Assaults on the Conscience of Our Culture

Thursday, April 25, did not go as planned.1 Instead of overseeing a series of meetings with the external review team in town to assess the department I chair at Emory University, by 11:00 a.m. I was in a police wagon with a group of students being hauled off to jail. At the same time, a clip of my being arrested began to go viral. The footage 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 cop 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.

That morning, I was one of twenty-eight people taken to jail after the university administration called on the Emory Police Department to disband a protest that had sprung up that morning that aimed at stop support of a local police training facility known derisively as “Cop City” as well as stopping the university’s investment in Israel. 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 protestors. Surely they 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 my colleague. “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, and acrid gas in the air; right in front of me, two or three cops were pummeling a young woman as she was on the ground, trying to protect her face with both hands.

I stood several feet away from them and started videotaping the horror. While maintaining a nonconfrontational posture, I yelled at them to stop, but one cop and then the other continued lifting and dropping her head to the ground. I couldn’t understand what was happening and yelled at them again to stop. And then one cop stood up and walked toward me and said, “Ma’am, you need to step back.” I thought for a moment and then calmly said no.

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 people of Palestine. 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 antisemitic or a 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.

Think about it: at least every decade or two, young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to raise 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 the climate crisis or the obscene wealth gap or now the situation in Gaza. Students carry out a vital function in a democratic system: identifying and thematizing issues. They name and frame problems. They put issues on the public agenda, which then allows deliberative bodies to address them and explore the various complexities that don’t make their way into protestors’ chants, slogans, and demands.

It took me a few days after the shock of the arrests and police brutality to realize how much the administration would rue that it was me they arrested: not only a full professor and chair of my department, but a political theorist who has been thinking and writing about the politics of the public sphere for more than two decades, as well as someone who is part of the leadership of our chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the president-elect of the University Senate, which would in a matter of days hold sessions with the university’s president, grilling him about the chain of events and his rationale for his decisions, including my asking him directly what he would do differently were this to happen again (basically nothing, he responded) and would he obey a police order to back away from a scene of police brutality (he didn’t respond). Nor could anyone have anticipated that a video of my being arrested would be viewed twenty-two million times in the space of a few days. 

So I have a bit of a platform to state the obvious: our universities need to be supporting and not undermining our students’ civic capacity. The issue is more than students’ freedom of expression; it is a matter of civic engagement. Of course students have First Amendment protections, but just as vitally they have civic capacity to help change the world. Letting them be civically engaged is not doing them a favor; it is them doing us all an important political service: putting neglected items on the public agenda, often in the starkest of terms. They are the conscience of our culture. As I discuss at length in my 2019 book Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, this kind of naming and framing of issues is a vital political task, nearly always originating in an informal and often rowdy public sphere. Campus quads and city streets serve at times like this as the wetlands of democracy where, most often, young people identify and thematize issues that more deliberative bodies can then take up. Such is what happened also with the civil rights movement of the 1950s, the environmental movement of the 1960s, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in the 1980s, and now student movements regarding the war in Gaza. It’s easier to see the civic role of these movements in the rearview mirror, but we need to understand this to be the case right now as well. Democratic processes often need to be kickstarted with demonstrations and demands, but then they also continue through the back and forth of deliberations and negotiations.

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 an annoyance at best, dangerous at worst. These administrators might tolerate students’ reading about Thoreau and MLK, but they better not act like them. Obey the law, never question it.

What we are seeing happen on college campuses across the United States (and now England too) goes along with the neoliberal turn of a politics that champions consumerism and criminalizes political engagement, and of a higher education establishment that cuts programs in the humanities in favor of more job training and has no understanding of a liberal arts education or the role that faculty are to play as custodians of the university’s educational mission. But with the violent crackdown on student dissent this year, the turn is even darker, from not only neoliberal to authoritarian, at least in the way I’ve been writing about authoritarianism of late: as a defense against indeterminacy and uncertainty and an inability to think what we are doing, to borrow a phrase from Arendt. This kind of authoritarian politics and authoritarian university sees the world in terms of danger and threat, like the supposed outside agitators who showed up on Emory’s campus that morning.2 No one in the administration even bothered to talk with them to find out that they were Emory students.

For weeks before that day, Convocation Hall, where the president and the provost have their offices, has been on lock-down. Today’s administrators are like the phobic subjects Fanon describes, containing their anxiety in the figure of the outsider, the agitator, the one for whom the likes of the Georgia State Patrol needs to be called in.

I was one of the first people who got released from jail that day—with a citation 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. What gives me great hope are the faculty and students who are exercising their civic capacity to hold brute power accountable through their continuing presence on campus, through various votes of no confidence, through faculty listserv discussions about how we might continue to teach in these dark times and work toward better ones.

At Emory University, Noëlle McAfee is Professor of Chair of Philosophy, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and a faculty member of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. She has written five books, including Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (2019), which won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Courage to Dream Book Prize.