Episode 7: Policing Protests

Jay Ulfelder:

You are listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast. I’m your host, Jay Ulfelder, he/him. Together with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth, and other members of the Nonviolent Action Lab Team, each episode we bring you the latest research, insights and ideas on how nonviolent action can or sometimes fails to transform injustice.

It’s Friday, August 30th, 2024, and today I’m joined by Paul Passavant. Paul is the author of the book we’ll be discussing today, Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection, which was published by Duke University Press in 2021. He’s also the author of No Escape: Freedom of Speech and the Paradox of Rights, and he’s the editor with Jodi Dean of Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, in addition to numerous articles in political and legal theory. He teaches at a small college in upstate New York.

So, Paul, thanks a lot for making time to talk today. I think your book’s title, Policing Protest, makes clear what it’s about in a general way and why we’re interested in it on this podcast. But more specifically, I hope it’s fair to say that the book mainly does two things. First, it describes how policing a protest has become more violent over the past few decades. And second, it offers an explanation for that trend that’s rooted in broader shifts in the American and global political economy. So if that’s fair, and you don’t mind, maybe we could take those parts in turn and then talk about how this way of seeing protest policing helps us understand what we’ve seen from police and the broader public, I think in response to several recent social movements.

Paul Passavant:

Okay.

Jay Ulfelder:

So first then the descriptive part. How has the policing of protest changed in recent decades?

Paul Passavant:

Well, Jay, thanks again for having me on. It’s great to be able to talk with you about this policing protest coming out of the sixties was reformed in ways that were reaction against some of the violent excesses and that were notorious from the way that demonstrations were policed in the 1960s. One can think of the way that police treated civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s, or perhaps most notably the way that police responded to the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And so a variety of influences came together to seek to reform protest policing in the 1970s. And the way that protests were policed in the 1970s is known as negotiated management, a more dialogic manner of responding to demonstrators, seeking to recognize their first amendment rights of freedom of speech, and recognize the fact that when there’s a demonstration, there may be some inconveniences to people in their daily lives.

And that model of police protestor interaction known as negotiated management that seeks to keep open channels of communication between demonstrators and police that begins to break down in the late 1990s and continues to break down in the 21st century. And I’m not the only scholar to have made that observation. And so police today, and we see a pattern of protest policing today that is more aggressive towards demonstrators, exercising their first amendment rights is more likely to resort to violence, more likely to escalate. Their level of force is not particularly dialogic at all. We don’t see lines of communication at all. Very often we see snatch and arrests, for example, where perhaps a commander will point and have an officer grab a demonstrator. They want arrested. We see preventative arrests and we see efforts at intimidation by bringing in excessive levels of force and numbers of police and forms of material that seek intentionally to intimidate demonstrators as a tactic for keeping the order.

And other scholars and myself, we warn that this is not a return to the model of protest policing that we saw in the 1960s. In the 1960s, police were less well trained, less well educated, and less well armed. And today, police are better trained, better educated, by and large and much better armed. And so it’s a new and distinctive model of protest policing, and it’s one that I call the security model of protest policing, one that is more militarized on the one hand, and also makes use of technological innovations seeking to prevent demonstrations and protests from forming on the other.

Jay Ulfelder:

You mentioned the late nineties as a start of a shift there. Were there some major events that were associated with where you were really seeing that shift start to happen?

Paul Passavant:

Yeah, we see it in two places, really. We see it in New York City with the NYPD. And some scholars like Alex Vitale for example, have observed that the NYPD adopted broken windows policing very early on in the early 1990s when Bill Bratton became the NYPD police commissioner and broken windows order maintenance policing, also known as zero tolerance. Policing really is quite hostile to the least forms of disruption or disorder. And as that was their major modality for policing in general, that gets carried forward into their protest policing. And so they became very hostile and very aggressive towards the least forms of disorder. And as the NYPD is symbolically, it’s a very significant police department. It’s a very large police department, and a lot of their police executives went to other police departments. For example, John Timney went to Philadelphia and down to Miami, Florida. Bratton himself went and led the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department, and then came back to the NYPD when de Blassio became mayor.

