Episode 105 - Civil Disobedience with Noëlle McAfee

Transcript

David: 0:14

Hello, and welcome to Overthink,

Ellie: 0:16

The podcast where two philosophers think about big ideas in relation to everyday life. I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:22

and I'm David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:25

As many of our listeners know, this spring college campuses nationwide have been the site of protests and encampments over the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Many of these protests have been driven by calls for universities to divest from companies that are directly contributing to the genocide, such as producing drones and bombs that kill civilians. And a number of these protests, including at Pomona College where I teach, which has a huge endowment, have led to student arrests.

David: 0:54

And these arrests have often been for charges such as trespassing, disorderly conduct, or obstruction of justice, which is really strange because most of these protests have been campouts by students on university lawns and quads, which are precisely the places where students are meant to be and have the right to be, right? So this is where students are students, where they pay to be students. And so the very notion that they could be trespassing or obstructing on their own campus raises really twisty administrative, educational, and legal issues. And this raises questions about the nature of civil disobedience, which one of our listeners, Rachel, suggested that we discuss in an episode. And so we've decided that it is very timely and it's very important and it's something about which philosophy has a lot to say. So Rachel, thanks for the recommendation. It's funny because we often plan our episodes months in advance, but we added this episode a little bit last minute due to the timeliness of the topic. And we want to talk about it with a very special guest who is Noëlle McAfee, who was a mentor of Elise and mine back during our time as graduate students at Emory. And the reason for this is not only because Dr. McAfee is a specialist in political philosophy and thus has a lot to say about the nature of civil disobedience, but also because she recently went viral for being arrested on the Emory campus for her participation in one of these protests. Many of you may have even seen the video, which has been played in a lot of news media and outlets of a professor who says please call the philosophy department and tell them that I have been arrested. And so this happened right outside of the building where Ellie, you and I did our PhD in philosophy.

Ellie: 2:47

I know it was weird to have that moment of like, Oh my God, I know her when it's somebody getting arrested for trying to keep students safe on campus.

David: 2:55

Yeah, no, it really was a very disconcerting experience for me. And especially when other people sent me the video and said, oh, have you heard about this philosopher who has been arrested for being an active participant in the protest? And I looked at it and I thought, Oh my gosh, this is somebody who was an educator and a mentor mine. And so anyways, she's going to be chatting with us about civil disobedience today.

Ellie: 3:20

Well, yeah, and also super quickly, just apropos of you mentioning that we squeezed in this episode kind of last minute due to the timely nature of the topic, I do just want to note for our listeners that Noëlle squeezed in speaking with us amidst some travels and she's been getting over a cold, so our audio quality perhaps isn't up to our usual par. But we love speaking with her. There's lots of really good stuff in the interview. So definitely stay tuned. I want to just now take these next few minutes, David, to continue setting up the topic for our listeners. So what is civil disobedience? Because I think what we've been seeing in the student protests is, in some cases, civil disobedience, but in other cases, simply protest, and there is a bit of a distinction between the two. So there are many, many protests that happen frequently that aren't technically civil disobedience because they are legal protests. And so in recommending this episode topic to us, our listener, Rachel, tipped us off to this really excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on civil disobedience, which really nicely lays this out. The two authors of this do a really good job of setting up the difference between legal protest and civil disobedience. Legal protest, you usually have to get permits for, and it lies within the bounds of the law, right? So we want to have a protest in front of LA City Hall, we're going to get permits for that, we're going to have permission to do that. Whereas civil disobedience is a breach of law, but as opposed to just a random act of disobedience, it's a breach of one or more laws with the aim of justice with the aim of achieving some end that brings about a change in laws. And so the main definition of civil disobedience today comes from the political philosopher John Rawls, very well known philosopher, who suggests that civil disobedience is a public transgression. Nonviolent and conscientious breach of law that's undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. And so civil disobedience happens at the boundary of fidelity to law. It's usually nonviolent. It's always principled and has the aim of more justice in the future.

David: 5:28

Yeah. And although, as you mentioned, Ellie, the definition that we tend to work with today in political philosophy comes from John Rawls, there is a much longer tradition of people thinking about what civil disobedience is and what it entails. And the person that is usually credited with coining the term civil disobedience is Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an essay in 1849 entitled Resistance to Civil Government, where he talks about how individual citizens have a moral obligation that goes beyond the boundaries of legality, and that is an obligation not to support injustices that are being carried out in their name by their elected governments. Because one of the concerns that Thoreau expresses in his essay is that when we follow the dictates of our governments without critical reflection, we alienate ourselves from our own political and moral conscience. So we alienate ourselves from ourselves, and he says we become machines at that point. And all of this happened in the context of Thoreau's own being sent to jail in the 1840s for refusing to pay his tax in opposition to a number of policies that were being supported by the U. S. that he did not agree with. This included the war on Mexico, this included the ongoing decimation of Indigenous populations, and of course, the practice of slavery. And so when a constable by the name of Sam Staples came to see Thoreau and ask him to pay back all the taxes that he had refused to pay. Thoreau simply refused, as you say, nonviolently, conscientiously. And eventually he was escorted to jail. And it's through this experience that he comes to the conclusion that there is this supra legal moral order that individuals can appeal to in justifying their objection to supporting what the state is doing.

