Student protests on campuses are calling attention to atrocities in Gaza and challenging university administrators to divest. What is the best way forward that avoids unnecessary violence?
Collectively, the global student protests demanding university divestments from Israel are one of the largest mass protests in recent history. Student protesters are risking their futures as they demand their institutions financially divest from Israel and companies connected to supplying weapons and technology to Israel’s government.
Last week, in Calgary, police descended on the University of Calgary campus with riot gear, using shields, batons and rubber bullets, to forcibly remove a group of protesters from an encampment set up on campus.
On today's podcast, Vinita speaks with Pratim Sengupta, professor of learning sciences at the University of Calgary. Sengupta was there the night police engulfed the protesters and says the violence he saw shook him to his core. Also on the podcast is Sarita Srivastava, a university leader of a much smaller arts and design campus in downtown Toronto. Srivastava (sister to Vinita) is a sociologist by background and author of the recent book, "Are You Calling Me a Racist?" Together, they look back on what's been happening on campuses amid this mass protest but also plot out a new - gentler - way forward than the one we've been witnessing.
THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT
PULL QUOTE
Pratim Sengupta: Globally, we are witnessing a historic moment in education. The history of public education is being made in front of us. And these are students who are voicing their conscience. What we are seeing is the emergence of a conscience across the planet. Of young people, of the youth, they are leading the way.
They are asking for the deaths of people in danger to stop. Is it really that difficult to have a dialogue with them?
INTRO
Vinita Srivastava: Over the past few weeks, student protests have sprung up in the form of encampments on university campuses across North America, as student protesters demand action by the universities on the situation in Gaza.
Their demands include their universities financially divest their assets tied to Israel or connected to companies supplying weapons and technology to Israel's government. This is one of the largest mass protests we've seen in recent history. At the heart of it is 1200 Israelis killed by Hamas, with almost 250 taken hostage on October 7th.
And the subsequent and ongoing attack you on Gaza by Israel. According to the United Nations, that onslaught has resulted in the killing of 35, 000 Palestinians and famine conditions for the majority of Gaza. What we're seeing across the country are thousands of students risking their futures. They are refusing to stop speaking their minds and demanding more ethical actions from their governments and universities.
In many cases, like at Columbia University in New York City, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT in Cambridge, we've watched police descend, sometimes using violence to disperse demonstrators. Last Thursday night, police used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the encampments at the University of Calgary.
It's been hard to watch for a lot of us. Pratim Sengupta lived it. He's a professor of learning sciences at the University of Calgary, where he says social justice is at the center of every project he works on. Last week, as police descended on his campus, Sengupta was there. He's on the podcast today.
Our other guest is a university leader who's been watching what's been happening at the University of Calgary and other campuses from afar. She's also someone I happen to be intimately familiar with because she's my sister, Sarita Srivastava. Sarita is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Arts and Design University, or OCADU, where she has also just finished a run as Provost, the top academic officer.
Sarita is also a scholar in sociology with a focus on race and social movements. She is a longtime activist herself and author of the book, Are You Calling Me a Racist? Together, we're going to look at what's been happening at campuses across North America and ask, what universities could be doing better?
Pratim and Sarita, thanks so much for talking with me about this.
Sarita Srivastava: You're welcome. Happy to be here.
Pratim Sengupta: Thank you.
INTERVIEW
Vinita Srivastava: So Pratim, let's start with you because you were there on Thursday night at the University of Calgary campus where students had been camping to protest the war in Gaza when police broke through the student protesters on campus.
And I'm hoping that you can paint a picture of what you saw and what was going through your mind.
Pratim Sengupta: The memory is very traumatic. I was on campus right before the police decided to do what they did. And I was outside the circle of the encampment and I was within the circle of the police vehicles. There were many police vehicles.
It is my belief that the police outnumbered the protesters by a large magnitude, subject to verification, of course. Being in the middle of all of that, I had never experienced that amount of militaristic presence. Police were in riot gears, had all kinds of ammunitions on them. I began to realize what was about to happen.
So I approached a police officer and had a very polite conversation with him about If they were going to use force on my students and he said, yes.
Vinita Srivastava: Well, I'm sorry,
Pratim Sengupta: These memories are very painful. Just the helplessness, knowing that we're about to get hurt. What I witnessed was a peaceful group of students commuting together.
