Since the 20th century, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have protested, most notably in 1967, when over 3,000 students banded together to rally on Bascom Hill in protest against The Dow Chemical Company.
At its peak, last spring’s pro-Palestine encampment drew about 10% of that mark. The encampment — which demanded full divestment of all UW-Madison companies tied to Israel — failed to achieve its ultimate goal, and UW-Madison Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has said no progress has been made on divestment.
At an Oct. 21 SJP general body meeting, organizers discussed a lack of internal engagement.
SJP declined to comment on this story.
It’s not just a UW-Madison phenomenon. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, protesters barely showed up. A month later at August’s Democratic National Convention, organizers expected tens of thousands of activists to gather in Chicago — a number which would’ve surpassed that drawn by anti-Vietnam protesters in 1968. Instead, the number was in the thousands, “fewer” than organizers had hoped.
Ultimately, the DNC did not see a single speech addressing the pro-Palestinian side of the issue, and the Israel and Hamas have yet to reach a ceasefire, while over 40,000 Palestinians have died.
Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, told The Daily Cardinal the reason for this may lie in direct impact.
“With the war in Vietnam, people's friends were dying,” Lucchini Butcher said. “I think there was a sense of urgency to those protests that made people feel as though they wanted to get involved.”
Lucchini Butcher also thinks emerging media has changed the way we protest. In 1944, Lucchini Butler said, a group of students got together to protest the use of university-approved private landlords. Students talked to their peers face-to-face and got the signatures of over 5,000 students, a third of the student body at the time.
“Students don't have those same opportunities to talk to each other,” Lucchini Butler said.
Community involvement has also fallen off, according to David Newby, who joined the UW-Madison Teaching Assistants’ Association in 1970 and is now a lifetime member.
“The Vietnam marches and rallies had considerable community participation, but if you look at the 1970 TAA strike rallies, they were primarily student rallies,” Newby said. “I'm not sure that we have the organizations and the structures to be able to bridge that divide between student action and community action.”
Newby, who participated in the pro-Palestine encampment, called it “smaller” than he expected but “different” than anything he’d previously participated in.
So is activism dead or simply changing? Movements like Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and now divestment from Israel have certainly made an impact, with #MeToo leading to the firing of sexual predators in top positions and hiring of women in prominent jobs, and Black Lives Matter leading to policing reform in some cities and hiring of Black Americans in prominent jobs. But none of the four have attained their central goal.
At UW-Madison, the university has always bargained from a position of power, Lucchini Butler said, but students are the ones to “hold a mirror” to the institution’s face, and with so much constant protest, “protest fatigue” sets in for organizers and students.
“Students also get this kind of burnout and disillusionment when they make demands, and then some of those demands are not met,” Lucchini Butler said. “I think there’s an exhaustion that comes with just organizing work on top of being a student and then on top of that, to see this dwindling return.”
Frequently, protesters will bring the university a set of demands, to which the university responds by bringing up minute details in specific policies to avoid, Lucchini Butler said. With thousands of campus policies, it’s nearly impossible for students to know every one. But it’s important to consider “the spirit of the ask,” she said.
“In the 1969 Black student strike, students really wanted to be involved in hiring Black professors in the African American Studies department, and the faculty came back and said, ‘No, that's against all these faculty hiring policies,’” Lucchini Butler said. “The spirit of the ask was that students wanted a professor that more closely reflected them… and they were worried that all the professors that were going to get hired for African American studies were going to be white and were going to maybe be white men.”
But the rhetoric has always been the same, Lucchini Butcher said.
“They say that these protesters should ask for rights more nicely,” Lucchini Butcher said. “That has been consistent on campus, but also throughout protest history, since the dawn of time.”
Protesters fell for ‘university tactics’
Now, the university has students on search committees, Lucchini Butler said, but to get there took compromise.
In the 1969 Black Peoples Alliance the university met only two of the protesters’ 13 demands, and, in May, the university did not directly meet any of the pro-Palestine protesters’ demands, agreeing to “facilitate access” to decision makers at the UW System or UW Foundation, engage students and scholars impacted by war and “use discretion” when reviewing disciplinary cases from the encampment.
In an anonymous reflection letter from a student negotiator at the pro-Palestine encampment, the protester claimed administration convinced protesters it was better to accept an agreement that didn’t meet any of their demands instead of rejecting the proposal and said negotiators succumbed “to admin’s psychological warfare that led us to believe the false notion that this agreement materially helps Gazans.”
The letter outlined several other negotiation tactics the protesters “fell for” and suggested they should have advocated for “dropping the charges” against protesters arrested at the May 1 police raid.
“I am not saying that the people who worked tirelessly should have worked harder — rather those efforts should have been distributed amongst more people,” the letter said. “Instead, we trusted a select few student voices when that kind of decision-making power should never be put into the hands of a few.”
Over the summer, UW-Madison updated both protest policies and a policy on when to make institutional statements, which has led to concern from free speech experts that the policy could lead to a “chilling effect” on protest and free speech.
The university has also investigated approximately 30 to 40 students for alleged involvement in the spring encampment and several student organizations.
UW-Madison previously divested from apartheid South Africa in 1978 following pressure from The Madison Area Committee on Southern Africa on the Wisconsin Legislature, including a 12-student occupation of the chancellor’s office demanding divestment. Still Lucchini Butler thinks it’s unlikely the university will meet SJP’s demands.
But even with a lack of visible change, protest can make a meaningful difference in raising awareness, Lucchini Butler said.
“Sometimes when you study protests, it's not even that a policy gets changed, it’s the tone of conversation has changed. If you leave a protest and more people know about reproductive rights than they did before, then maybe that's a good thing,” Lucchini Butler said.
Staff writer Drew Wesson contributed to this article.
Tomer Ronen is the Features Editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has covered protests, state politics, sports and more. Follow him on Twitter at @TRonen22.
