Why campus protests worsen divisions, and how to mediate: Advice from Eboo Patel

Transcript

Listen: On this episode of the GZERO World Podcast with Ian Bremmer, Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, advocates for cooperation over division on college campuses in response to protests, highlighting the need for civil discourse and pointing out that despite some instances of violence, most campuses engage in constructive dialogue.

Whether you are for or against the protests happening across the country, one thing is clear: They've caught the world's attention. Some have escalated into violence, as seen at UCLA, Texas, and Columbia University. On the podcast, Patel discusses his efforts on over 600 college campuses to foster unity. His central message: "Cooperation is better than division."

Patel emphasizes the need for universities to shift their focus from confrontation to cooperation, advocating for environments that promote civil discourse. He suggests initiatives such as teach-ins and dialogues to explore constructive solutions to complex issues. Patel criticizes the default mode of many universities. "I think the problem here, the thing that universities could control, which I think that they have gotten wrong in many cases over the course of the past five years, is the default mode has been set to confrontation, not cooperation."

While it may be challenging to find common ground, Patel highlights that the majority of college campuses have managed to engage in debates about the Israel-Gaza conflict without resorting to chaos or violence. He explains, "The media, for good reasons, covers planes that crash and not planes that land." This suggests that the instances of violence and chaos are outliers and that civil discourse is still prevalent on many campuses.

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TRANSCRIPT: Why campus protests worsen divisions, and how to mediate: Advice from Eboo Patel

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm Ian Bremmer, and this is where you will find extended versions of my show on public television. And today, we are looking at the campus protests that continue to rock the United States and increasingly, universities around the world. Calls to campus leadership have run the gamut, but the central rallying cry is divestment from Israel. Whether that means divesting from Israeli donors, Israeli businesses, or other Israeli ties depends on the campus or the protestor. Thousands of students have been willing to risk suspension, expulsion, and even arrest to make their demands heard. Joining me to talk about the protests sweeping America's universities is Eboo Patel. His nonprofit, Interfaith America, has been working with hundreds of college campuses to foster healthier debate and discussion. In other words, he's got his work cut out for him. Let's get to it.

Eboo Patel, welcome to GZERO World.

Eboo Patel:

Hi, Ian. Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So Eboo, you run this organization called Interfaith America and it's had a big impact on college campuses across the country. Tell us a little bit just for an audience that might not know it what your role is and what your role has been in this crisis.

Eboo Patel:

We are the largest organization of the United States that works with diversity issues, including religious diversity. We work across diversity categories, but religious diversity is something that we include proactively rather than ignore. We help colleges design environments of cooperation. We have an article called The Practices for Pluralism on College Campuses, and we're telling college campuses there are seven things you ought to do from presidents making public statements about pluralism to training for every first-year student on cooperation skills. So, we help college campuses and other organizations be environments of cooperation. What I like to say is diversity work cannot be a battlefield. That's part of the problem right now, is people think of diversity work as a battlefield. Here's how I think we need to approach diversity. Number one, diversity is a treasure. Number two, cooperation is better than division. Number three, identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization. Number four, faith is a bridge. And number five, everyone is a contributor. Those are the kinds of messages that we bring to college campuses.

Ian Bremmer:

If you're the president of a university with major demonstrations going on right now, what are a couple quick dos and don'ts?

Eboo Patel:

It's a really tough situation. First, I would deescalate as much as possible. Talking is always better than fighting. I would try to remind people that a university is a place where people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies cooperate in the search for truth together, and can we do that? And then frankly, I would say from my own personal point of view, that war is terrible. Let's absolutely look to work together to find a way to end this war as quickly as possible. The truth of the matter is universities have resources that can help do that. I'll give you an example. Many times universities have expert negotiators on their faculty. Are there ways that those expert negotiators can play a constructive role in the current conflict? Those are the kinds of things that I think that university president should do. They should always lift up the chief value of a university, which is cooperation across difference to learn together and to seek truth together.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, there are all sorts of reports and claims of people from outside campus coming in and causing trouble irrespective of what side of the political spectrum they're on. Is it reasonable if you have a series of demonstrations like this that one of the first things you want to do is make sure that the campus is for the students, that you want to have some fairly strict ID protocols, that kind of thing, making sure that you're actually talking to the student community?