Caring for each other, teaching each other, learning from each other, doing the work of educating themselves. And it became clear to me that that's the work that we should have been doing as professors on campus. We did not. Students were leading the protests. They were leading the call to stop any kind of support for an ongoing genocide.
Protesting that does not take away from the horrible acts of terror that Hamas has caused. Let me go back to the conversation I had with the cop. I asked him, are you going to use force on my students? And he said, how else do you make people do stuff that they don't want to do? And I asked him about the authorizations that they had.
And they said that the owners authorized them. And I clarified the owners were the administration. I told him that I'm afraid my students will get hurt. And he said, not if they leave now. And I asked him if there is any other way. And he said, no. And by that time, some other police officers had engulfed me from the other side.
The officer who I was talking with, he gestured to the other officers and said that this is a polite conversation. He's a prof. I told them that I'm very scared that my students will get hurt, and they said they probably will. And then I was asked to leave, and I left at that point, because I was afraid that my presence would make that situation worse.
I stood on the other side of the gate. And I just waited.
I would like to know what actually happened. How did this decision get taken? Who was supporting this decision? Why was this not a conversation? And a prelude to this is that the students had sent their demands to the administration a couple of days prior, and they just requested a dialogue.
Vinita Srivastava: I hear that you're very emotional about it.
I know that it's very fresh for you two, but I also want to ask just about the official position of the University of Calgary. Like what they're saying is we agree to free speech, but we don't agree to the encampment. They said, we're putting out this warning. We're asking protesters to leave.
Pratim Sengupta: I don't want to let that moment pass, no matter what.
The textual justification is my colleagues in the law school, both at U Calgary and U of Alberta, have raised concerns about the legality of the administration's position that this is trespassing. And I think any educator needs to be very careful before going on to justify acts of violence that they authorize on their own students.
This is not education.
Vinita Srivastava: One of the things that you mentioned to me was the hope that you had when you were watching your students in action. So can you talk a little bit about that? What is it that you saw there that was so hopeful?
Pratim Sengupta: Yeah, the students are not one homogeneous person. Right. The students come with many different commitments, some resonant, some dissonant with one another.
And what I witnessed was students actually having long, hard, difficult conversations, but also joyful conversations. They're celebrating with Palestinian music, with Palestinian dances, with poetry, with art. Art. They're doing art. And Gayatri Spivak has a beautiful line, something like, in the classroom we speak of worlds outside.
And often we fail to do that in our classrooms. And what I saw happening as an education professor was, this is education. They're trying to really find solidarity despite differences. They're putting forward the cause for change. of a group of people, uh, and they're trying to center their voices in solidarity with other students at other universities.
That, to me, felt like if there is a moment for true education, this is it. And the administration could see that as an opportunity to have a dialogue with the students because Often we assume and we take it for granted that it's the administration who speaks officially for the university. The irony is that a university with just administrators is just an office.
University is not a university without its students.
Vinita Srivastava: One of the things that you said is that it made you realize was the university should have been doing this all along, this kind of education, this kind of encouraging of dialogue and I want to turn to Sarita now because one of the things that you have been doing like where you work is OCAD University, which has a much smaller campus and so it hasn't had these types of big protest or encampments.
And as a university leader and administrator yourself with a book about social justice movements, you've been watching these events from afar. I'm wondering what's been going through your mind. If you empathize with some of the challenges that the university administration experiences and what you think some of the biggest challenges are with this type of situation.
Sarita Srivastava: I don't know if I would use the word empathy because what I write about in my book, the subtitle of Are You Calling Me A Racist is why we need to stop talking about race and start making real anti-racist change, which is that much of our thinking, conversations, action is rooted in the moral and emotional and the self, and the individual.
And so when I think up of these questions, I don't think, what are those university other leaders feeling? And let me empathize with them. I think I take a step back and think, what are my questions about this situation? What are my observations? And I don't want to make any pronouncements or analyses about situations that I haven't had time to study, that I haven't been involved in, that I haven't observed firsthand.
I think we all have to be careful to remember that the information we're getting from social media, And media is really a very partial story, and that's why it's so helpful, you know, to hear from people who are there. But for me, the only way that I can enter into this conversation is to ask the bigger questions about what is our role as university educators?
