What’s the Problem with those campus GAZA demonstrations?

As I drove through the town near where I live yesterday, which is Amherst, MA I noticed a demonstration involving maybe 30 people waving flags and placards calling for peace in Gaza. Not only was I pleased to see a public display of a political narrative with which I happen to agree, but it was the first political demonstration I had seen in the town’s public space which otherwise is where the weekly farmer’s market is held.

If you are not yet 70 years old, you could not have been on any college campus when the demonstrations occurred after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot in 1968, which then morphed into anti-war demonstrations that took place endlessly until we pulled our troops out of Nam in 1973.

I have lived in and around college campuses my entire adult life, was a full-time tenured faculty member and administrator until 1986, so what’s going on right now with the demonstrations calling for peace in Gaza evokes memories of campus politics and activism which have largely been absent from university environments for the past 30 years.

And to be very clear as to where I stand in the current Israel-Hamas debate, I am extremely pleased to see that American college campuses are once again providing a lesson in what serious and forthright political debates should be all about.