Eboo Patel:

I would say, first of all, that I have friends who are on many, many campuses. I have friends who are faculty at places, friends who are senior administrators, friends who are presidents of universities. And that is absolutely the case, that what started as mostly peaceful student protests have become an event that has attracted, if you will, a set of professional agitators in many cases. I do think that it is within the broad rights of a university administration to say, "Hey, listen, while normally this university, public or private, is a space that welcomes people from a variety of quarters of the neighborhood in the city, et cetera, for right now, we need to focus on our mission and we're going to be a place that looks to focus on our students and faculty and staff to get the work of the university done." Which again, as I said, is learning and cooperating across difference to seek truth.

Ian Bremmer:

Of the schools with significant demonstrations, give me an example of one that has done a particularly good job and why.

Eboo Patel:

From my perspective, any university that managed to deescalate the situation and to engage in conversation rather than confrontation is looking pretty good right now. The great Jesuit philosopher, John Courtney Murray, says that civilization is living and talking together. I think that part of what a university should excel at is encouraging people to talk across their deep disagreements. And so, any university that managed to deescalate the situation and to put on a track of conversation as opposed to confrontation I think is doing a good job.

Ian Bremmer:

A couple quick ones that come to mind?

Eboo Patel:

Well, this is largely for media reports, but Brown and Northwestern managed to have conversations as opposed to confrontations. Again, in a very imperfect situation, I think it is better to be talking than fighting.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, the case of Brown, I mean, I saw that this was in part a climb down from the administration that they're willing to offer a vote and really take up the issues, the demands that are being made from the students on divestment, which a lot of the universities, especially if they get a lot of money from donors that are not on that side of the political spectrum, are going to have a much harder time doing that. I don't know the Northwestern situation, but when you mentioned Brown, I'm just wondering if it's structurally easier for certain kinds of universities in this environment to say, "Yeah, we're going to sit down and engage with the students." In other words, they have more to offer.

Eboo Patel:

I want to be simple about this right now. In a situation of hot conflict where people are being hurt, I think that people should think about this in two tracks: are we talking more together or are we fighting more together? If one of those conversations is broadly speaking about how a university spends its endowment, I don't think that's a ridiculous thing for people to be talking about. It's better to be talking about it than fighting about it.

Ian Bremmer:

Why do you think this is happening right now, just generally this level of hatred, contempt, unwillingness to speak to each other, and also specifically why the Middle East when there's so much that's going on in the world that is deeply contested?

Eboo Patel:

The media, for good reasons, covers planes that crash and not planes that land. My organization, Interfaith America, we have a network of 600 college campuses. I'm on a different college campus roughly every week. In fact, I was on two campuses just this past week because I'm a commencement speaker at a lot of places. And both of them have handled the situation quite well maybe especially because students have had the opportunity to express themselves, to engage in conversations that are marked by learning and engagement rather than confrontation and fighting. And so, let's not just pay attention to the 50 places in America where things are looking pretty ugly right now. Let's remember that there's 2,500 or so universities and many, many of them, this is being handled quite well. That's the first thing to say.

Ian Bremmer:

When you say quite well, you really mean that there might be some demonstrations going on, but they're peaceful, there are no issues that require intervention. There is nothing that is newsworthy in the vast majority of campuses in the United States right now.

Eboo Patel:

That's exactly right. Most campuses on most days are places of learning that we should be proud of and places of cooperation that we should be proud of. I have Muslim friends who are faculty, I have Jewish friends who are faculty, who are telling me that their classroom is a place where people are asking good questions, where they're learning from one another, where they're saying things like, "Oh, I never thought of it that way." That is what a university should be about.