Ellie: 7:30

Yeah, and it's not exactly that he was sent to jail for his conscientious objection, although I think, broadly speaking, that's a fair characterization. It's more specifically that he was sent to jail for not paying his poll tax. But the reason that it sort of makes sense to say what you said, David, is in the sense that, well, not paying his poll tax was his form of conscientious objection.

David: 7:51

The cause and the effect.

Ellie: 7:52

Yeah, but the reason that I highlight that distinction is because that's something that the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article do. They point out that when somebody who's engaged in civil disobedience is punished by the law, it's not for civil disobedience, strictly speaking. It's for another recognized offense that they commit, such as disturbing the peace. You mentioned trespassing earlier, in this case, refusing to pay the poll tax. And it's interesting to think about Thoreau here, because Thoreau has been a scapegoat in recent years for a presumed Into the Wild esque male privilege of solitude and independence, like, go out into the woods and be alone, and people love to point out that he actually was still dependent on his mom to do his laundry while was, you know, on Walden Pond. Okay, fine, there's like a caricature of Thoreau as some white man alone in the woods that's easy to make fun of, but the dude literally went to jail for objecting to slavery, the war in Mexico, and the genocide of Native Americans.

David: 8:56

Yeah, no, that's right. And it depends on how you read the nature of civil disobedience, especially in the case of Thoreau, because some people have said that in his sort of individualistic kind of classic American transcendentalist way, the way he thinks about civil disobedience is all about the individual alone acting according to his own moral principles. But there's another way of reading what's happening, which is that the individual here acts for principles of justice and morality that encompass other individuals, they encompass the community. And so it's not so much about the individual in a vacuum. It's about the individual acting for the sake of others.

Ellie: 9:34

And I think that brings us to another pillar of the civil disobedience tradition in the U. S., which is Martin Luther King Jr., who is very learned in political philosophy and whose very famous letter from Birmingham Jail articulates a picture of civil disobedience as fighting against unjust laws. and or against the unjust application of just laws. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Birmingham jail because he was part of a civil rights protest for which they didn't have permits. So this is a classic case of civil disobedience being at sort of the margin of the law. It was a nonviolent protest, but it was one that was not permitted. And so he, as well as others, got arrested for it. And he notes that the point of such marches, as well as other forms of direct action, such as sit ins and so forth, is negotiation. And so there's so much to say about Letter from Birmingham Jail, as well as Thoreau's piece on civil disobedience, that we won't have time to unpack in this brief introduction of the topic. But I think one of the most interesting points for me of this piece by Martin Luther King Jr. is the clarification that he makes that these direct actions are meant to lead to negotiation. They're not instead of negotiation. They're what people do when negotiation is not happening in order to bring people to the negotiating table. And I think you see this quite a lot in the student protests that have happened this spring as well. Student protests want to speak with administrations. They want change that is material at these administrative levels and they're protesting because administrations are not doing that and they want to get them to do that.

David: 11:16

No, you're right, Ellie, that the function of the protest is to shake up the status quo, but not to shake it up so that things fall apart, but rather so that we bring new issues to the table and insert them into the Overton window of public discourse so that we talk about and then we come to decisions about them. And some political philosophers, and I'm here thinking about Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice talks about the conditions under which civil disobedience can be justified. And Rawls says that one of the conditions that civil disobedience has to meet in order for it to be morally and politically justifiable is that it has to be a practice that we turn to when it is the last resort available to us, i. e. when we have exhausted other options. And Thoreau disagrees with this because he says, look, there are always going to be a lot of alternatives for political action and mobilization that individuals have at their disposal. But the fact of the matter is that many of those alternatives, whether it's voting or writing to your representatives or organizing a march to Washington, D. C., are temporally unfeasible because they either are very difficult to get off the ground or because they just take too long. And according to Thoreau, civil disobedience on the part of an individual making a conscientious objection against a law or rule or policy that they deem unjust is the quickest, most direct form of political engagement available to us. And there is this passage that really stood out for me from his essay where he says, look, as individuals, we don't really have a moral duty to eradicate all the evils in the world that we know to exist. But we do have an obligation not to actively support them when it is within our means not to do so. And civil disobedience is one way to enact that refusal.

