So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response. 

I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests.

Here, from a report in Princeton Alumni Weekly, is a statement by Jennifer Morrill, the university’s spokesperson, describing the April 25 arrests:

Morrill said in an email that “no force was used by Public Safety officers when conducting the arrests, which occurred without resistance.”

It’s an indisputable fact of American criminal procedure that an arrest is a “seizure of the person” arrested, and requires a “search incident to arrest” of the person, which is likewise involuntarily imposed on the arrestee. It’s a trivial inference from the common understanding of the English word “seizure” and its cognates that every seizure is imposed involuntarily, i.e., by force on the arrested person. And it’s a trivial inference from the common understanding of an involuntary imposition that it, too, is forced on the subject. It follows that every arrest, and every search incident to arrest, is an act of force–or rather, two acts of force imposed in quick succession. 

So force certainly was “used by Public Safety officers when conducting the arrests” in question, because an arrest just is an act of force. That the arrests “occurred without resistance” is irrelevant to this prior, basic fact. 

Princeton’s administration and its defenders, and indeed the administrations and defenders of other colleges and universities experiencing these demonstrations, have made a Very Big Deal about matters of legality. The demonstrations, they intone with great solemnity and piety, “clearly” violate “clearly stated policies, rules, regulations, and laws.” No, they don’t. Not only is that not so, but contrary to widespread belief, no one has made any serious attempt to demonstrate that it is. 

One example from among many: W. Rochelle Calhoun, Princeton’s Vice President for Student Life, has asserted in a recent statement that: “Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus.” A related statement was posted under the University’s official account on LinkedIn. I asked the university on LinkedIn for a definition of the term “involved.”

The university has threatened arrest of any individual “involved” in an encampment or occupation or disruption. What is the operative definition of “involvement”? And where is it codified in print for public consumption?

It’s been four days, and they haven’t responded. That’s their idea of a clear, publicly stated policy, and of transparency in governance: clear as mud, and transparent as tin foil. Put more bluntly, it’s just some BS that some high-paid bureaucrat put together, or got her staff to put together, because she knew she had to say something. But whatever it is, it’s nothing that the university can explain, justify, or parse. Not that they ever intended to: pious, hypocritical imprecision is their stock-in-trade. Rochelle Calhoun knows full well that the word “involve” is the most ambiguous, misleading verb in the English language. That’s why she used it.

To be “involved” in something is to bear some unspecified, maybe unspecifiable, causal relation to it. That could be anything. So is the university threatening to arrest people for just about anything? Well, if arrests can be made without force, I guess it’s no big deal to threaten to arrest people for being “involved” in unspecified activities. What could go wrong? I mean, if it works for the “material support” statutes–any money you send anywhere to anyone could end up being “material support” for something like “terrorism”–why not here?* It’s not as though anything will go wrong for W. Rochelle Calhoun’s career if she fucks up your life. That’s what her career is for. After a few decades in higher education, you come to realize that this is how university administrators act all the time. Eventually, people get sick of it and push back. The real question is how hard they manage to push, and with what results. I’m happy to wait for as long as it takes. 

If things were as clear as these administrators say, there wouldn’t be a need to misrepresent the basics, but that, in fact, is what the universities have done across the board–virtually all of them, about virtually everything. I’ve plucked one egregious statement from a raft of statements that Princeton has made, itself the tip of an iceberg of bullshit that American university administrators generally have served up as rationalizations for their actions. 

I’m not going to work through the whole iceberg now; there is, to quote Princeton’s ridiculous President Christopher Eisgruber, a proper “time, place, and manner” for everything.  I would simply advise anyone trying to figure out what to think: take these administrators’ claims about “clearly stated policies, rules, regulations and laws” or the Holy Mission of Higher Education with a large grain of salt. These are people who want to pretend that police arrests are voluntary acts because no one has resisted them. In other words, in their cosseted universe, an act is voluntary when someone with a gun orders you to do it, and you do it for fear that not doing it will get you thrown to the ground, jumped on, tazed (see video below), and zip tied. Take it as a hypothesis with a good historical track record: no one who misrepresents facts that basic can be trusted on facts more complex. 

And I hate to break the news to these over-paid mandarins and their self-righteous apologists, but ultimately what’s at issue in the campus protests is not a matter of legality at all but of justice. The question is not what the law says but why we’re morally obligated to obey the law under these circumstances. That’s a big question, apparently too big for the small minds presiding over our universities. A university, they keep telling us, is a place for learning. I agree. It’s time to teach the people at the top a lesson they’ll never forget. 

*As Lara Friedman points out, the next step is to declare all pro-Palestinian non-profits “terrorist-supporting organizations,” and terminate their tax-exempt status (here’s Reason magazine on the same topic). Preamble to the legislation in the second link above:

Shown Here:
Reported to House (12/19/2023)

This bill suspends the tax-exempt status of a terrorist supporting organization. The bill defines terrorist supporting organization as any organization designated as having provided (during the three-year period prior to its designation) material support or resources to a terrorist organization in excess of a de minimis amount.