Columbia's Tiananmen Square

Naturally and rationally, the visions of student encampments at Columbia and other universities bring to mind the now distant memory of what happened in Tiananmen Square some three and a half decades ago.

In April of 1989 students occupied Tiananmen Square to commemorate the death of Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang. An important leader in the reform movement at the time, he favored a more democratic China.

At roughly the time when Francis Fukuyama trotted out his neo-Hegelian eschatology and declared that liberal democracy would inevitably prevail, the student protesters in Tiananmen insisted that it come about, sooner and not later. They were not satisfied with Deng’s reforms, which involved free enterprise and privatization. They wanted democratic elections, freedom of speech and a free press.

Of course, Fukuyama believed that liberal democracy included capitalism and free enterprise. The Chinese begged to disagree.

Playing itself out in Tiananmen Square was one of the most important theoretical questions of our time. Can you have capitalism without liberal democracy? Will the one necessarily lead to the other?

Some members of the Politburo, led by Premier Zhao Ziyang sympathized with the students. And yet, after a month of deliberative debate China’s leaders decided that the student protesters more closely resembled the Red Guards, not the revelers of Woodstock. 

China had undergone severe turmoil during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution-- in large part because it was a children’s crusade, and because the children in question had no self-control or discipline. 

Now, flash forward to Columbia University. Is it fair to ask whether the students encamped in the Columbia University quad, along with students at other universities were more like the Red Guards or more like party goers at Woodstock.

Strangely, they were not even trying to hide their truth. They have been saying that they are more like Hamas, a group the murdered, massacred and raped Israelis. They have assaulted and harassed Jewish students on campus, to the point where the university president recommended that Jewish students stay off campus-- she could not guarantee their safety.

Islamic terrorism has much in common with the Red Guards. The Red Guards murdered more than a million people, but they did not throw babies into ovens. They did however end up eating their teachers-- in the literally cannibalistic way. 

We might say that the leaders of universities like Columbia are congenitally weak. And yet, when you see the student protesters in open defiance of the president’s authority you should conclude that these young people have no respect for authority. Perhaps this is the fault of an older generation that rejects authority, and even denounces anything that resembles authoritarian government, but the truth remains, the chaos in the Columbia quad or outside of NYU manifests a rank refusal to respect adult authority.

As for how the situation unfolded in 1989, consider this. When a twenty-one year old student named Wuer Kaixi-- an ethnic Uigher-- appeared on television in dialogue with Premier Li Peng, he harangued and taunted the leader, causing him to lose some considerable face. 

It was a miscalculation, assuming that it had been calculated at all. Wuer was saying: you are not in charge; we are in charge. What are you going to do about it?

Outside of the square,the breakdown in the respect for authority caused the social fabric to disintegrate. Many Chinese were sympathetic toward the students. Troops that were stationed around Beijing, the troops that would normally have been used to quell the demonstration, had already declared that if such orders were given they would refuse them. In more pedestrian terms, they were in mutiny.

Keep in mind, Deng Xiaoping was among the leading targets of the Cultural Revolution. Mao had declared him to be the number 2 capitalist roader. At the time of Tiananmen Deng was called the Supreme Leader, but the only title he had was as Chairman of the Military Commission. 

The Tiananmen Square demonstrations bore some semblance to the Cultural Revolution. China’s leaders had survived the first one and were not going to allow a second one to start.

Premier Zhao Ziyang argued the student position in Politburo deliberations, and eventually walked down to the Square to tell the students that they had lost the debate. 

The leadership decided that it needed to make a show of force, to make clear that they were in charge. It was an assertion of authority, one that was no longer subject to debate. The students who had refused to go home were run down by tanks and shot down by snipers. It was a decidedly ugly scene. No one knows how many died. 

It looked like repression. Journalist Nicholas Kristof declared that the regime would necessarily be overthrown, because repression always leads to rebellion. 

Strangely, they were all wrong. The government continued its reform program and continues it to this day.

Anyway, we are not proposing that the forces of law and order suppress the student protests violently. We are far too civilized for that. And yet, someone needs to take charge of the situation on America’s college campuses. And those who are disrupting education in order to defend Hamas should be punished.

Of course, the issue in China was: who was in charge? Was anyone in charge? Evidently, the tanks and snipers offered one answer to the question.

As for Columbia University, evidently no one is really in charge. The university president did call in the police to clear out the quad, but once that bit of theatre was over, the demonstrators returned and took up residence in places they were told not to take up residence. Evidently, her words were not backed up by any consequential action, so she evidently was not in charge.

The larger issue is quite simple: should certain institutions of higher learning be saved? Many people, mostly from the conservative right, have long inveighed against what is being taught at these institutions. But, has the rot so thoroughly infested them that they have become irretrievable?  

Liel Liebowitz suggested in the City Journal that the institutions are lost. He was implying that parents should begin a national boycott of these universities and send their children (and their money) to non-Ivy League colleges and universities:

It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions that we must repair but as national security threats that we must address forcefully. The message out of Columbia this week is that there’s nothing left on campus but fanatics awash in foreign funds, and fawned over by a faculty that long ago lost its decency, its courage, and its reason. Let’s waste no more time trying to reform the unreformable. Let’s hold the violent zealots accountable, and then get to work building new institutions worthy of our children.

If you are more inclined to promote reform, you might be happy to see these universities break their ties to Middle Eastern countries who have been funding Muslim and Arab Study programs, places where anti-Semitism has been allowed to fester. The leaders of such institutions cannot assert their authority if they allow student demonstrators to align themselves with Hamas and to call for the death of Jews.

Jonathan Pizludny makes that case in the City Journal:

In effect, U.S. campuses have been importing anti-Semitic propaganda for almost 50 years. As the New York Times reported in 1978, “Oil wealth from the Middle East is starting to flow onto college and university campuses throughout the country, bringing a bonanza of endowed chairs and new programs.” That initial flood of money—and specific concerns about gifts to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—led to the establishment of foreign gift-reporting requirements in 1986. To this day, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to report foreign gifts above $250,000.

Unfortunately, weak enforcement by the Department of Education allowed many universities to ignore the requirement. That changed in 2019, when Secretary Betsy DeVos initiated noncompliance investigations at several top schools. In 2023 congressional testimony, Paul Moore, chief investigative council at the Department of Education during the Trump administration, described the sea change that followed: “enhanced enforcement . . . produced dramatic results,” including the “disclosure of more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign gifts and contributions.” The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which analyzed the updated disclosures for 2014–19, found that over $2.7 billion in gifts came from Qatari sources, $1.2 billion from Chinese entities, and over $1 billion originated in Saudi Arabia.

The issue is the assertion of authority. We have rendered the notion retrograde and no one respects authority any more. It is time for a reckoning on America’s college campuses.

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