Ellie: 13:21

Today we're talking about civil disobedience.

David: 13:24

Do we as political subjects have a default obligation to obey the law?

Ellie: 13:30

What distinguishes civil disobedience from protest?

David: 13:34

And how do the recent student protests in support of Palestine contribute to democratic life? Noëlle McAfee is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She specializes in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Political Philosophy. She is the author of a number of books on social and political theory, including Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship from 2000, Democracy and the Political Unconscious from 2008, and Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis from 2019.

Ellie: 14:13

Noëlle, we are so happy to have you with us here today. Welcome to Overthink.

Noëlle: 14:19

Thank you, Ellie. I'm so excited to be here with you and David. It's a delight.

Ellie: 14:23

It's been a while since we were all together and now it's, yeah, nice to have this community via Zoom. I want to start by asking you about the recent events. You were arrested at Emory where you are the chair of the philosophy department on April 25th as part of a protest primarily led by students and a video of you being arrested went viral. There's been a ton of news coverage of it. Now it's a bit later and we want to get your perspective both as participant, as citizen who was arrested and also as philosopher. But I want to just start by asking you, asking about this actual situation, like what were you arrested for and what happened?

Noëlle: 15:05

So the prehistory of this is that about a year ago, about this very same time, students were demonstrating on campus against what's what they call the rise of the cop city. Which is a police training facility here in Atlanta that many young people in the area in the region and all over the country have been very, very worried about coming down and demonstrating against the students who were involved in that. Now, a major player in the cop city is the Atlanta Police Department, and back a year ago, the Emory Police Department, which is a little part of public safety in Emory, called on APD to come and disband these protesters. So you have this already pretty combustible interaction between students demonstrating against an APD related facility and the APD themselves, and the APD, I wasn't there, I didn't see it, but there was an image of this plastered on bulletin boards of a line of police, heavily armed police against these demonstrators, a small group, and they all left, but they were traumatized. So as a member of many faculty leadership groups, like for example, the American association of university professors, we have a little chapter we've been concerned about administration calling on the APD to come out. So when I got to campus - that day was our external review, which happens like once every 10 years, I had gone to pick up our eminent group of external reviewers, including a faculty member from Columbia university - and as we're driving over on the radio it said there's a demonstration going on. I was like, Oh my. And so we go to the department, which is right on the quad. And I go and get them all set up. Everything's cool. And then I have a minute. I think, okay, let me just go down and see what's going on. Let's hope they don't call in the APD. I get down to the quad. It's a beautiful, calm morning, students, there's a small group on one quadrant of the quad. with a few tents and they're chanting the chants and there's faculty milling around and students walking by and it's just very pleasant. I see a colleague of mine from the AEP and I said, well, at least the APD aren't here. And he said, Oh, they, yeah, they are. And he pointed across... I went, Oh no. And then on the other side, walking up, marching up is the Georgia state patrol, which is notoriously violent. Cop military kind of organization, and they were just coming up a line of 25 or something. And then when they took their position, right, a few feet from where I was standing, they just charged. They descended. So on one side you've got the APD, on the other side you've got the Georgia State Patrol, and it's mayhem of a scene that was just kumbaya, pleasant, suddenly becomes brutal. So, you've probably seen these images. It was horrific. So I had been taping the Georgia State Patrol coming up, so then I thought, Okay, I think I need to keep taping, so I step closer into it, and I make a point of having a posture that's very non confrontational, and I'm keeping my distance, and then I see these two or three cops whaling on this young person, long braids. And she's covering her head with her hands, and they're pulling her and pulling her, knocking her, and I was horrified, but I'm still aware, don't be confrontational. So, but I did yell, stop, stop. And then this one cop stood up and he comes close to me and he says, Ma'am, you need to step back. And I thought, well, here he goes. No. So my one thing was I said no. And then he came around and arrested me, pulled my arms behind my back, took my phone. I think he erased whatever I was recording, because it wasn't there anymore later.

David: 18:52

Oh, they erase the content of your phone

Noëlle: 18:54

I got the Georgia State Patrol marching in, but the other things I had been taping were gone. And another faculty member who got arrested told me that the things he had been taping were gone from his phone too. But so here I have got my arms pulled behind my back and I'm being pulled around the side and somebody's asking me if I need help. And I said, please call the philosophy department. Who are you? I'm chair of the philosophy department. Hours later, I see that this has now gone viral. That little clip. Yeah. So I was one of about 28 people arrested. One person ran off. So 27 of us went down. That was the short, the first answer to that question about what I was doing. I was not participating. I was worried, and I was wanting to make sure that this didn't happen, this thing that happened.