And so as executives, people from the executive level and the NYPD went to other departments, they brought with them the style of policing that had been institutionally developed with the NYPD. And so that’s one source for this change or one source of influence, shall we say. We can go into deeper changes later. Then the second is mega events that we start to see much more security minded, aggressive preventative protest policing, taking shape at major economic summits, for example. And the most notorious of those is when Seattle Washington hosted the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999 and the way that police responded to protestors there. And so that becomes a major source so that when other cities host mega events, they don’t want to be another Seattle. And so that has helped to develop a security legacy of aggressive protest policing.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah, yeah. Having just watched the most recent edition of the Democratic National Convention, it’s astonishing how many of the things you just described were on full display in that, and maybe we can come back to that a bit later, but I was hoping you could talk now and then about, so why is this happening? What’s your understanding of the causes of this trend towards more violent and aggressive policing of protest activity?

Paul Passavant:

I think that police are part of the state, and so we have seen over the last decades shifts in the shape of the state, the state’s form or the state formation and the book, I argue that we can talk about three different crises that together helped reshape the state in the United States and reshaped protest policing, the first crisis we could refer to as a crime crisis. For example, when the civil rights movement was engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience, say sitting in at lunch counters or seeking to ride a bus without attending to the whites only section of a bus, for example, those forms of nonviolent civil disobedience seeking to implement the principles of Brown versus the Board of education that ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional from one perspective is peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience, or in fact, actually legal conduct the idea of equality and open public accommodations for all.

But from the perspective of white southern conservatives of this was criminality, it was breaking the law, the laws of segregation in the 1968 presidential election, Nixon is famous for having engaged in what was known at the time and still is known as a southern strategy, seeking to appeal to southern conservatives to make that the new base of the Republican party. And he did that not through overt racism of a George Wallace, but by using coded language. And he talked about law and order. And in his acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention, he allied peaceful protest with criminality and violence. And so what from the perspective of more equality minded people, was peaceful protest from the perspective of white conservatives in the south that was violence and criminality. And so there was a sense of a crime crisis that demanded a law and order response.

And we see this notion of a crime crisis carried forward in the 1980s under Reagan’s presidency, the 1990s, the 1994 crime bill. And so all of this focuses on getting police to be more aggressive, hiring more police, training them better, and arming them better. And so that’s one vector of influence, the build out of policing in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s and into the 21st century. The second crisis was the urban fiscal crisis. New York City, most famously the Ford Administration made an example of New York City when New York City could not afford to make its debt payments and used the fiscal crisis as a way to impose austerity and to send a message to other cities. Now, cities in the 1970s had been losing industry and had been losing population. And so with massive cuts to federal programs that had been very important for urban political economy that had occurred in those cuts occurring in the 1980s during Reagan’s two terms.

And then in Bush’s two terms, these federal programs were cut by two thirds. Cities had to invent a different political economy. And so they began to think about how they might raise revenue from visitors rather than from their residents, and began to reorient their infrastructures towards visitors. And so that meant promoting things like dining, dining experiences, theater, shopping experiences, aquariums, sporting events and so forth, try to encourage people to come visit a city on vacation or for a weekend stay in a hotel. And for this sort of visitor oriented economy to work, number one, the visitors had to feel safe. And so kind of policing to images of disorder and affect management took hold, and that’s broken windows policing. And then secondly, cities wanted to be able to host mega events in order to bring in conventions, for example, and raise revenue from the conventions folks eating out, staying in hotels and patronizing the businesses.

But also these mega events became ways of sort of branding the city and of marketing the city to potential tourists who might one day come and visit the city or to other events that might want to have the city host their convention. And certain mega events are known as national special security events that is the highest security classification in US law. And so if an event is designated in NSSE, then the Department of Justice has training materials to help you prepare to host the mega event in terms of security arrangements. And the police department in the city that’s preparing to host a mega event will visit other cities that have hosted one or are hosting one and observe the security arrangements there. And so when you’re hosting the highest security classification and the nses and what are nses, they’re things like the Democratic or Republican national conventions, a presidential inauguration, a presidential funeral, a Super Bowl, a high level economic summit that involves international visitors.

When you’re talking about, say, a Democratic or Republican national convention, you get federal money to help you prepare for your security arrangements. But after the mega event has left the city, there’s a sort of security legacy that is left in your city. So if you use the money to purchase CCTV cameras, the cameras remain up. If you used it to purchase scooters or a bearcat, an armored personnel carrier, those things remain in the city. Military grade drones, that stuff remains in the city, a helicopter. It remains in the city after the mega event has gone. And so the training and the security preparations that go into getting ready to host that mega event, that helps to transform that police department and indeed the city space itself into a much more securitized zone. And so that winds up affecting policing. And then third of all, I suggest that coming out of the 1960s, there was a reaction particularly among conservatives, that there was a crisis of democracy, and this is the third crisis.

