Caged Heat

the associate dean wants you to say away from the intifada

I just got home from a long visit to UCLA, my old academic home, where the Palestinian flag flies over Powell Library….

I took all of these photos, btw

….and access to a large area at the center of the campus is controlled by masked students at gated checkpoints, although the exact way that access worked will become much more interesting in a moment:

There’s a remarkable irony to those checkpoints, but let me give you some context for them first. This is the other side of that gated site, in video that I shot, with a protester shouting for intifada over a bullhorn:

There’s a massive security presence, unarmed and calm, supervised by administrators in “UCLA Student Affairs” jackets, and fences — sometimes double fences — all the way around the encampment. Here you can see the double-layer of fences on the east side of the encampment:

And here’s a “student affairs” administrator making the rounds between the fences, with many security guards in the gap:

When I tried to get into the encampment, the masked students didn’t stop me — an extremely friendly and apologetic trio of uniformed security guards stopped me. I asked them how I could get get in, and a guard said, pointing at the encampment, “They have to let you in.” (He also said, “The university has decided to let them have this area,” but he didn’t know how much time they were given or when the fences would come down.)

The protesters inside the encampment vet people who approach the gates, and then the university grants access or denies access on the basis of the word they get from inside the encampment. So UCLA is working with protesters to close of a portion of their own campus, enforcing access control on behalf of people who’ve “seized” a piece of the school. The seizure is cooperative; UCLA has seized itself. Here’s a protester-gatekeeper inside the encampment declining to intervene as security stopped me from climbing the stairs on the west side of the encampment:

I watched a woman rush the east side gates, and I watched security and student affairs staff stop her, on the basis of people inside the encampment declining to let her in. “But I love you!” she shouted across the fence. It didn’t work.

Here’s the irony: By giving up a piece of the campus, and then fencing it in and surrounding it with guards, UCLA gave the protesters the gift of — well, of fencing them in. It’s like an open-air prison, you see. On a 419-acre campus, an acre belonged to the intifada. They had almost no presence outside the fence. Here’s the nearby sculpture garden, facing Young Research Library sorry, the back of Bunche Hall:

This is what the campus was like: calm and peaceful. This is the lawn right in front of the stairs I was prevented from climbing:

Ten feet outside the encampment, campus life is normal.

There have been costs to the decision to let the pro-intifada protesters have the square between Royce Hall and Powell Library, the heart of the campus. Among other things, Kronos Quartet was supposed to play at Royce Hall last night, and the university cancelled their performance. So UCLA has surrendered a portion of a public university campus, and they’ve surrendered the openness of a community of inquiry — with the one benefit of limiting the harm, the value of which is up for debate. The protest is highly spatially concentrated, which I’m betting the university administration regards as a victory. No one is responding to email messages, and no administrators on the site want to talk about it, so I can only guess.

Counterprotesters approached the encampment from the wide-open side, not being surrounded by fences.

The protesters inside the encampment announced that they had someone with a banana allergy inside the fence, demanding that bananas be kept well away from the site, after which counterprotesters made them a thing:

Someone — I haven’t been able to find out who — funded a giant video screen on a piece of grass that faces the pro-intifada encampment, and the screen plays a nonstop loop of GoPro footage captured from Hamas terrorists as they killed Jews on Oct. 7.

The effect of this was remarkable, as people lounged on the grass in the sun, and walked their dogs, in front of the images of mass murder, with the sound of screaming and gunfire running under the nearby sound of masked California undergraduates chanting for intifada.

Protesters and counterprosters shouted insults across the double fence….

….but I also watched some of the pro-intifada students do shift change, in their uniform of masks and keffiyehs, leaving the encampment in pairs and walking across campus with their anger suddenly not in evidence.

Or maybe they just hid it well.