David: 19:38

And Noëlle, if you feel comfortable, can you tell us what happened after the arrest? You were taken to jail and eventually you were released. What were the charges? How did that pan out?

Noëlle: 19:50

Sure, so, I was, there were three faculty members, altogether, twenty people from Emory, seven from, who were probably community members. I should say that the pretext for, that the administration had was that these were outside agitators. Later somebody mentioned to the president, that's a racist term, it goes back to, Civil rights movement outside agitators. Anyway, outside agitators, it was non Emory people. But then when they got us all over there, this is behind the Candler school, one of those buildings, the alleyway behind the quad. And they've got everybody, everybody's gathered, they divide up the Emory people, the non Emory people, they've got their police wagons ready to go. This had been planned in advance. We can come back to that. This was planned in advance. So on the pretext that we were not Emory people, they pull us there, but then they quickly realized, oops, these are Emory people. So I'm talking to the, a woman EPD-person saying, you know, I've got an external review. I've, can I just go back to work? You can give me a ticket. I'll pay the ticket. And they decided they just wanted to bring everybody in. So they brought all of us in, and then as soon as we got, it's the Cap County Jail, which I'm familiar with. Won't go into why. But, so, they brought us, and then they decided to bring us, all of us who are Emory affiliated, back, inside the chain link fence, but outside the jail itself, to the outside. And they lined us up, and they were trying to sort out who had been violent versus those who had not. So I guess I had been one of the ones who was not. I was given a ticket for disorderly conduct, criminal trespass. Yeah.

David: 21:36

On your own campus.

Noëlle: 21:37

uh huh. And they let me go. So took off the handcuffs and opened the chain link fence. And there was another, there was a graduate student who was being released too. And I said, come with me. It was just so surreal. I step out and I call an Uber.

Ellie: 21:51

Oh my God.

Noëlle: 21:52

So we got an Uber back to campus, I go straight back to campus to continue with my external review.

Ellie: 21:59

And I wanna ask you a little bit more about this trespassing charge. The disorderly conduct charge. That's already interesting. The disorderly conduct was saying no when a police officer asked you to step back so they could brutalize. But I think also this trespassing charge is one that I've been hearing a lot in relation to recent student protests. And there was actually one situation I heard about at Columbia where students were charged with trespassing on the grounds that they were suspended for their protest activities. But the grounds for their suspension is that they were arrested for trespassing. And so there was this circular logic going on there. And so I'm really curious about how this charge of trespassing gets leveraged against people who are on their own communities.

Noëlle: 22:48

I believe that students began arriving at 7:30 in the morning to go set up their little area with a few tents. And I'm trying to get, I'm president elect of the University Senate and we've had a series of meetings with the president asking him questions. and lots coming out about the misinformation, to put it mildly, of what he's saying. The, their view is that, we were told that these were outside agitators, non Emory people. they sent out an announcement to avoid the quadrangle, avoid. Now to me, avoid doesn't say you must not go. It's like, okay, don't go that way if you can help. But if they weren't keeping us from going to campus, if we had a pass, we could get in our building. So I go in my building. And then I go out the front door of my building. Nobody's keeping me from going at the front door of my building to go onto the quad. But that's their rationale is that they had said to avoid the quad and people went to the quad anyway. So we were trespassing.

David: 23:45

Yeah, it's interesting because the same thing happened several years ago when we were graduate students at Emory during the Occupy movement and the manifestations that happened on campus. Some people also were arrested on the grounds that they were trespassing and this led to a long debate about whether it's even conceptually meaningful to say that a student is trespassing on a campus where they pay tuition, even in cases in which they have been quote unquote suspended, because suspension actually prevents you from enrolling in courses, not necessarily from stepping on university property, which is often open to the public. And so even that claim doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny. But Noëlle, I now want to pivot a little bit from this event. And, you know, we are deeply sorry that this happened to students, that it's happened to you, and that it's happening across university campuses. But I want to pivot to your work because, of course, you are a political philosopher who has written extensively about democratic theory, about political philosophy, and so it's something that you've spent a lot of time thinking about. And I here want to ask you to reflect with us on the basis of a book that you wrote in 2019 called Fear of Breakdown, Politics and Psychoanalysis. And in this book, you bring together democratic theory and psychoanalytic theory to think about the question of what it means to be an engaged. citizen in a democratic space and how to make your voice heard along with the voices of other people, especially in cases where not everybody agrees on their conception of the good political life. And in particular, I want to invite you to just share with us your thoughts about how your work informs your thinking about civil disobedience on college campuses. But this notion of breakdown that appears in the title, because you take this from Donald Winnicott and Julia Kristeva, and you make this argument that in the course of development, many individual pathologies, like obsessions and neuroses, emerge from the loss of the maternal object. For a child, especially an infant, the loss of the mother is such a traumatic event that it plants the seed for later pathologies and obsessions that then result in this fear of breakdown that leads to all kinds of symptoms. And in the book, you argue that something similar happens at the collective level, at the level of the body politic, that things like xenophobia, racism, misogyny, are in fact expressions of this collective fear of breakdown that results from an originary collective trauma. And so, can you tell us about how this work on psychoanalysis and democracy and breakdown can shed light on what's going on in connection to the student protests.