And so what from a more social democratic or liberal perspective, the perception of the 1960s was that maybe there’s a legitimation crisis that we need to close the gap between the promise of equality and the material existing inequalities that exist in American cities. From the conservative perspective, the message of the 1960s was that there was too much democracy, too many social movements. And this, for example, was the position of Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard who talked about how there was an excess of social movements from the 1960s in an essay called The Crisis of Democracy. And he particularly pointed to black social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and the demands for equality as overloading the system and creating a sort of crisis of democracy. And so, so moving on from the 1960s, there’s a kind of democratic exhaustion, if not an antipathy towards democracy moving forward.

And so these three crises, crime crisis, the urban fiscal crisis and the crisis of democracy come together to reshape law and political culture in terms of the crisis of democracy, reshapes urban political economy from the perspective of the urban fiscal crisis and reshapes policing from the perspective of the crime crisis. And so all of this reshapes policing and urban political economy in such a way that the result is, for instance, if a city’s hosting a mega event, it wants that event to occur without disruption, whether the disruption is terrorism, a natural disaster crime, or a protest, it wants this event to come off smoothly for the reasons of the production of the spectacle itself in order to be able to market the city. And so there is a heightened incentive not only to host these mega events in terms of neoliberal political economy, but to make sure they occur without disruption. And that means making sure that demonstrators do not disrupt this event. And likewise, when you’re hosting, when you’ve got a visitor oriented economy in terms of fine dining, theater, the arts, et cetera, you want people to feel safe. And that means if you think that they might feel unsafe in terms of the disruption of, again, there’s a tendency to be more aggressive towards demonstrations and protests there. So these three crises come together to reshape both political economy and also policing, and particularly policing protest.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah, I think you’ve hinted it or started alluding to what I wanted to ask you about next when you were discussing the crisis of democracy there, but your book was published in 2021, I was impressed that you still managed to work a pretty thorough analysis of the policing of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Paul Passavant:

Yeah, I think book publishers don’t want to have their books occur that way, where I think it might’ve, I was trying to remember when that got in there. It might’ve come in when we were doing the final page proofs,

Jay Ulfelder:

Right?

Paul Passavant:

First the final draft,

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. Yeah. You were even quite a bit of detail on the 2020 protest wave in particular. So kudos, that was very impressive. But I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how and why the Black Lives Matter movement triggers, what maybe you could describe as a sort of heightened version of aggression and hostility from police and how that’s connected to the Blue Lives matter or thin blue line kind of mass counter mobilization we saw that year. Again, I think you were hitting at this with the crisis of democracy part, but maybe you could elaborate a bit.

Paul Passant:

Yeah, I think the scholarly literature, you have some scholars who will say that when black people are the demonstrators, there’s a greater tendency for police to respond with violence. Some other scholars will say that it’s not so much the race of the demonstrators as what they are protesting, and if they are protesting policing, police get very aggressive. They don’t like that. And so that’s out there in the scholarly literature, and that might help account for the aggressiveness with which police responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. And really when we were seeing the protests of 2020, I mean, that was what I call the security model of protest policing in the book. It was just like pages right out of the book. Police were so aggressive, very violent and stunningly so because they had to know that they were being recorded by video and being witnessed by journalists as they were doing it.

And so that really displayed quite a disturbing sense of impunity on the part of police in a number of different cities. DC and New York City certainly, certainly come to mind, but I also wonder if the changes in the state formation might also be something of an account for this as well. In that I talk about the transformation the state away from a sort of social democratic horizon towards neoliberal authoritarianism. And so when we talk about neoliberalism, we’re talking about governing for markets to promote markets and market behavior. And so this is an important shift in government. I think that government now is oriented towards markets as opposed to the people or the common good. And when people then begin demonstrating or protesting inequalities, material deprivation, you, the state winds up getting into a different position vis-a-vis the people. And so rather than say it being a form of democratic governance where one needs and wants to hear the grievances of the people, and that’s an important aspect of democratic policymaking.

