This Is Helicopter Protesting

“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality. It seemed to me that Fohlin was not in the quad to join the students in their protest of the war in Gaza: She was just trying to look out for them.

Other faculty members have been roughed up too. Video showing the arrest of Emory’s philosophy-department chair, Noëlle McAfee, went viral. So did a clip of the Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck getting knocked over and zip-tied. At Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, Steve Tamari, a history professor at nearby Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was filmed being tackled and dragged by police; Tamari says he was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand. During a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the sociology professor Samer Alatout was detained; he says police inflicted the head gash that was visible in images circulated on social media.

Though sometimes called “student protests,” students are only some of those participating in the campus demonstrations and occupations of the past three weeks. My university reported that 100 people were arrested on April 27, of which 23 were students and at least four were employees. Various roles are represented at the protests, and those roles bear different meanings. The faculty members whose images have been shared most widely aren’t among the protesters so much as beside them; they’ve been watching over students as their guardians, instead of marching as their peers. This is helicopter protesting, fit for the helicopter-parent generation.

Following her arrest at Emory, Fohlin’s attorney told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she “was not a protester,” but had just come down from her office out of concern for students on the quad. In so doing, she saw authorities wrestling an individual to the ground and approached to intervene: “What are you doing?” she asked the police, appearing to tap one on the back before another officer grabbed her. McAfee told a similar story in a local-television interview: “I saw something going on … A bunch of police had tackled a young person, and threw them on the ground, and were just pummeling them,” she said. McAfee, whose scholarship connects feminist theory to political life, acknowledged the gendered role of protector that she felt she was playing. “The mother in me said, Stop, stop,” she told reporters.

The role of protector isn’t limited to women, of course. Before his detention, Tamari can be seen filming the protesters around him, perhaps as a means of documentation. In a statement issued later, Tamari positioned himself as a participant, but also a peacekeeper: “I joined the student-led protests on Saturday to stop the genocide and support and protect the students.” Alatout, the University of Wisconsin professor, expressed a similar ambition: “My and other faculty and staff’s position is that we are defending the students’ rights,” he said. “To demonstrate and to protest, and that we are defending them.”

Protection has been a theme of the protests. Members of Congress have pressured university presidents to demonstrate that they have done enough to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Disputes about the intention and etymology of campus chants and calls for Intifada, mixed with political motivations quite separate from the real operation of campus life, are also set against a years-long trend to cast safety as a matter of sensation, and sensation as equal to harm.

One timely example: After the Columbia University protests, some law students reportedly called for exams to be canceled, because the events of the week had left them “irrevocably shaken.” To feel unsafe is to be unsafe in the contemporary campus scene, and one’s perception of a slight, or even an act of violence, has become akin to its reality. Professors have played a role in advancing that ethos in their classrooms and offices, in part out of political empathy, in part because they truly care about students and their well-being, and in part because their institutions now demand it.

That situation has now circled back on itself. At UCLA last week, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and other organizations organized a rally on campus—a counterprotest, really, to the pro-Palestinian encampments—to “advocate for the protection of Jewish students,” as David N. Myers, one of the school’s history professors, put it. According to Myers, another, more agitated group of counterprotesters was also present, and came close to instigating a brawl with the anti-war activists. Myers wrote that he and other faculty “inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer.” A few days later, the situation did turn violent, and some among the original student protesters were beaten by a mob, as the police stood aside. At first, police action was creating danger, then its absence did the same. Amid the confusion of today’s campus protests, it can be hard to predict who will be vulnerable to whom at any given time, and when protection can or should be provided.

Clearly students there and then badly needed help, of a sort that faculty could not reasonably provide. In the current college climate, concern for safety is a constant, but rarely modulates above a steady background noise. At the protests, as during the school year, teachers mostly offer their protection as a means of staving off much lesser harms than those delivered by stick-wielding thugs. At Columbia, one professor urged news cameramen not to film students inside the encampment, according to The New York Times, seemingly to guard the students’ reputations.

Columbia professors have been involved in student protests in the past, but they didn’t position themselves like this, as purveyors of moral support. Instead, they played the role of mediators. In 1968, when students occupied several buildings across campus, faculty at one point physically positioned themselves between the protesters and the police—in the interest of bringing the matter to a close. A faculty statement from the time read, in part, “As members of the faculty, we are determined to do everything within our power rapidly to resume the full life of this institution in the firm expectation that our proposals will permit a climate to prevail that will once again allow reason, judgment and order to reign.” That sentiment bears far more resemblance to the goals of today’s administrators and politicians—the restoration of order and resumption of business as usual on campus—than it does to the goals of professors who have intervened in recent weeks to keep students safe.

Today’s protests might look similar to those previous ones when viewed in pictures, but their context is transformed. Students and parents have spent years demanding more and better services on campus, including services to help students feel and be safe and comfortable. Universities have swelled into giant bureaucracies in response to regulatory demands and competition. College life itself, especially at elite private universities, is now consumed by professionalization more than self-discovery, thanks in part to the astronomical cost of attendance. Campuses have become more diverse, making today’s faculty motivations different and more varied than those driving the (whiter, maler) Columbia faculty of ’68, who yearned for reason’s victory. And politics has become more identitarian, giving selfhood greater sway.

In this new context, professors and students have developed a relationship of protection above all others. Faculty have been converted from instructors into personal coaches. Much is gained in this change, including its expression at campus protests; professors such as McAfee and Myers have shown bravery on behalf of students. And yet, something is also lost: By inserting ourselves into students’ lives as guardians of their welfare, we risk failing to protect an important aspect of their intellectual, political, and personal development—namely, their independence.

Recounting the intervention that had led to her arrest at Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck reported saying to the police, “Leave our students alone. They’re students. They’re not criminals.” Like some other faculty, Orleck drew a line at calling in law enforcement, a choice she said was unprecedented in her 34 years at the college. But since Columbia set the precedent to do so, policing itself has become a subject of campus demonstrations. Participants may well be risking arrest by design. At the same time, students seem ambivalent about the degree to which they really are at odds with authority, rather than reliant upon it. At Columbia, one was mocked after demanding “humanitarian aid” in the form of food and water after taking over Hamilton Hall. “I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” she said.

What, exactly, is the nature of that obligation? Attending college is an American coming-of-age ritual, and a means of giving students room to figure out how to live and act in the world. Orleck’s reminder that students are just students undercuts that mission, in a way. It’s both protective and infantilizing. It strips students of their power before they’ve even had a chance to test it out. None of us wants our students or our colleagues to be harmed. But there’s value in learning how it feels to take risks, and to reap their rewards.