Scholars’ Circle – Insights into student protests at university campuses – May 26, 2024

The Scholars' Circle Interviews

With massive protests on university campuses over the war in Gaza, universities have chosen to aggressively and violently break up the protests putting student protesters at risk. How does non-violent protest turn to violence at the hands of the police? How have national politics driven the responses to student protests? As university space has become more contested, particularly by political forces on the right, what do violent responses to protests mean for university values of free speech?

We speak with three university professors and one student about their experiences at their respective campuses. [ dur: 58mins. ]

• Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office and his latest book Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight For Democracy. He hosts the podcast This is Democracy.
• Mark LeVine is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of History at UC Irvine. He is the author of Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil and Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Soul of Islam. He is also the co-editor of One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States and Religion and Social Practices and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies.
• David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Planning, Policy, and Design. He is the author of The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America and co-editor of The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement.
• Jack Leff is Post Doc and instructor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His PhD dissertation is An Alchemy of Smoke and Flame: The Politics of Tear Gas Use Against Social Movements in the United States. He is an active political organizer interested in prison abolition.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian and Sudd Dongre.