Dr. Thiele Strong is a professor of sociology at San Jose State University and a 2023-24 Public Voices Fellow at TheOpEdProject. He lives in San Jose.
Students have rallied and camped out at hundreds of universities across the country to draw attention to the ongoing violence in Palestine. Last week, student protesters occupied a building at California State University, Los Angeles.
Treatment of student protesters has varied widely.
People across the country are arguing that student protests are problematic and that they are not using acceptable tactics to exercise free speech. One Columbia University professor argues that women's departments have no right to take a collective stance on violence in Palestine. He positions higher education institutions as neutral, as if a domain established primarily by “rich white men” is neutral.
But this rhetoric dominates in the public sphere. It is how systems of oppression and domination persist. Historically, the world's rulers have tried to justify their power by imposing their own framework on others. For example, since October 7, 2023, more than 36,000 Palestinians, at least 13,000 children and 9,000 women, have been killed. And it remains difficult to speak up to defend their lives. Even if you are Jewish, you risk being considered an anti-Semite.
In sociology, we talk about the concept of otherness and what it takes to treat entire groups of people as less deserving.
Most of us are horrified by the toll this conflict is taking on Palestine, Israel and beyond. We see the devastation on social media, the dead, the babies, the confused children hit by missiles. And it's not just in the Middle East. Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, the prison camps in North Korea and many other forces around the world are hurting people. Poverty and the struggle for precious resources take a similar toll across countries, time and place.
Understanding these truths, I think about the sociological imagination, the ability to see how structures shape our careers. I return to TINA's idea that humans often find themselves acting as if “there is no other choice.”
What if there was an alternative? What if we were pro-Palestine and pro-Israel?
We have been told that embracing a different path is too risky, that violent struggle is synonymous with humanity. Perhaps these doomsayers are right. But even if the path to social and environmental sustainability ends in betrayal, it is worth fighting for the goal of listening to students, women's and gender studies departments, embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and explicitly supporting peace, especially when it comes to children, all children.
If we are collectively destroying ourselves, I think it would be better to be bold and act on how we can be better, rather than allowing the things that destroyed us to continue. Even if we can ignore them, we shouldn't.
Students and women's colleges across the country are calling for unity. Unity is a sustainable resource. And universities have historically been large and powerful sites of social movement protest. As history unfolds, we can see that college students have often been on the right side of it.
The question of who has the right to speak and where is hotly contested, and universities are at the heart of that struggle. Academia is not the place to platform exclusionary rhetoric. A Eurocentric perspective that focuses on the aftermath of conflicts in Western universities rather than in higher education institutions on the ground is not valid.
This politics of divide and control, where those in power tell students and women’s groups what they should and shouldn’t say, is not worth it. All empires have fallen and solidarity with students and women’s groups can be renewed.