Now the state is in a defensive pose or defensive posture to defend markets against the protests of the people. And so it creates a kind of state people relation of antagonism. And black lives matter, of course, it was about excess of violence and the killing of black people, excess of abuses of force by police that predominantly affected black people. Absolutely. But the Black Lives Matter movement, as I write in the book, takes on, goes much further to talk about a sort of crisis of social reproduction. We could say opportunities for children, education, healthcare, caring for the elderly and so forth. And so again, under the conditions of neoliberal authoritarianism, under the conditions of a neoliberal state, we get this relation of antagonism between the state and the people. And here the Black Lives Matter movement. And so that antagonism, I think explains something. But also in the, I talk a little bit about the philosopher Jacques ADA’s concept of ology, the idea that in our present interactions were often haunted by in different ways, the past, we think about the past or the past informs how we respond to the present or sometimes and with the Black Lives Matter protests, I suggest that I actually present evidence in the book, for example, in the case of the Memphis Police Department with some of their PowerPoint presentations, that when they saw Black Lives Matter, they saw and feared the protests from the late 1960s and the riots from the late 1960s, they saw that, right?

So when you have Black Lives Matter demonstrations, for example in Memphis, you could say the response is completely disproportionate what’s going on. But in a way, what the police were responding to is like is that they’re actually being haunted by the uprisings of the 1960s. And so there’s an overreaction because it’s sort of responding to what a sort of trauma to police. And so I know I’m sort of expressing that in deeply philosophical language. I mean, one could also express perhaps the same thing in terms of racial capitalism, but the police tend to respond particularly aggressively towards the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it has to do with what it triggers in police and the way that police are sort of haunted by the protests and riots in the 1960s still, even though you see just ordinary, obviously they’re not being violent or something like that, but they’re seeing something else and they’re afraid of something else. And so the reaction comes from this other place.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah, I am thinking of all the endless repetition of B roll footage from a small number of places during that movement that also sort of created and kept recreating that idea and fear in the American public imagination that summer and fall and on and on. It’s still an element in the current election.

Paul Passavant:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Jay Ulfelder:

To me, one of the most important and fascinating social movements in the US since 2020 with real linkages to the Black Lives Matter movement, I think is the movement to stop Cop City in Atlanta. And this is something a couple months ago, I interviewed Joe Brown, a professor at UMass Boston on the kind of ins and outs of that movement and the police and city government’s response to it. So we don’t necessarily need to revisit all that here, but I was interested in, given your observations about long-term trends in policing and urban, the nature of the state at the local and beyond level, I was interested in hearing your thoughts on the proliferation of these sorts of police training facilities around the country. I’ve seen police abolitionist groups circulating maps that are showing more than a hundred of these either under construction or in the planning stages across the US right now. So I’m wondering, what do you make of that? Why are there so many police departments that are so eager to build these things and why are so many local and state governments so happy to back?

Paul Passavant:

I think it’s a continuation of the trajectory that I describe in the book, unfortunately. And so I think it’s a sort of deepening of the investment in the security model of policing and policing protest. And so it’s about better training and better arming police to confront demonstrations that speak to grievances needs and material deprivations of people in these different communities. And so it also speaks to the shift in the state and its relationship to the people that I just described to you a few minutes ago where the neoliberal state winds up taking on a different posture vis-a-vis the people, unfortunately, where it becomes state versus people. And so we see an ever deepening, unfortunately, investment in that. And I think it’s also an extension of the way that I described this model of protest policing in the book is that it’s post deic and it’s post legitimation, right? It is quite obviously pro-democratic because it is attacking freedom of expression by demonstrators, demonstrators seeking to exercise first amendment rights, and it becomes post legitimation in a variety of different ways.

If one considers consent to be, for example, a major principle of legitimation, then the expression of we don’t consent to say deepening investments in fossil fuels, that the attack of that expression of lack of consent indicates a state that is beginning to move beyond a concern for legitimation, or in a most narrow sense, legitimation might be following the law, but many of these tactics of protest policing now either involve targeted arrests or indiscriminate arrests or the use of things like long range acoustical devices, LRADs that seeks to disperse a protest by using pain to get people to comply. That is to say a very high level of sound that humans can’t bear, and that doesn’t merely respond to somebody who might or might not be in violation of the law, but it affects everybody who’s in that area whether or not you’re in violation of the law or not.

