By james art Since the 20th century, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have protestedmost notably in 1967, when over 3,000 students rallied on Bascom Hill to protest The Dow Chemical Company.
At its peak, the pro-Palestinian camp last spring attract about 10% of this brand. The camp—which required full disposal of assets of all UW-Madison companies with ties to Israel — fell short of their ultimate goal, and the UW-Madison Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said no progress is made for sale.
At a meeting of the SJP general body on October 21, organizers discussed the lack of internal engagement.
SJP declined to comment for this story.
This is not just a UW-Madison phenomenon. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, protesters barely showing up. A month later, at the Democratic National Convention in August, organizers expected tens of thousands of activists to gather in Chicago, a number that would surpass that drawn by anti-Vietnam protesters. in 1968. Instead, the number was in the thousands,”less” than the organizers had hoped.
After all, the DNC I didn’t do it see a single speech targeting the pro-Palestinian side of the issue as well as Israel and Hamas no truce has yet been reachedwhile over 40,000 Palestinians have died.
Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, told The Daily Cardinal that the reason for this may lie in direct impact.
“With the Vietnam War, people’s friends were dying,” Lucchini Butcher said. “I think there was a sense of urgency in these protests that made people feel like they wanted to get involved.”
Lucchini Butcher also believes that emerging media has changed the way we protest. In 1944, Luchini Butler said that a group of students gathered to protest the use of private landlords approved by the University. Students spoke with their peers face-to-face and obtained the signatures of over 5,000 students, one-third of the student body at the time.
“Students don’t have the same opportunities to talk to each other,” Luchini Butler said.
Community involvement has also declined, according to David Newby, who joined the UW-Madison Teaching Assistants Association in 1970 and is now a lifetime member.
“The marches and rallies in Vietnam had significant community participation, but if you look at the TAA strike rallies in 1970, they were mostly student rallies,” Newby said. “I’m not sure we have the organizations and the structures to be able to bridge that divide between student action and community action.”
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Newby, who participated in the pro-Palestinian camp, called it “smaller” than he expected but “different” from anything he had been involved in before.
So is activism dead or just changing? Movements like Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and now Israel Liberation certainly have had an impactlike #MeToo leading to the firing of sexual predators in top positions and the hiring of women in prominent jobs, and Black Lives Matter leading to police reform in some cities and the hiring of black Americans in prominent jobs. But none of the four have achieved their main goal.
At UW-Madison, the university has always bargained from a position of power, Lucini Butler said, but students are the ones “holding up a mirror” to the face of the institution, and with so many constant protests, “protest fatigue” is setting in for organizers and students.
“Students also get this kind of burnout and frustration when they set demands and then some of those demands aren’t met,” Luchini Butler said. “I think there’s an exhaustion that comes with just juggling a job on top of being a student and then on top of that, seeing these diminishing returns.”
Often, protesters will present the university with a set of demands, to which the university responds by pointing out fine details in specific policies that should be avoided, Luchini Butler said. With thousands of campus policies, it is almost impossible for students to know everyone. But it’s important to consider “the spirit of the inquiry,” she said.
“In the black student strike of 1969, the students really wanted to participate in the hiring of black professors in the African American Studies department, and the faculty came back and said, ‘No, this is against all these tenure policies,'” Lucini Butler said . “The spirit of the inquiry was that the students wanted a professor who more accurately reflected them … and they were concerned that any professors who would be hired for African American studies would be white, and perhaps they would be white men.” “
But the rhetoric has always been the same, Lucini Butcher said.
“They say these protesters should demand better rights,” Luchini Butcher said. “It’s been consistent on campus, but also throughout the history of protest since the dawn of time.”
Protesters fell for ‘university tactics’
The university now has students on search committees, Luchini Butler said, but getting there requires a compromise.
In 1969 Black Peoples Alliance the university complied with only two of the 13 demands of the protesters, and in May the university did not directly meet any from the demands of pro-Palestinian protesters, agreeing to “facilitate access” to UW System or UW Foundation decision makers, engage students and scholars affected by the war, and “use discretion” when handling disciplinary cases from the camp .
In an anonymous reflection letter by a student negotiator in the pro-Palestinian camp, the protester claimed that the administration had convinced the protesters that it was better to accept an agreement that did not meet any of their demands rather than reject the proposal, and said that the negotiators had succumbed to the “psychological an administrator’s war that has led us to believe the false idea that this agreement materially helps the people of Gaza.”
The letter outlined several other negotiating tactics that the protesters “caught” and suggested that they should have advocated for the “dropping of charges” against the protesters arrested in the May 1 police operation.
“I’m not saying that the people who worked tirelessly should have worked harder — rather, those efforts should have been spread among more people,” the letter said. “Instead, we trusted elected student voices when this kind of decision-making power should never be placed in the hands of a few.”
Over the summer, UW-Madison updated both its protest policies and its policy on when to make institutional statements, prompting concern from freedom of speech experts that the policy could have a “chilling effect” on protest and free speech.
The university has too surveyed approximately 30 to 40 students for allegedly participating in spring camp and several student organizations.
UW-Madison previously sold of apartheid South Africa in 1978 after pressure from the Madison Regional Committee for South Africa on the Wisconsin Legislature, including an occupation by 12 students of the chancellor’s office demanding exemption. However, Luchini Butler believes the university is unlikely to comply with SJP’s demands.
But even in the absence of visible change, the protest can make a significant difference in raising awareness, Lucchini Butler said.
“Sometimes when you study protests, it’s not even about changing policy, it’s about changing the tone of the conversation. If you walk out of a protest and more people know about reproductive rights than before, then maybe that’s a good thing,” Lucini Butler said.
Staff writer Drew Wesson contributed to this article.
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Tomer Ronen is the features editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has written, covered protests, state politics, sports, etc. Follow him on Twitter at @TRonen22.