Noëlle: 26:51

Yeah. So it's not exactly that there's a loss of the mother. It's that there's some kind of developmental failure early, early on. It could be a loss. It could be a war. It could be that somebody's been struck down with depression or illness, but some kind of, catastrophe that the infant is too immature, premature to metabolize or think through. So there was a breakdown early on. And then as an adult, the patient, this is Winnicott, the patient says, doctor, doctor, I'm going to have a breakdown. I'm going to fall apart. I'm going to die. Something terrible is going to happen. And Winnicott says sometimes we have to tell our more psychotic patients that this fear they have that, doctor, I'm going to fall apart, I'm going to have a breakdown, is a fear of something that already happened, but was never metabolized is my word, never really thought through. So the task is to help the patient work through that original early loss so that they can live today. So it's a kind of imagining something could come, but it was already something that happened. When I first read that, back in 2016 when I was doing psychoanalytic studies, I was, resounding in my ear was the MAGA slogan, Make America Great Again. It had the same structure. We're going to be great again, because then we're going to destroy us. So this kind of fantasy of, we're not great, something has to happen, and it just seemed to be the same thing. So in that book, and then since then, I've been actually working, a lot of my work is trying to understand authoritarian regimes. There's a whole lot here. But one thing is that the person who's suffering in this way truly believes that the world is cataclysmic and out to get them. The administration building, I had noticed already before this event, that for three weeks beforehand, all the doors were locked. I'd have to go to Senate meetings in there, and somebody would have to let me in. I'm like. Why is it under, why is it, they're, they're all locked down. There's this kind of, I'm reading into it, but I think I have license to do this. There's paranoia that somebody's going to try to destroy them, right? Then they get wind that there's going to be, you know, 7:30 in the morning, there's these, we don't know who they are. They're going to come in, they've got tents and this anxiety that now they're going to be taken over. And they see scenes from Columbia and all, and just they're going to have to stop it no matter what. So the response is so out of proportion to a dozen students setting up a camp and chanting, chanting. So the response is so disproportionate. Now I think my psychoanalytic insight helps me realize that they're not really just full of shit. Can I say that on here?

David: 29:36

You definitely can, yes.

Noëlle: 29:39

They really believe that. They really believe that. They are severely paranoid. So, the middle part, the outside part of the book is about that kind of anxiety that happens, but the middle parts are about six democratic practices. That people can use to work through this now. So I'm talking about a body politic, not an individual. I don't think there's a mind of the whole body politic. Each of us are social beings and the social is nothing more than the collectivity of us individuals. So it's not like two different levels, but something that goes at work at the political realm when there's so many anxieties that keep people from thinking, right? So anxieties, illicit defense mechanisms. And the defense mechanisms protect you from having to be in that indeterminate space in between. So, here, to live with, they're trying to destroy me. So we send in, you know, not just a psychological defense mechanism, but bring in the Georgia State Patrol over a dozen or so students, maybe two dozen now, chanting. It's, that's just crazy. It's crazy.

Ellie: 30:50

This is so fascinating and I want to get into these democratic practices in a moment, but I want to just pause for a moment and think a little bit about what you're saying in terms of the actual actions that the students desire to see taken. And so coming from my context teaching at Pomona College, which was actually the first college in the U.S. to have a spate of arrests in spring 2024, somehow we avoided the national news cycle before Columbia's arrest, but indeed our president arrested 20 students in April 2024, and when I look at the situation there, there was a claim that the students activities were causing the campus to be unsafe, but in terms of the act of protests and civil disobedience that the students were engaged in. They have very clear objectives, and they were extremely well organized, and their protests since, including an encampment that they actually set up on our graduation stage, which forced our graduation to move and achieved their goal of disruption, was very different from the kind of breakdown that I think so many of the powers that be fear. What our students want is initially a divestment from 11 very specific companies that are directly contributing to genocide. And so there's this unevenness in the discourse, I think, between the national news media's conception of the students as like seeking breakdown and their actual objectives, which are sort of the opposite. They want to disrupt business as usual, but for ultimately the continuation and establishment of a more just university. And so I'm really interested in the way that your work helps us understand that it's actually not necessarily about breakdown, but it's about the fear of breakdown. That fear of breakdown is driving the powers that be to intervene in these extremely violent ways that are actually sort of creating the breakdown, if anything is creating the breakdown.

