Mnookin Messes Up

Yesterday I wrote that I sympathized with UW Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin’s plight. Today I’m not so sympathetic.

On Wednesday morning Mnookin made a tough call. She ordered that the small encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters on Library Mall be removed. The police showed up and did their jobs, taking down the tents with minimum trouble, though a few protesters and faculty made the predictable “police brutality!” charges. If they’ve got a real complaint they should file it with the city’s new Police Monitor, if the forms are ready yet.

Overall, I thought removing the camp was a mistake, not because I sympathized with the protesters, but because it was a small group, they weren’t blocking the entrance to any buildings or harassing passersby and, with the semester about to end, they’d be gone a week or so anyway. Still, I could also see the other point of view. If you allow this to go on, what happens when the next group decides to make the mall a campsite?

But then the tents went right back up. Nobody anticipated this would happen? They didn’t have a plan for it?

And now Mnookin has compounded the problem. After insisting that she would only meet with protesters after they had voluntarily decamped, she met with them yesterday anyway. Why on earth is she rewarding this kind of behavior?

At the meeting the protesters checked the protester box by complaining about how they were treated by the cops. Then they went on to list their “demands.” Why is it that protesters always have “demands”? Where else in the real world does anybody make demands? I don’t know about you, but if someone demanded something of me my first reaction would be to not want to do it. Adults have conversations. Adults negotiate. And, by the way, a handful of protesters should be in no position to make any demands on anybody.

Anyway, these demands are about tracking down every possible link the university has to Israel and severing it. That’s simply not going to happen, nor should it. Mnookin wasted her time talking to these people, but worse she sent entirely the wrong message. When a handful of protesters and faculty broke campus rules, she first insisted that they needed to stop breaking them before she’d meet. Then she went back on her own word and met with them anyway.

In the bigger picture, I think it’s likely that these people are hurting their own cause. Nobody’s going to disinvest from Israel, but American public opinion is likely to run against the protesters. Overall, 80% of Americans support Israel over Hamas and even 57% of college-age Americans support Israel. In fact, that same poll found that, among young people, the Israel-Hamas conflict ranked 15th out of 16 issues listed. Watching a relative handful of students and sympathetic faculty set up their REI tents on campus malls isn’t going to convince anybody of anything.

Mnookin should know this. The best strategy to deal with these protesters is to simply not take them seriously.

That’s it for this week. Look for the overwhelmingly popular Quote & Quiz tomorrow. See you back here Monday.