Ian Bremmer:

To be fair, that's been my personal experience at Columbia Graduate School. My students, no problem this year whatsoever. No one felt like they needed a safe space. We were discussing everything. So I think it's very worthwhile for you to drive home that point. Now let's focus though on what's bleeding and leading and why you think it's happening now.

Eboo Patel:

So there are a couple of issues in American life which are deeply divisive. One of them is abortion. One of them is the Middle East. I just take that for granted. In 2009 at Notre Dame University, there were massive pro-life protests over Barack Obama's being invited to be the commencement speaker. People were using language like baby killer, people were involved in overnight activities on campus. Prayer sessions some called it. Other people might have called it encampments. There were shouts that were made at commencement. Abortion is a divisive issue, and I understand that.

The Middle East, the situation between Israel and the Palestinians is a divisive issue, and I also understand that. One of the reasons we have universities is, as the great philosopher Alistair McIntyre says, to initiate people into the conflicts of a diverse democracy and to teach them how to discuss them in rational ways. I think the problem here, the thing that universities could control, which I think that they have gotten wrong in many cases over the course of the past five years, is the default mode has been set to confrontation, not cooperation. First-year students come on campus and confrontation is romanticized. People are told that some people are the oppressed and some people are the oppressors. The oppressed can never do anything right. The oppressors can never do anything wrong. And diversity is a battlefield.

I think that that is the wrong way to approach a diverse environment like a university. I think that universities should say, "Hey, listen, diversity is a lot more like a potluck. We invite people to bring the dishes that are inspired by their distinctive identities, and we create a space for creative combinations and enriching conversations." That's something that can and should change. We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm.

Ian Bremmer:

So if you're a student of Palestinian descent, what's the dish that's so tasty that you are bringing to campus right now that everybody wants to partake in? Because, I mean, that's a high bar.

Eboo Patel:

Palestinian culture is beautiful. All cultures are beautiful. All cultures have associated with them foods and fashion and language and rights and rituals. That's what we should be bringing. All cultures have associated with them literatures and songs. That's what we should be bringing with them. And if you're a Palestinian descent and you are devastated by the famine in Gaza, I understand, I feel that. If you are of Palestinian descent and you are absolutely shattered by the way the war has gone, I feel that, and I understand that, and I think your voice should be heard. And if you want this war to stop, I feel that, and I understand that, and I think your voice should be heard. And incidentally, if you're Israeli or Jewish and you want that, I think that that is exactly right. I want this war to stop also.

And that is where I totally agree with the protestors, let's stop this war. Things that are extraneous to that, things that are about insulting other people's identities, things that are about we need to dismantle the university police force, that's a distraction. I would like the peaceful protests to focus on stopping the war and being in a cooperative engagement with the university administration who, again, may have a set of resources like for example faculty members who are expert negotiators that could actually make a positive difference in this situation.

Ian Bremmer:

We can have a long conversation about the Middle East because, I mean, clearly the majority of Israelis don't agree with the idea that the war should be stopped right now, at least not until more has been done against Hamas. But I am more interested in what you think is and isn't appropriate on campus. So specifically, where do we start talking about limits of appropriate free speech being breached? What should be considered beyond the pale in a speech that might make a student of Jewish descent or of Palestinian descent feel legitimately unsafe, not that you said something mean or that they disagree with, but something that actually requires some level of policing by the university?

Eboo Patel:

I'm going to shift the question just a little bit. I'm going to stay within the general. I'm going to say, if I was a professor teaching a class on effective protest, not romanticizing protest here, I'm teaching a class on how do you have an effective movement for constructive social change, that's a very high bar. One of the things that I would say is, whatever you say or do to another group, you have now made fair game to say and do to you. So if you call another group baby killer and you beat drums outside of, say, their cultural center... I'm making this up, but it's not implausible... you beat drums outside of their cultural center-

Ian Bremmer:

I'm almost certain that has happened. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Eboo Patel:

... and you call them baby killer, well, it's not impossible that that could happen to you. If you burn a flag that another group cherishes, it is not impossible that somebody else may burn a flag or an item that you cherish. If you chant from the river to the sea, somebody else can chant from the river to the sea. And so I don't know how to think of this as a senior administrator, because part of what senior administrators have to think about right now is when not only are we crossing lines of speech into harassment, but when are we provoking violence as happened at UCLA or involved in a situation that could very easily become violence as happened at UCLA, physical violence?