Noëlle: 32:51

Yeah, the breakdown is not the reality. The breakdown is the fantasy on the part of those experiencing this, those who are feel under duress. It's not the students, as you, you said it exactly right. I, I love this, 11 very particular things, but those who feel under siege feel like they're trying to destroy me. It's not a reality, but it's very much part of one's own reality. And I want to also be very sensitive to that. When somebody hears that they're chanting anti Semitic slogans, it does no good to say, well, that's not true. Because the person who's saying that experiences it as very much true. So our psychic reality is something we need to take seriously, not just say you're paranoid and crazy, but to say, well, let's talk about that to try to work through that. So we have, again, if you think about the kind of garrison that's got itself all defended to the point where you can't even think about what's inside of it. What is, so vulnerable and frightening that we're trying to protect against?

David: 33:57

And I really like that you say talk through because it brings to mind the Freudian concept of working through in a clinical setting, right? Doing the work of exploring how early childhood traumatic experiences continue to condition the behavior of a subject well into adulthood. And you do mention in the book that one of the Things that democratic theory and psychoanalysis have in common is the emphasis on talk, right? There is talk therapy and psychoanalysis. And then there is the many ways in which we make our voices be heard as citizens, whether that's through voting, through direct action, through other forms of political engagement. And so, talking through things is the political version of working through things with a therapist. And in the book, you talk about six practices for working through or talking through our political traumas. And so I want you to tell us a little bit about what those practices are and what they are ultimately practices of or for.

Noëlle: 35:02

Yeah, so the first two are about thinking about politics, not just as what governments do, but things that happen on the quad at work, talking to neighbors. It's the public spaces in which we talk with each other about what kind of communities we want to have, what our anxieties are, what we want to do. That's a vital part of a political process. and to see oneself as someone who has a right to put something on the agenda, to call a meeting, is a part of being a citizen. So those are two of them, thinking about politics that way. The third and fourth ones, they're really central to this. The third one is about naming and framing issues. It's what people do when they protest or to use Habermas's language. Identifying and thematizing, same thing. The fourth one is to deliberate and work through it back in the nineties or something, iris Marion Young wrote a piece about the deliberator and the activist, you know, which one's right? It seems like there's always been this contest between the people who take to the streets with their slogans and chants versus the people who sit down and deliberate in a kind of nice Habermasian sense. And, and what I was trying to do is say, these are both vital. These are both important. It's not that protesting trumps the other one or the other way around. Somebody puts it on the agenda and it's often young people putting it on the agenda. Every important issue has come from outside governmental spaces. It was regular folks and scientists and citizens who noticed in the 60s that the birds aren't singing anymore. There's some environmental looming catastrophe. And they put that on the agenda and then the EPA was formed, right? So these work in tandem, these public unruly spaces where people protest. And then the more deliberative spaces, they need each other completely. The other five and six, the other practices are about taking up and, in public work, trying to work through and implement these policies in the world. And then at the end, reflecting radically and rethinking and looping back in to do it again. So I see what the students are doing. It might be a little different. I mean, students often say they will have their protests and then they'll have their list of demands as if now you just got to do what we said. The demands might become starting points for a deliberative process where students and administrators and boards and stuff sit down and think, okay, how do we do this? Right. But it's vital. So one thing I've seen in this and through this recent mess is pointing out that the problem with Fenves, president Fenves of Emory and others calling in the police, it's not just a violation of students' freedom of expression. That's a kind of liberal way of putting the problem. It's a problem, it's a civic problem. It's closing down the capacity for students to put these things on our agenda. That's what students did in the 60s, this little war in Southeast Asia. They did it in my generation, you know, apartheid in South Africa. They've done it around Black Lives Matter, you know, and now this. It's a problem for our whole body politic when these students are shut down.