What is the role of universities? How do we support students? How do we support their learning journey to help them create the communities that they want to with each other? Within on campus, but also when they leave and the work that they're doing outside. My work as a sociologist. I teach sociology of race and gender sociology of social movements.
I've taught courses on community organizing practicum courses where students go out into the community to make change. In those moments, I'm thinking about how do I equip students with the skills, the practical thinking, theoretical skills that they need to make an intervention. And I think if universities, whether that's leaders or scholars or professors, want to support that, Journey to train students to teach students to intervene and in the big questions of our time as designers and artists and scholars.
So if that is our agreed upon shared mission, which I think it is of many public universities in Canada that we share that and many globally. If that is our starting point of what we want to do, then let's start from that aim and then ask what would we do differently? What would we do if that would be a thing that we want to accomplish?
I mean, we can talk about these things that are going wrong in this moment in these encampments, but I'd rather say let's think about how did we get to that place? How could we get to a different place going forward? For example, one of the things that we've been working on at our university is creating a framework for brave conversations.
It's just a starting point, having some workshops, equipping students and faculty with other kinds of questions and other kinds of tools, because this is the most, one of the most challenging political, geopolitical moment that we've experienced for many reasons. It is a situation in which the debate is so polarized that it's Very difficult for people to enter into a conversation across those differences.
And so that's the challenge. If our ethical commitment is to create peaceful communities or to work for peace, how is it that we bring that framework into our own communities? So I think this echoes what you were saying about your concerns about what you saw happening on campus, which is how discordant it is from our aims when actually our aim should be As leaders, as university professors to be supporting our communities and our students to work towards living in connection and community and working towards peace and social justice.
And that requires a certain kind of understanding of history of what direct action means of what has been successful in the past. What is the most effective way to act right now and how to do that in such a way that takes account. Of the place that we are at right now located with our fellow students and with people that don't agree with us So I heard inspiring things from you You talked about the diverse positions that exist and yet we don't see that from the outside That is not what we see on social media.
That is not the representation. We hear about the polarization because There is a strategic advantage to holding a more extreme and more polarized position, an advantage in the algorithms of social media, an advantage to how much attention you get and so on. In fact, that isn't necessarily a representation of what is happening on campuses.
It is one representation. It is happening. It gets cultivated through social media and through the moral positioning and the moral advantage of holding a very clear, delineated position that has no nuance. But actually what you're describing is that students are interested and willing. to start to move outside that frame.
And so how can we cultivate a broadening of that? Because we know that there are students on campus who aren't in that encampment for a variety of reasons. They don't feel comfortable with that strategy. They don't see themselves in that particular positioning. They see themselves as demonized by that positioning.
And so those are the questions I have is how do we broaden that conversation? And we as leaders in the university have a lot of tools to support those. conversations and help the students ask those questions.
Vinita Srivastava: One of the things that you were telling me about, Sarita, is the yellow staircase situation that happened at OCAD.
Sarita Srivastava: It's quite locally famous. We have a yellow staircase in the centre of our main campus, the centre of Toronto. Which students are, have ability to be creative on the walls. It's encouraged that they can draw whatever they want, write whatever they want. It's been there for many years. It's considered the heart of the creative expression of the campus for students.
Unfortunately, what's happened since October is that it's also become a place of conflict. It's become a place where people are having competing messages and sometimes they are crossing the line into profanity or to expressions that are targeting. Particular communities are students and that happens everywhere.
We see that in every campus as a history of graffiti that makes certain communities feel targeted. So that's something that's been challenging that we've been thinking about deeply. How is it that we both maintain a space of creative expression for students at the same time as create agreed upon community guidelines that are based in our community values, which is both creativity and mutual respect.
And that means not only drawing on legalistic definitions of what constitutes a hate crime or not, and if it's not a hate crime, therefore it's okay. But actually thinking about, how is it that I actually want to live with mutual respect and an ethical commitment to people who don't agree with me? And that's not such a straightforward question, even though I'm framing it in that way.
But it has to be something that the community together agrees on.
Vinita Srivastava: I think also what it does bring up is this idea of safety because you're talking about being ethical, but also whose safety are we talking about, right? And I want to explore that a little bit more if we could, like, it seems like everyone is calling for peace.
We want peace. Protesters are calling for peace. The university administration is also saying they want peace. But the university administrators are suggesting that protesters are creating an unsafe atmosphere, right? So, who's safety are we talking about?
