April 25, a Thursday, did not go as planned. Instead of overseeing a series of meetings with an external review team in town to assess the department I chair at Emory University, by 11 a.m., I was in a police vehicle with a group of students and other protesters being hauled off to jail, and a clip of me being arrested began to go viral.
The clip is indeed mesmerizing: Here’s this nicely dressed, rather composed, somewhat older professor with blonde hair being handcuffed and dragged down the sidewalk by a police officer with his face covered in a balaclava as she pleads with a bystander to please call the philosophy department and tell them that the chair of the department and president-elect of the university Senate has been arrested.
I was one of 28 people arrested after the university administration called on the Emory Police Department to disband a protest that had sprung up that morning, a protest aimed at stopping support of a public safety training center and investment in Israel. I now know that the administration knew that Emory police would call in the Atlanta Police Department and, it seems, the Georgia State Patrol as well. (The university president said he does not know who called the GSP, though an email sent out by the Emory’s public safety official notes university participation.) I had happened down to the quad that morning to observe things, hopeful that the administration would not repeat the catastrophe of a year earlier when it had summoned a heavily militarized APD to disband a group of peaceful protesters. Surely, university officials wouldn’t be so stupid.
I found a colleague milling around the peaceful protest, along with other onlookers, enjoying the weather and chatting with colleagues. “At least the APD aren’t here,” I said to him. “Oh, yes they are,” he replied, pointing to the far corner of the quad. And then we saw a line of Georgia State Patrol troopers marching down the side of the quad, stopping just steps before where we stood. And then in a flash the GSP attacked the quad from one side and the APD tore into it from the other, leading to utter mayhem, screams, sounds of rubber bullets, acrid gas in the air, and right in front of me two or three officers pummeling a young woman who was on the ground trying to protect her face with both hands.
Credit: handout
Credit: handout
Since getting arrested for refusing to back away from this scene of police brutality, I have gotten love letters from all over the world, thanking me for standing up for the Palestinian people. I have also gotten hate mail and death wishes for the same. I seem to be a screen for people’s projections: the first in hopes that someone with some privilege in the West will care about the massacre of Palestinians; the second in outrage that anyone supporting Palestinians must be an antisemite or boneheaded elitist lefty academic who ought to lose her job or worse.
What they all misunderstand is my reason for being on the quad. It was not to express my views about the situation in Gaza, which I find to be too complex to convey in a round of chants and slogans. I was there to protect our students’ roles as civic actors, the conscience of our culture.
Think about it: At least every decade or two, young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to sound a warning bell about what is amiss in the world, whether an insane war on a small country in Southeast Asia or complicity with South Africa’s apartheid regime or climate crisis or the obscene wealth gap or now the situation in Gaza. Students carry out a vital role in a democratic system: identifying and thematizing issues. They name and frame problems. They put issues on the public agenda, which deliberative bodies can take up and start figuring out ways to address along with the various complexities that don’t make their way into protesters’ chants, slogans and demands.
When university presidents call in the cops to violently dismantle peaceful demonstrations, they demonstrate how little they know about how democracy works. They send a message to students that their voices are just an annoyance at best, dangerous at worst. These administrators might tolerate students reading about Henry David Thoreau and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but they better not act like them. Obey the law, never question it. This all goes along with the neoliberal turn of a politics that champions consumerism and criminalizes political engagement, that cuts programs in the humanities in favor of more job training, that has no understanding of a liberal arts education.
I was one of the first people released from jail that day — with a ticket in my bag for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass. I called an Uber to take a student and me back to campus. It was quite surreal. That day and the next, in between meetings with our external reviewers, I wandered the campus to find students and faculty shocked and somber but continuing their discussions about the situation in Gaza and Israel — and Emory University. But at the university administration level, nothing changed. That evening it again called in cops and dispersed students. In meetings with the Senate and constituencies, it continues to vow to uphold law and order and seems to have no capacity for understanding the civic role of the university it runs.
Noëlle McAfee is a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, where she also is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and interim co-director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She is president-elect of the Emory University Senate.
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