Ellie: 38:20

Noëlle, I'm so glad that you bring this up because one thing that has been very troubling to me is the way that the students are sometimes portrayed. They're sometimes portrayed as not knowing what they're talking about, as being naive young idealists. as being kind of ironically snowflakes who just want to get their way, which I think is such a bizarre way to describe young people who are putting their lives on the line and willing to stake the possibility of arrest or police violence. And there was this very troubling moment in particular that I heard about where on one of the few occasions that the students at Pomona who were protesting were allowed to sit at the table with the administration, they were in a meeting with the trustees. And again, this is about the desire to divest, which is a very real possibility. If Pomona wanted to divest from these 11 companies, it would be possible, but the trustees have no interest, at least as of the time of this recording, in engaging in that conversation. And one of the trustees told the students on the call, look, you have no idea how much money I donate to Pomona. There's probably at least one of you in this room right now who is receiving financial aid that I have offered. Basically, sit down, students. I'm the one paying the tuition. Like, leave it to the adults in the room. And that's such a disrespectful, and I think naive, way of engaging with people. I mean, obviously it's disrespectful, but I also think It's very likely that the students in the room have a more robust sense of history of civic engagement than the trustee in the room. I have been nothing but inspired by the actions of the students that I've witnessed. And so I think this kind of refusal to deliberate, to engage, to recognize that politics is happening in these meetings, various practices that you're mentioning here are evident in this particular situation.

Noëlle: 40:20

Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say bravo to the board of trustees to actually talk to students, because here they're behind this. No one can get to them at all. They don't engage at all. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot in what you said. One thing is that young people seem to have a kind of ability to have a clarity that's not muddled by complexity. I've been saying and thinking that young people are the conscience of our culture. So the board of trustees that you're talking about at Pomona misunderstand this. They don't really have an image of the political and the civic sense that we're talking about here. It's all about who's contributing more money and what we're doing for you and go about your business. But it's just this lack of a civic imaginary of an understanding about how politics works. And what I'm really, I love is that our faculty, we have the college faculty as a discussion listserv and there's, it's been so rich and alive and there's different points of view, but it's mostly about how do we engage and work with our students to further thinking together and not this patronizing way of talking down to students. What you're talking about is very patronizing and it's just wrong. It's completely wrong.

David: 41:43

And it is ironic that as the students are being presented, as you said a minute ago, as disruptive and disrespectful, the students see themselves actually as carrying out the mission of the university, which the university seems to refuse to carry out on its own accord, right? So it's the students doing the job of the university for it. And so here I want us to pan out and have you think with us about how you see the future of the university in democratic life, the role of higher education in promoting and cultivating civic virtues, so on and so forth. So if we were to zoom out from this particular moment, what lessons do you think we ought to derive for moving forward?

Noëlle: 42:34

Yeah. Thank you, David. So to go back to the first point you were making, many have been online in different spaces, making the point that Emory University, all of the rhetoric is all about the home of the civil rights movement, that we're going to bring in people who are disruptors and civic actors, all this stuff. It makes me kind of nauseous because then they turn around and they imprison the students for doing that. So many students of color, students who really want to be activists in public life, then get arrested for doing that. It's the worst kind of hypocrisy. It makes me ill. Now, I'm not completely disheartened because as a member of the AAUP chapter here, the American Association of University Professors, AAUP helped define over a hundred years ago, the pillars of higher education in America that made our educational system one of the best in the world, if not the best. And that there's a kind of division of authority of responsibilities between the board of trustees that looks over the welfare, the reputation of the whole, the administration that makes sure everything runs on time. And the faculty who work with the students for the educational mission. It's the faculty and students that are doing the educational work, including the work that the students are doing now, taking a lead on that. And I see that at Emory, the faculty are so heartbroken by what the administration did and further committed to continuing the work with the students, for the students' own education, civic engagement, for us all, for us all, right? Now, I was saying a minute ago that the students might have a very clear cut idealistic vision. But you need that clarity before people become like my age. Clarity gets so complicated by things. Clarity is key. People in their 20s and 30s have that clarity at that moment. So we need them. What makes me ill is an administration that has no understanding of what the political is in this more robust civic liberatory kind of way. It's very, very sad. They need a civic education.

Ellie: 44:46

No, I think that's so true. And as we close, I know you had something quick that you wanted to share with us from something that you recently wrote. So I'll turn it over to you to close us off with that.

Noëlle: 44:57

Yeah. So 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 just an annoyance at best, dangerous at worst. These administrators might tolerate students reading about Thoreau or Martin Luther King, but they better not act like them. Obey the law, never question it. What we are seeing happening on college campuses across the United States goes along with the neoliberal turn of a politics that champions consumerism and criminalizes political engagement of higher education that cuts programs in the humanities. in favor of more job training that has no understanding of a liberal arts education, or the role that faculty are to play in higher education as custodians of the university's mission. So what's happening now too, is that these administrators are trying to take over that educational role to take away the prerogative of the faculty who are in partnership with students. Maybe this is a moment when we can say enough to that because this overreach is just appalling and disgusting. I can close saying that I'm very optimistic. That's what keeps me going through stuff like this. I think that we can see this as an opportunity.