Pratim Sengupta: Who committed violence? I think the truth is out there for anyone to see.
The students were not in riot gears. The students were chanting. The students were really huddling and communing together. They were protesting, peacefully, a genocide. And these are the people who were violently acted upon. So whose safety was violated? Then the second issue I have, and this goes back to some of the research that I have done, there is a political arithmetic.
Anytime violence is justified, it is. Usually like a chess gambit, like I'm going to sacrifice a pawn, but in the spirit of a greater good. And I feel like that's the implicit logic that's being used. And I wonder about the, the lived reality of that claim that the administration makes. That a group of students asking for dialogue on campus, and I'm only talking about the University of Calgary because I was there.
That implicit calculus there that a few people will create an unsafe campus, so we are going to unleash violence on them so that the greater campus can be safer, that claim needs to be investigated. The administration's claim, based on what I saw Needs to be questioned.
Vinita Srivastava: So I guess I'm also talking about a psychological safety. I wonder, Sarita, if you want to talk a little bit about that psychological safety at all.
Sarita Srivastava: There's a long, long history of us talking about safe spaces, meaning psychologically safe. For example, I didn't feel safe. That conversation happened and it made me feel not safe. And I've written about this many years ago.
We do need to recognize that of course there are relations of power in every classroom and every workshop and every space that are inequitable, but to say that therefore we can recognize them and make that space safe is to say that we would absent or disappear those relations of power. So in other words, it's actually not possible to disappear the relations of power and therefore it's not possible to make any particular space psychologically safe.
So if we say this is a safe space. This is a disingenuous thing to say, um, because it's absenting the relations of power that those students will be facing no matter what. If you're asking a student of color or an indigenous student to speak about their experience and say this is a safe space, you cannot possibly make that space safe for them.
What you can do is to create some guidelines that recognize the conditions. Of speaking and actually in, for example, not ask individual students to speak about their experience because you're replacing them in a situation of potentially having people deny their experience and therefore we're going to take on other kinds of practices, other kinds of ways in which we express mutual respect, in which we don't challenge individuals about their positions.
You can make guidelines for living in community, whether it's about a staircase or whether it's in a classroom or whether it's on a campus more broadly, that recognize practices that Don't focus on individual, that if they say something that you find uncomfortable or offensive, that it's not inherent of their identity, that they're not inherently evil or unjust, but that they are open to conversation.
And so if we all agree, we're in that same framework, then we're no longer talking about creating safe spaces. We're talking about having brave conversations in a mutually respectful way under conditions that allow us to speak without having individuals attacked, without having individuals Speak on the basis of their experience or identity.
Those are things I think that we can cultivate and accomplish. And yet we rarely do, because we do have this very weighted language of safety that we continue to use, that we continue to claim.
Pratim Sengupta: Sarita, what you said was what I saw happening in that student space. This is a student-led protest. Globally, we are witnessing a historic moment in education.
The history of public education is being made in front of us. And these are students who are voicing their conscience. What we are seeing is the emergence of a conscience across the planet of young people, of the youth. They are leading the way. They are asking for the deaths of people in danger to stop.
Is it really that difficult to have a dialogue with them? And by the way, what I saw was the students are just fine. They are having difficult conversations amongst themselves. They are engaging with each other so deeply, even while disagreeing. They're saying that. We are holding space for you in our hearts and we have to move beyond where we are.
And it's a beautiful moment. These are things that we often struggle with in our classrooms. And I think what, to me, as an, as a scholar of education, what this movement is showing is that maybe our classrooms, as we have thought of up until now, are fundamentally inadequate to do this kind of work. And maybe this is the education that needs to happen.
Vinita Srivastava: We've been talking about safety. Pratim, you've mentioned to me that you're concerned about some international students who are Palestinian and perhaps rely on Israeli funds to be on Canadian campuses, which adds complexity to the students protesters call for divestment from Israel. And I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about the concerns of the call for divestment, the potential impact.
Pratim Sengupta: On, on two fronts, there are Palestinian students who rely on Israeli funding in different countries. There are also Palestinian scholars at Israeli universities. And I have been associated with a few such people. And as we are thinking about divestment, first, we need to start the dialogue with the students.