But I would say as a professor in the intellectual space, I think a really important consideration is, as soon as you start to engage in something, you move that action or slogan into a territory called fair game, and now somebody else can do it. And so, one of the things that I think is important just as somebody who seeks to set norms is, if there are a set of things that you don't want to be called and you want a norm of other people respecting your preferred names or pronouns or whatever, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask other people how they want to be engaged with. I think that that is a norm of civil discourse.

And absolutely a campus has to be a place of civil discourse because one of the things that makes universities such a treasure of American civilization is precisely because they gather people from an impossibly wide range of identities and an impossibly diverse spectrum of ideologies into the same place. We literally say people who pray like you, people of different ethnicities like you, they're at each other's throats on the other side of the world. But here in this magic space of a university, we are lab partners, we are roommates. We sit in class together and we discuss Moby Dick and Midnight's Children. I think that that is so special, and in order for us to strengthen that, we need to shift the default setting from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm, and we build up the muscles and skills to do that. It's a skillset. It's not easy to cooperate.

Ian Bremmer:

It's a skillset. Look, again, I appreciate both what you are doing and also your message. So my pushback is coming from a place of hope here, but I also see there are a lot of people on campuses that think of what Israel is doing on the ground in Gaza right now as genocide. That is obviously not a characterization that is agreed with by the majority of the Israeli people. There are a lot of people among the Israeli population, Jewish populations that see Hamas and anyone that supports Hamas as a terrorist. Those are obviously, on the one hand, names that one can call someone that will elicit the kind of response that you are cautioning against. But also, in an environment where people are talking about what's really happening on the ground, it's certainly within the context of legitimate political discourse and opinions to be held. What do you do with that in today's college environment?

Eboo Patel:

I mean, actually I think that that is a stunningly rich learning experience. And so, I would love to see students who are within two or three inches of each other politically... And by the way, I think most people are, right? Most people are somewhere between center leftish and center right-ish. And by the way, part of the goal of my organization, Interfaith America, is to expand the center, is to expand the number of people who are in the circle of discourse. What would it be like if 500 campuses in America, instead of having dueling protests in which the language people are calling each other is becoming increasingly insulting and provocative, if they said, "We're going to have a teach-in on what a ceasefire agreement could look like."? A bunch of 20-year-olds got together at 500 campuses and they said, "We're going to figure out what a ceasefire looks like, and we're going to put it in one-page documents and we're going to send it to Washington DC and we're going to say, 'If we can figure this out, you can figure this out.'"?

I mean, people do model exercises like this all the time. So those are the kinds of things that I think would be a great idea for people at universities to be engaging in. By the way, you have experts on your faculty who could help you run that exercise. You have people who are in business schools who have been part of big deals, big negotiations. They can help you run that exercise. You have people who are part of diplomacy schools or schools of foreign affairs who have literally been in the room on these kinds of things. If I'm a 20-year-old, I don't want people to be disrupting campus life. I don't think we should be romanticizing disruptions. I think we should be romanticizing the everyday activities of campuses. They're that level of treasure in American civilization, and we should ask ourselves the question, "What would it look like to be the problem-solvers and the leaders?" And we're going to put together a simulation of this, and who knows, maybe you get 500 super creative documents and some people in DC learn from them and it actually moves things forward.