Ellie: 46:25

Well, thank you so much, Noëlle. That's so beautiful. And we're so grateful for you joining us on Overthink, Noëlle. We really appreciate your time. To our listeners, you can check out Noëlle's recent writings about this experience online, as well as her most recent books, not only Fear of Breakdown from 2019, but the more recent Feminism: A Quick Immersion. And we're so grateful for your taking the time to join us.

Noëlle: 46:47

It's a delight. I'm very, I'm very happy for the work that you two are doing. Thank you so much.

David: 46:52

Thank you.

Ellie: 47:20

Wow. This was such an interesting conversation with Noëlle. I was really struck in particular by her suggestion that students, or young people, I think she said, are the conscience of our culture.

David: 47:35

Do you not agree with that Ellie?

Ellie: 47:38

I'd have to think more about whether I agree with it generally or not. But I think in this particular case, I definitely agree with it. Where I'm teaching, it was the students who first came up with a plan for divestment and that then inspired the faculty to create our own plan. And so that is a really obvious way that this was impacting older people, namely the faculty, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will respond to this or not, but I think in this case it's right. I've been so inspired seeing the organization of the students and their nuanced sense of the issues at hand combined with their sense of what direct actions need to be taken. I think that's been really beautiful and something I really just want to highlight is how nuanced many of their opinions have been because oftentimes when people are protesting. What you hear are the soundbites, and sometimes those soundbites aren't so good and aren't so nuanced, but I think, the people on the ground that I know of at least do tend to have quite nuanced opinions of these matters.

David: 48:49

Yeah, no, you're right. Because by definition, by the time something becomes a soundbite for media, it has to lose its nuance in order to fit into the format. And when people say, sometimes - this was not Noëlle's intent - that young people are the conscience of society. Sometimes, how that can be read is that they represent the idealism that eventually has to be shed in the process of growing up, and so sometimes it gets reduced to an impractical stage of development. And what you're saying, Ellie, is that what we're seeing from these students is not just courage and presence and a willingness to put themselves on the line, but we're also seeing very concrete proposals and very effective modes of organization that are growing from the bottom up, right? When we're thinking about the divest effort, they're putting on the table concrete proposals like we need to divest from weapons manufacturers, right? This has been happening at Cornell and at Columbia. They are demanding that universities turn down funds from the Israeli military, which often funds research projects on American universities like at MIT. They are calling in some cases for academic boycotts for American universities to stop collaborating with Israeli universities. And so these are not idealistic head in the cloud proposals. They are the proposals of individuals who are engaging in political work and thinking strategically.

Ellie: 50:19

Yeah, and that then becomes an opportunity for negotiation because when folks are protesting and or engaging in civil disobedience, the idea is not you need to fall in line with my view or else, right? At least in these democratic contexts, is part of what distinguishes civil disobedience from other forms of disobedience, including like politically engaged disobedience, like militant protest. Although maybe that's a more complicated story, but in any case, there is definitely a sense of a desire for negotiation, a desire for conversation, rather than just, these are the demands, right? I think Noëlle did a really good job of pointing out that lists of demands among groups engaging in civil disobedience are not demands in the sense of you must do this. They're usually, this is what we are demanding as a starting point for negotiation. This is what we want to see happen. How are you going to meet us at least part way?

David: 51:19

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And once it's reframed in that way, then we stop seeing these students as agitators, because agitator has a connotation of somebody who just wants to move things around for the sake of moving things around. So we see the students as having a clear purpose, a clear end goal in mind, and as thinking rationally and collectively. about what the best way to bring that about is. And you see that with the fact that they're addressing their universities, who are more likely to listen to them than, let's say, if they were just addressing the US government as a whole, because they have a closer connection to them. And they're addressing them with proposals that, as you pointed out, Ellie, are plausible. They are realistic. It just demands the development of the right kind of political will. And it's funny to me that a lot of people are mourning the fact that, oh, for a lot of these students, this is going to be their last memory of undergrad. The fact that they were arrested, which of course is sad that many students are graduating, knowing that their universities turned their back on justice and refused to stop supporting institutions and companies that are directly aiding in the genocide in Gaza. But my thinking about this is that maybe this is not their last memory as students. Maybe this is their first formative memory as activists, right? Because this is how activists are made. There is no better way to turn a student into an activist than to have them face repression from their own educational institution. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q and A's and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast. and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor Aaron Morgan, our production assistant Emilio Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the music And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.