And it is my understanding that the students are open minded enough to actually have these conversations, but we need to begin the conversation. With students leading, I tend to be less worried ethically. And I think there's a lot of invisible levers in the administrative decision making process that we are clearly not being able to see or grasp.
With students, it's a lot more transparent.
Vinita Srivastava: Sarita, in your book, Are You Calling Me A Racist?, you talk about the many avenues that students and educators and education leaders can take to concretely prepare students to engage with their local community as well as with the world. I'm wondering what do you think the best places to act are right now? What do you think we should be doing?
Sarita Srivastava: There's a multiplicity of ways to make change in the world. And we make these decisions based on our own, not only values and commitments of what we want to change, but where we feel the most capable and skilled in acting. Some people will choose to do things that reform institutions.
Other people will want to do more radical action. Some people will want to do direct action. Some people will want to write and do poetry. Our students are involved in all those practices. There's sometimes a way in which simply acting feels good. Because it's taking an action and what I would like to see us supporting as longtime educators and people with a history of acting in the world is to cultivate conversations, whether it's among students, whether it's among students and university leaders about exactly your question, take that question to heart. What are places that we could act? And that will be different for the University of Calgary then it is for OCAD University. We are a school of art and design. For example, there's many ways in which the kinds of interventions that students do here is things like installations and writing poetry. For example, we talk a lot about. So, um, I think it's important to talk about civics engagements and how young people aren't involved and so on, because there's many people that are not at that encampment, for example, that we could also think about how do we encourage them to think critically about global politics.
So there are many ways in which we can think about these questions in terms of not just in the classroom, but also the civic engagement and political engagement. Student protest has been a feature of campuses for decades. It's been a significant, important feature. Right now, it's happening in a very different context.
The campuses are more diverse politically. They're more diverse internationally, racially, and they're existing within a very polarized political environment, globally, and at a polarized social media environment. My inclination is whenever we're confronted with something where we say this moment is so terrible, I do feel very strongly that there's also always fault lines and opportunities that we see even when we fail, that there are opportunities for us to Ask why did this happen?
Why were we not able to come together on this? Why are certain people feeling excluded? Why are we not able to talk to each other? Why is this happening? We're beginning to ask these questions in this conversation. And so to me, that's not just a moment where we throw our hands up and say, this is terrible and we shake our heads, but I see it.
As there is that there is an optimism and the possibility for us to think differently within a context that we've never experienced before, you know, post pandemic, post 2020 debates and movements and racial justice. There actually also are new difficulties, but there are also new. movements and new ways of thinking and new contexts that we have to enter into.
And we are, we have a tremendous, exciting responsibility, uh, and very privileged position of, of, uh, of being in connection with youth who really care. We have an opportunity to think more deeply about how we support the whole range of students and that is going to challenge us as educators. We are all being challenged and instead of taking that as a moment of this is irreconcilable, I feel left optimistic about it as a moment of possibility for new kinds of conversations.
Vinita Srivastava: One last thing before we go. Pratim, you had mentioned your alma mater, Northwestern, as a possible model of how to successfully engage with student protesters on this issue. So I'm wondering if you can just briefly outline what university officials there did, and if you think that this can be replicated at your university or other Canadian universities.
Pratim Sengupta: Northwestern had very successfully ended the encampment by agreeing to have conversations with the students, by agreeing that they are going to provide scholarships for Palestinian students. They are going to have that difficult conversation about divestment. I would just hope, if there are any administrators listening to this podcast, please Talk to the students and don't send in a militarized police force before you do that.
Vinita Srivastava: Everybody here is nodding their heads. Yes, we all agree. Thank you so much, both of you, for your time.
Pratim Sengupta: This was a very moving conversation. The trauma of having witnessed that, it's just coming back every time I think of it. And so I appreciate the space, Sarita. I greatly appreciate being able to be in conversation with you. Vinita, thank you for making this happen.
Sarita Srivastava: Thank you.
Pratim Sengupta: Thank you.
OUTRO
Vinita Srivastava: That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what Pratim and Sarita said about universities and the hopeful tone set by students at the protests. This is one of those episodes where I pressed stop and the conversation just kept going. Like, it was kind of amazing.
Keep an eye out for an article from Pratim Sengupta in the Conversation Canada. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram at @dontcallmeresilientpodcast. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. The series is produced and hosted by myself, Vinita Srivastava.
Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.