In many ways, it is the ultimate dream of a student movement to become the sparkplug for a national debate. The more a student movement is talked about, the more supporters it garners beyond the confines of a given campus, and logic seems to follow, the more likely the movement is to succeed.
In practice, the opposite seems to be true. Over the past few years, as the fervor of campus activism reached new heights, a trend emerged — the more a school’s protests are followed nationally, the less likely they are to achieve any of their goals. Though mass attention lends short-term validation for student causes, in the long term, extensive coverage of specific schools tends to stiffen the administration and cut the legs off of a movement.
Brown now finds itself at a crossroads. Historically, even in the most politically contentious moments, Brown has played second fiddle to other universities in the realm of political action. Now, the University seems to be in a constant battle to fight off the Trump administration’s attempt to goad the school into national dogfights. The school’s politically active students should follow suit — students should do all in their power to reject the call of the national spotlight and keep our school’s debates in house.
Two years ago, three university presidents were called to testify before the House of Representatives’ Education and Workforce Committee. Within a month, two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, were forced to resign.
Four months later, Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik testified before Congress, and within a day, made the decision to call the New York Police Department to arrest the students participating in Columbia’s encampment, likely in an effort to appease the committee and save her job. The decision backfired, Columbia spiraled into chaos and Shafik resigned the following summer.
I was a student at Columbia at the time. When I look back on that moment, what strikes me the most is the spectacle that campus became. Shafik’s testimony, and the decision it yielded, made the campus a zoo, a poster child for college activism to be poked and prodded by anyone. Suddenly, for all students, leaving campus meant finagling their way through mobs of onlookers, protesters and interested folks who were not passionate students taking a stand, but residents of Manhattan with spare time and access to the one train. Walking to class meant seeing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson deliver a speech condemning supposedly terroristic classmates on the left while fighting off interview requests from international news stations on the right.
As the semester progressed, this constant observation infected the campus. Sidechat posts were used as exhibits in congressional testimony and ideologically opposed students' rants turned into Fox News interviews. Every attention-seeking Columbia kid with a keyboard and a dream was pitching their uniquely brilliant op-ed anywhere they could (myself, unfortunately, included). We stopped communicating with one another or the school, stopped doing the work of figuring out what we made of all that was happening when our political action and experience became a commodity for the rest of the country to consume.
In the absence of such an intense microscope, I’ve seen firsthand that activism and political controversy at Brown function better. Disagreement on campus is by no means perfectly civil or even productive, but it is a marked improvement. Student voices prove so much louder without the megaphone of national attention because they are projected toward the people who actually need to hear them.
For evidence, look no further than Brown’s response to its encampment. Within a week, the administration had met with student organizers and agreed to a deal. I feel confident in saying that compromise, that good faith negotiation, could never have happened if, say, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 had been called to testify in Shafik’s place.
Under national scrutiny, the tangible stakes of on-campus debates are warped. When non-students are banging on the gates of a school to protest with students, they’re not doing it because they so strongly believe in a specific administrative policy for that school. They’re doing it because the school is now the site of a proxy war for a national debate.
Attention makes us all feel important. There was a novelty, and an exhilaration, in feeling like I and my classmates were at the epicenter of a national movement. I’m sure it felt empowering for the protesters at the most politically relevant schools to be commended by national progressive heroes, and I’m sure it was just as thrilling to be admonished by politicians with whom they disagreed. But the thrill came at the cost of tangible progress and strides for those universities. That is not a trade worth making.
I’d like to make a plea to any Brown student with a cause and a uniquely brilliant op-ed and a need for attention — keep the fight on College Hill. Let our school fade into national obscurity. Fight with all your might, but please don’t tell your family friend who works for the Guardian about it. Believe me — the more we’re forgotten, the better results we’ll get.
Oscar Noxon ’27 can be reached at oscar_noxon@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
