. That decade has witnessed a resurgence of student activism in higher education concerning social justice, institutional equity, multicultural democracy, and universal human rights. Frequently newsworthy student demonstrations in this vein, moreover, often take place against the backdrop of significant demographic and structural changes within colleges and universities, including increases in students and faculty of color, international students and scholars, LGBTQ groups, disability or mental health accommodations, and more. Such trends render university campuses visibly diverse and pluralistic compared to much of the rest of the country—an ongoing series of laudable experiments, as it were, in learning not only from books and professors, but in how to use academic knowledge to bring a true multicultural democracy into being.
During the same time, however, U.S. universities have also been scenes of an emerging authoritarian response to the prospect of such an American Maidan. The initial stages of this response echo autocratic crackdowns on Western-style universities in nations like Russia, Hungary, and Poland throughout the early twenty-first century. Such repressions almost always begin with propaganda about student radicals who have allegedly seized control of entire universities and turned them into centers of violent ideological indoctrination.
A bright line leads from manufactured outrage about campus protests, or a “free speech crisis” in higher education, during the mid-2010s and the use of police forces to end student protests at Columbia University in April of 2024. Media sensationalism and faux intellectualism about “coddled,” “leftist,” “radical,” and easily “triggered” undergraduates throughout this period was, from the beginning, a knee-jerk response to rising levels of predominantly nonviolent student activism on college campuses in the mid-2010s. Legislative proposals in various states to more tightly regulate campus speech and academic freedom by targeting pro-Palestinian student and faculty demonstrations emerged at this time. Instead of trying to understand the longstanding causes of anti-racist student demonstrations at the University of Missouri, opinion columnists reveled in deriding college students as "Dictators in Diapers.” Instead of trying to understand the roots of freely adopted student commitments to institutional equity, public intellectuals promoted pseudo-science to argue that there must be something deeply, psychologically wrong with college students.
Between the mid-2010s and today, the American public has been inundated with a continuous stream of dangerous falsehoods about undergraduate students and how they should be treated. We have been told that their apparent commitments to social justice, institutional equity, multicultural democracy, and universal human rights are probably just childish fixations; that they subscribe to “irrational” views because they are overly emotional and simply desire “safe spaces”; that their expressed commitments to liberal values are a really a form of intolerance in disguise.
The overwhelming result of this misinformation—designed to turn college students into social others—has been the normalization of an inappropriate and ineffective punitive mentality toward free speech and academic freedom on college campuses. A wave of laws designed to restrict on-campus demonstrations and political activism, end academic programs centered on themes of cultural diversity and the histories of disenfranchised groups, and dismantle advocacy centers for historically excluded student populations are the most evident signs of this increasingly widespread punitive mentality.
Powerful politicians and intellectual figures across the country now maintain that higher education is about discipline and submission to authority, not questioning whether existing disciplinary hierarchies are just or prevailing authorities are legitimate. College, from this perspective, is about preserving the traditional status quo, not striving to imagine new and truly democratic futures. “Colleges Warn Demonstrators: Enough” one headline boasted in the wake of the arrests at Columbia University. “At Columbia,” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul cheered, “the Grown-Ups in the Room Take a Stand.”
Such demeaning anti-university rhetoric resembles propaganda about universities in authoritarian countries abroad. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orban routinely warn that perverse LGBTQ radicals who indoctrinate students in ideologies hostile to conservative values, Christianity, and cultural heritage thrive in Western-style universities. Attacks on academic freedom in nations like Russia and Hungary have been instrumental in their retreat from post-Soviet democratic reforms back into more authoritarian regimes.
Universities are essential to a healthy democratic society because they offer competing sources of truth to government propaganda, encourage people to question authority rather than obey it automatically, and empower individuals to pursue their personal interests instead of deferring to the state. Government crackdowns on universities allow aspiring autocrats to beta test restrictions on civil liberties more broadly. The shocking, but regrettably unsurprising, arrests of over 100 Columbia University students is one of the most conspicuous manifestations of intensifying authoritarian tactics amid glimmers of an American Maidan on college campuses.
It is no coincidence that patently McCarthyist theater in the U.S. House of Representatives preceded, and arguably motivated, this escalatory targeting of peaceful student organizing and nonviolent civil disobedience. Authoritarianism spreads when leaders of civic institutions learn to comply automatically with state demands at the cost of protecting basic liberties. Congressional representatives have no direct power to remove Ivy League university presidents from their positions. Between December of 2023 and April of 2024, however, some representatives learned that irresponsibly exploiting legitimate concerns over antisemitism on college campuses and endorsing propaganda about other facets of higher education in televised political hearings will move powerful alumni and donor groups to force the removal of those presidents for them. Congressional representatives have no direct power to order police actions against nonviolent student protesters on university grounds. But some representatives learned that they didn’t need to; the president of Columbia University would do it for them immediately after a televised hearing full of even more propaganda about the state of higher education.
Many members of the generation that bravely began the process of desegregating public education, pursuing a new and more democratic future in their time, are with us still. Ruby Bridges was six years old when she became the first student to desegregate an elementary school in the South, facing harassment by angry segregationist mobs as she did so. James Meredith was the first Black student to enroll in the University of Mississippi, to which segregationist mobs responded by rioting on university grounds until President John F. Kennedy ordered thousands of federal troops to quell them—to protect equal educational opportunity, not curb civil liberties. Bridges, Meredith, and many of their generation are still very much alive and active as civil rights leaders, even as multiple states seek to ban from public schools educational materials that tell their heroic stories.
The struggle to transform academic institutions originally founded to serve socioeconomic elites and support segregated society into forums for truly equal educational opportunity in the public interest—in pursuit of true multicultural democracy—has, in historical terms, barely begun. It can still be won. And it can still be lost.