Outside Agitators on Campus
The outside agitator narrative has been misued for decades, but the real outside agitators are often politicians and police.
Sometime during either the very end of the Reagan years or the early days of the George H. W. Bush’s presidency, some friends and I drove up from Santa Cruz, where I was going to school at the time, to Berkeley to participate in a demonstration near the campus. As we were marching along, I ran into a friend from high school who was a student at Berkeley. While we were chatting, we laughingly noted that I was an outside agitator.
Growing up in San Francisco in the long shadow of the 1960s, I learned a great deal about the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and left-wing politics in general. I was therefore very familiar with the term outside agitator by the time I was in college. I encountered it reading about the Civil Rights Movement when racist southerners used the term to describe northerners, many of whom in the language of today's left we would call Zionists, came to the South to support African American activists there.
The subtext of the use of the term outside agitators during the Civil Rights Movement was that if the white northerners hadn't been involved, African Americans would not been so upset and riled up. It was obviously a very racist frame. During the anti-war movement, at campuses like Berkeley, Columbia, Kent State and others, the idea behind the outside agitator line was that older people were coming from outside campus to radicalize and mislead students.
The outside agitator idea has made a comeback in the last few weeks. We've heard it from the media, university administrators and, perhaps most notably, New York City Mayor Eric Adams
Blaming campus unrest on outside agitators is as unhelpful, inaccurate and damaging today as it was decades ago.
Blaming these demonstrations on outside agitators also reveals an ignorance about what universities today look like. Schools such as Columbia, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, UCLA or USC have tens of thousands of students, including many graduate students who may rarely go to campus but are still technically enrolled, or were enrolled recently enough that they still have an activated ID card. Similarly, the faculty ranges from full time tenured faculty to a large number of lecturers, adjuncts, graduate students from other universities and the like. This is also a reminder of the economically exploitative nature of academia.
Therefore, at every major university, there a lot of people walking around campus, staying in the encampments, and at Columbia, occupying Hamilton Hall who may not look like 20-year-old college students, but that does not mean that they are from the outside.
Additionally, the outside agitator frame is always insulting to the people on the inside. Decades ago it was used by southern racists to suggest that African Americans didn't mind racism and segregation, and that it it was only when northerners came in and told them about it that they got upset. Today the use of the term outside agitators suggests that students aren't making their own decisions about the war in Gaza, and that students are not capable of forming opinions on their own. This may be a charitable view of the students, in some respects, but it is not true.
The students who are protesting have arrived at their opinions, for better or for worse, through their own, admittedly sometimes shoddy, analysis. Those who don't like the opinions, ideologies or the antisemitism of the students, need to confront it directly rather than write it off as something coming in from outside the university.
Additionally, a very relevant question about recent events on college campuses is who the real outside agitators are. Is it a graduate student finishing her PhD who doesn't get to campus much but believes in the cause and joins the encampment? Is it a pro-Palestinian activist who taught a course the previous semester and will probably teach in the future? I do not consider those kinds of people to be outsiders to the university community.
On the other hand, when a politician from another state, like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, comes to the campus to grandstand for votes for his party, offends students and make the situation summarily worse, that politician is acting as an outside agitator.
When the mayor of a city like New York uses events at the highest profile university in the city to shore up his conservative base, that is also agitating from the outside. And lastly, even if you believe that it was essential to clear Hamilton Hall and that bringing the police on campus was just an unfortunate necessity, you have to ask yourself if was it necessary for the police to make a propaganda film about it, and if it was necessary that a gun was fired?
The answer to both these questions is an unequivocal no. Eric Adams and the police excess he has celebrated have damaged the teaching and learning environment at Columbia much more than any demonstrators who may not have had a formal relationship with the university have.
It is also obviously true that some people at the encampments across the university and inside Hamilton had no affiliation with the university where they were protesting, but even if only people who were affiliated with the university were participating in these protests things wouldn't have looked very different.
On other hand, it should be axiomatic that if politicians, community groups from the outside back in October and November with trucks doxxing students at Columbia and elsewhere, videographers from the Police Department intent on making a promotional film about clearing Hamilton Hall at Columbia or right wing seeming vigilante groups coming at UCLA had stayed off campus the environment on college campuses today would be much better.
The outside agitator narrative is condescending, dishonest and is often used to infantilize students or other activists, and trivialize their concerns and demands. As we head towards graduations, summer and the start of the new academic year in the fall, it will be very helpful to stop talking about outside agitators and, regardless of whether or not you agree with the substance of the students’ demands or opinions, recognize that this protest movement is organic, legitimate and not going away as long as this war continues.
Agree with Stefan below. Outside agitators, professionals there to create trouble are a real thing.
Pamphlets stating "death to America" arent a great contribution either.
Professional protesters is a better term. There is lots of reliable information that intense training for these occupations took place. It’s really NOT just some idealistic college students expressing their views.
The “fake blood” covered man who interrupted a graduation shouting “KILL ALL JEWS” was not a great contribution to freedom of speech!