Ian Bremmer:

I share with you the idea that not only are most students generally in the center politically one shade or the other, but also most university professors have real expertise and want to use that expertise to benefit the student body and the world. That's why they're there. But of course, a small number of educators that happen to have some of the biggest megaphones are not only not sharing that orientation, but are actually agitators and bomb throwers themselves. We've seen that in a number of these universities where the faculty has assertively decided to place themselves not as educators to drive expertise, but instead on a side of this heated political fray. Clearly that is making it a lot harder for everyone to come to terms and engage with each other. How do you try to turn that around in a way that is more constructive?

Eboo Patel:

I think the first thing we should do is just recognize the numbers here. There are on college campuses probably a small number of faculty, very small number, who are in, say, a camp of intransigence on one side or another. I think faculty to express their political views in peaceful, constructive ways, one side or another, is perfectly fine. You want a campus that that happens. If you've got a couple of faculty members who are basically saying, "I am going to slow down, disrupt, or stop the activities of this university, which are principally living together and talking together, learning and researching together, cooperating together," that's a problem, but it's not mass numbers of people. I think we should be clear about that. It's a couple of people.

Ian Bremmer:

No, again, I accept that it's not massive. I also accept that these are some of the people that have the most engagement on social media. It's very performative. They're the people that are getting the eyeballs, they're driving the headlines. They're the people that the external billionaires on the left and the right most want to engage with around those headlines. And they're also the people that are bringing politicians to these universities to stand in front of one or the other side to make their own political points. I mean, we're living at a time where it's not just a problem on campuses. We're living at a time that there are political entrepreneurs that make bank on the back of making these problems appear much worse than they actually are. That is clearly a reality of 2024.

Eboo Patel:

I think that's absolutely the case. I mean, it reminds me of The Wizard of Oz, where this whole kind of simulation world, The Wizard of Oz, is run by one guy behind a curtain. That's what social media allows people to do. It allows them to make themselves out to be way bigger than they are, which is why I think it's very important for the vast majority of faculty and students and administrators to say, "The norm on this campus is cooperation. We are going to assert it in peaceful, positive, and constructive ways, but we're going to stop pretending that a fist in the air is better than two hands clasped together cooperating. We're going to stop pretending that every revolution ends in utopia." I mean, you can get rid of the Shah and install the Ayatollah.

It's interesting to me, there's lots of people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts, but not that many people who wear Fidel Castro t-shirts, because actually the system that the revolution produces is often not what you want. I think a university should be about nurturing people who can build a better social order, not a more ferocious revolution. Incidentally, Ian, I want to say I want a better social order. I want to dramatically erode poverty. I want people from a variety of backgrounds to have more opportunities. I think racism and sexism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and homophobia, these are problems, but I don't think that we defeat those challenges by constantly destroying and dismantling and confronting. I think we defeat them by cooperating together to lift everybody up.

Ian Bremmer:

We have elections coming up in November. Do you think that students and youth, more broadly, are going to be more engaged in these elections as a consequence of all this or not?

Eboo Patel:

Boy, it's really hard to say. May and November, it might only be five or six months, but it's going to feel like six seasons in American life. What I would say is the kind of responsible people, so to speak, we have to be busy building spaces where people with different ideas and views can find common ground. Walt Whitman says, "There's nothing as holy as common ground," and I believe that. Look, the only way to have a diverse democracy is for people to be able to disagree on some fundamental things and work together on other fundamental things. And I will tell you what the nightmare situation is in American life is if firefighters walking into the fire station look at each other and they say, "Hey, you're wearing a Trump hat," and somebody else says, "Well, you're wearing a Biden hat," and they say, "We can't fight fires together."

By the way, that happens in other countries. Let's not forget that most societies over most of civilization have been societies where people of different ethnicities, religions, or races either do not live together because they live in homogenous communities, or they are at each other's throats. The most important thing that we do in the United States of America is we build a society where people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies can cooperate. We need to cherish that, and we need to strengthen that, and I think colleges are the best place to do it, but we need to do a better job there.

Ian Bremmer:

That's a great message for our students, Eboo. Thanks so much for joining us.

Eboo Patel:

Thanks, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official, why don't you rate and review GZERO World, five stars, only five stars, otherwise don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Tell your friends.