And so in that respect, it’s post legitimation and that it’s not about following the law or preventative arrests where you know that the charges are going to be dismissed later. But you just want to shut down this demonstration. Again, another example of post legitimation policing. And so unfortunately, it seems that investing in these kind of cop cities, we could say seems to be a deepening investment in the security model of protest policing, but also a deepening investment, unfortunately, in a kind of post legitimation state, which has all kinds of very deep implications from the perspective of political and social theory where we have a state that is no longer as concerned about legitimating itself as a government.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. I feel like that’s part of what’s so intriguing about this movement is that it seems like it’s been especially effective at drawing out that tension, clarifying that shift. And I’m thinking particularly here of the, it’s a movement that’s employed a wide range of tactics and approaches, one of them being pursuing in response to the criticism that they’re doing things illegally, they should be doing things quote the right way, pursuing a ballot initiative and collecting the signatures to get it on the ballot, only to have on the day they’re supposed to turn in the signatures the city clerk leave early from something as petty as that up to the mayor, effectively shutting that down so far so that it’s still not clear if they can, this sort of ultimate expression of democracy, way of airing grievances and sort of democratically resolving them, trying to put this on the ballot being shut down by a city government that continues to claim it is attempting to represent democratically. So yeah, it’s sort of a particularly acute expression of all of this. Yeah, tragic. Yeah. Mindful of time here. Maybe we can wrap up with some discussion of other current events. And I’m thinking particularly of policing of the movement that’s working to stop genocide and Gaza and in support of Palestinian liberation,

I’m wondering how you’d describe the police response to what, so I’m just going to call them for convenience, pro-Palestine protests, how you describe the police response to those, maybe in general, but particularly interested in what we saw around the wave of student encampments last spring, and now we’re seeing this sort of contagion of policy changes across colleges and universities, sort of like a school level manifestation, I think of the post democratic

Paul Passavant:

Right

Jay Ulfelder:

State you’re talking about, but how that fit. Absolutely. Yeah. So maybe what do you make of all this?

Paul Passavant:

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Let me just briefly say something about Chicago and the D first, where again, we see elements of the security model of protest policing. We see the Chicago wanted to be able to host the DNC, the city’s bid on these things, and they had to make sure that the Democratic National Convention came off without a hitch. And you also have demonstrators there who have been very concerned with the response of the Biden administration to the genocide in Gaza that’s been ongoing, if not kicking up in the West Bank as well. Now we see the security perimeters that come with nses, and certainly that raises questions around democracy. If you can keep demonstrators so far from important officials and policymakers that they’re not exposed to the grievances of the people. And so I’ll just point out the extensive security parameters.

On the one hand, the numbers of police was overwhelming in Chicago and perhaps unnecessary the numbers of police, which has an intimidating effect on demonstrators. And it criminalizes demonstrations so that if there are onlookers and they see a demonstration and they see more cops than demonstrators, then they’re like, well, what’s that? And it must be dangerous because they’re surrounded by police. And so it invalidates the message right off the bat by having such a suffocating number of police accompanying, say, very peaceful demonstrations. Here, I’m thinking about the last day at the DNC in particular, and I will say that the numbers of arrests though in Chicago, what 70 something? When New York City hosted the Republican National Convention in 2004, we had like 1800, maybe 1900 arrests. And so there are far fewer arrests, and we didn’t see really the use of less lethal weaponry against protestors either.

And so on the one hand, we did see the intimidation factor, but we didn’t see certain forms of violence on the part of police that we have seen in other cities, particularly other cities that have hosted national special security events. And so if I was to criticize Chicago on some grounds, I would say however, that the fact that we didn’t see so many arrests and we didn’t see the police have to resort feel like they had to resort to the use of, say, chemical weapons or something like that, shows that you can respond to demonstrations without those kinds of violence. And so if there’s ever an element of hope here, it was like it would be nice if people took note of that and built on that and began walking back some of the aspects of the security model of protest policing because it shows that you don’t need to respond with violence or it’s possible not to.

That also means that the choice of violence is a policy choice. It’s not a security necessity. And so then that raises the question of why do we choose violence? Why do we choose it, and what does it mean for the state and for government that we do and that we’re okay with it? And so I would just lay that out there. In terms of Chicago’s hosting the Democratic National Convention. It looks like the city and the police made the call that they didn’t want viral footage on Fox or something like that of cops pepper spraying or doing something worse to demonstrators and good for them. Okay. Now about the campuses, again, I think that we can, I think you, you’re absolutely right. We are seeing a lot of what we’ve been talking about in terms of the way that cities have responded to protests over the last few decades now being brought onto campus.

