The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 16

Author

Lester Spence
May 20, 2024

I noted in my last newsletter the Hopkins Justice Collective created an encampment. A week ago yesterday, the encampment came down. On Saturday, May 11, faculty and protestors worked on an agreement, that saw the protestors potentially gain ground on divestment—Hopkins’ Public Interest Investment Advisory Committee has a process by which investments are analyzed, and the timeline’s been reduced by several months—in exchange for ending the encampment. The protestors were not able to gain amnesty but received deferrals. And faculty have committed to several projects designed to increase knowledge about the region.

In President Daniels’ email to members of Hopkins community he placed primarily responsibility on the agreement on administration and faculty. While Daniels did meet with protestors twice (once at the beginning of the camp, and again approximately half way through) and offered to meet with them on other occasions during the camp, at the end the responsibility for brokering an agreement was placed squarely on the back of individual faculty members, with administrators (including Daniels) basically refusing to meet with the protestors. 

This is pretty important. If it were up to the administration, the police would’ve been called on the encampment immediately. Unlike other encampments (last week I mentioned Columbia, Emory, UCLA, and Washington University in Saint Louis but there were others), police didn’t step in—from what I understand Baltimore city officials refused to intervene recognizing the protest as peaceful. Baltimore City held primary elections two days after the end of the encampment. Incumbent Mayor Brandon Scott staved off a challenge from former mayor Sheila Dixon. I can’t imagine Dixon taking the hands-off approach Scott seems to have taken.

I’ve written several times here about the proposed Hopkins private police force. Hopkins administrators weren’t able to deploy police here in part because we don’t yet have such a force.

I didn’t write much about the conversations held with administration about the encampment, largely because the process was ongoing and I didn’t want to potentially disrupt the negotiation process. But now that the encampment is over, one thing that struck me during the process was how far removed we are from the late twentieth century student protests—the protests that paved the way for me and many professors like me. It seems as if almost immediately the protestors were othered and then criminalized.

The term “outside agitator” has a not-so-complicated history. In general the term comes into popular usage during labor struggles and then again during the civil rights movement. Writing about the use of the term as a means of delegitimating dissent during the sixties, Bruce Arcus writes of a South Carolina editorial called ‘The North Meets the Outsider’:

This editorial…made clear that the professional agitators in question were not only illegitimate by virtue of their ‘vocation’ and politics, but also by virtue of their geographical origin. Authentic politics in this vision—which included authentic collective anger presumably—was the province of the local. By placing agency elsewhere—in the bodies of deviant outsiders—critics sought to occlude any potential political meaning such that events might elicit. The author's point in the editorial was that in the same way that Southern cities had previously been disrupted by the ‘outside agitators’, Northern cities were now also the victims of these same individuals. If the North saw itself as above sectional finger‐pointing, then it was only consistent to argue that the previous performances of dissent in the South were equally illegitimate. The editorial thus concluded that “we sympathise with our northern brethren in their time of trial, but we find the methods by which they meet that trial unworthy of solid government and sound sense.” (O’Conner 1967 cited in D’Arcus, Bruce, 2004)

Before the Hopkins encampment had even spent one full night its members were tagged as outside agitators. The encampment itself was constructed out of tents, stakes, and tarp. To hear administrators at Hopkins and elsewhere tell it, the various tools used to make the encampment were objects waiting to be weaponized. The masks the protestors wore—in some instances individuals involved were international students with visas, in other instances individuals were still COVID-averse—was simply the outward sign of their illegitimacy.

(Last week I attached the text of a statement the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Senate drafted. In a conversation held with a colleague about that statement, I talked about the role student protest played in my personal trajectory. When I talked about how my presence on campus is the direct result of protest he thought I meant this figuratively—that protest inspired me to pursue a PhD. I had to correct him. I wasn’t simply inspired by protest. I meant that I was literally the beneficiary of student protest. Black students took over the University of Michigan in the late sixties, in the mid-seventies, and then again in the mid-eighties. I attended Michigan through a program created by the second wave of protest, and then was able to get into grad school in large part through the third wave of black student protest. Further, black student protest led to a push for black faculty at both Washington University in Saint Louis, and here at Hopkins. While on the one hand one might claim that I’m not necessarily objective here, I’d simply point to the student protest record over the past several decades. They’ve been more right than wrong.)  

There’s more to this criminalization dynamic. I’m not going to write more here about our encampment, because even as though the encampment is gone, there are a number of troubling questions raised about how the encampment were handled. Questions that I imagine will be dealt with in the months to come.

And of course there’s far more to the issue itself—indeed I read that the ICC is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders.

But for now? Grades are due in a few hours.

Which means that volume eight is almost in the books. 

See you next time.