And that’s the shame. And so I think that in part, this is perhaps a product of transformations in academia over the last few decades that scholars have talked about the neoliberal of the university. And so that today there’s been a dramatic change over the last 50 years in terms of the percentage of full-time faculty who are untenured versus the percentage of the faculty who are tenured or occupy a tenured line. And the percentage of those who are tenure or occupy a tenure line, I can’t remember the numbers now, it’s in the twenties or maybe it’s like 30%. And so effectively, because tenure is institutionally the institutional protection of academic freedom, we can say academic freedom has already been lost with the neoliberal of the university and also faculty, government and shared governance was an aspect of protecting academic freedom. And as states have cut and the federal government has cut aid on or cut the money that they contribute to supporting public universities, just as an example, and that money has got to be made up either through fundraising or through tuition hikes. This has made universities behave more like market actors. It’s neoliberal the university in the same way that the cities became neoliberal coming out of the urban fiscal crisis. And so this has resulted in hiring far more administrators and staff as opposed to faculty, and it’s heightened the importance of the president of a university as somebody who’s going to go out there and help fundraise and represent the university. And so it is also undermined shared governance or faculty government. And so the university presidents are very concerned about promoting a good campus brand.

To the various stakeholders, I believe, of the particular university. And so the incentive structure now is about maintaining that campus image in a similar way to the incentive structure or of a city in terms of them hosting a mega event. And so these campus demonstrations disrupted that image, that brand image that they sought to promote. And then third of all the neoliberal of the university has meant that they also are starting to downgrade things like the humanities, liberal arts education as they seek to promote either stem engineering, finance management, things like that. And so here we see that what is happening in the university by downgrading the humanities, by downgrading the liberal arts, this is where we learn how to justify. This is where we study what is the purpose of government, what normative basis or purpose should government pursue, and so that we can have conversations so that we can deliberate, so that we can argue that this provides us our language and the normative structure for these kind of conversations.

And it provides us the capacity to justify. And so what is happening inside the neoliberal university is that we are beginning to shortchange the development and the support and sustenance for democratic discourse for the capacity to justify. And we see, and so the universities are giving up on democratic deliberation and the preparing of students for democratic deliberation in terms of the content, qualitatively of education. And then unfortunately, we also see this doubled with the institutional response that there isn’t patience, there’s not deliberation, right? There’s not discourse. And instead, they call in the riot police who, and then they call the police, and the police come in, and the police have been shaped by the last few decades of the security model of protest policing. They come in in riot gear as we saw in some of the different university campuses, a bearcat at Columbia University, for example.

And so it just reenacts this kind of post deic, post legitimation protest policing, and the universities then further undermine their relation to democracy by changing the rules as the demonstrations are going on or during the summer for other universities or for the same ones changing the rules to try to make the demonstrations less likely to occur this fall. And again, this changing the rules, changing the rules, so that expressions of lack of consent do not get expressed here. Unfortunately, the university, excuse me, is modeling this kind of post legitimation, post deic governance. And we should not forget that the liberal arts, the humanities, are vital to democracy as is academic freedom. And now we are seeing that the neoliberal eyes university, its relation to democracy, is now we can see how deeply it has been eroded. And with these demonstrations, the university’s importance for democracy is further eroded.

And so I think unfortunately, the significance of this is very important not only for the universities and for the kind of education that university students are receiving today, but also in terms of the relationship of the university to the state where we’ve got all these court cases that talk about the importance of academic freedom and First Amendment scholarship about the importance of academic freedom and education for a democratic polity. And we are seeing the universities now not backing down from that position. And so it makes me worry not just for universities and university life and education and the wellbeing of our students and faculty, but it makes me concerned about the future of the state and government in terms of the horizon of democracy for our society at large moving forward.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking of the spectacle of university administrators hall before the panel of supposedly representing the Democratic state to rake them for not constraining speech on their campuses and all the ways that embodies so much of what you’ve been talking about. Yeah. Well, this has been terrific. Really enlightening for me. I learned a lot from your book, really admire it, and I’m glad we finally got a chance to speak and I hear more about it and think about some other ways that it continues to be extremely relevant.

Paul Passavant:

Absolutely. It was a pleasure meeting you, Jay.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah, likewise. I’ll be with you. All right. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, hosted by me, Jay Felder, and produced at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Please rate and review us. Wherever you listen. You can find more information about the Nonviolent Action Lab and links to our work in the show notes below. See you next time.