How many protesters is enough?

How the Princeton president helped...but the Senate Minority Leader did not.

Today the president of my university, Christopher Eisgruber, wrote an article that I hope will be a watershed in the sorry affair of the Trump Administration's attack on higher education. All of you should read it: Columbia’s Real Radical Threat is From the Government. For the first time in months, I felt a little hope.

It's been hard for most people to process the gravity of this year’s events. The executive branch is doing something weird: it is going after whole segments of society: upending the federal government by shutting down dozens of agencies, seizing and deporting legal residents for their views or identity, and threatening entire colleges and universities on account of their students’ political opinions.

These events are so far outside normal experience that they appear to be leaving many people befuddled. One of those befuddled people is the Senate Minority Leader, to whom I will return in a moment.

First, here is an example close to home.

This is not fine

The other day I learned that a grants administrator at Rutgers, about half an hour from here, was reluctant to sign off on a grant. One collaborator on the grant was a physician at Columbia University. The administrator thought that because of the federal attempt to impound Columbia's research money, better judgment suggested removing the collaborator’s name from the grant.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Tim Snyder calls obeying in advance. To remind everyone: when the executive branch tries to take away Colombia's funding abruptly, without due process, that action is likely to be illegal. The physician-scientist in my story did no wrong.

But University administrators are taught to follow rules. You can imagine the thought process: the federal government has a new rule, no money for Columbia…so we have to follow the rule. Any living person in the United States has only known the federal government as a source of rules that are supposed to be applied to all, in a uniform manner. Did it enter this administrator’s mind that the government might have been taken over by a force that was actively hostile to universities?

Why Eisgruber's statement matters

This is why Chris Eisgruber's statement is so important, at least in my sector, higher education. At last we have a university leader who will say that the Trump administration is attacking higher education. He's willing to point out that accusations of anti-Semitism are not made in good faith, but in fact constitute a pretext for pitting people against one another. And he's willing to stand up for those rights.

President Eisgruber said that Princeton and other institutions should engage in "forceful litigation." That's an interesting phrase. Eisgruber is a constitutional lawyer; he once worked as a Supreme Court clerk. He knows that the First Amendment protects all of us from having government curtail our speech. In that respect, the blackmail of Columbia University is an unconscionable threat to freedom of expression or thought. So expect some action by Princeton, and hopefully more of the 60-or-more other institutions under threat.

Not everyone understands this radical moment like Eisgruber. This brings us to a poster child for inability to grasp the situation: Chuck Schumer.

Missing the Moment

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reacted to the possibility of a government shutdown by giving in on a “clean” continuing resolution, or CR. Such a resolution is basically a way to keep the government open even though its budget authority has run out. Since the mid-1990s, such resolutions have become a normal part of partisan negotiations. Over three decades, negotiations have treated the budget as a hostage to be released once the demands of the Republican Party are met. The normal playbook has been to negotiate the terms of the budget, maybe let the government close for a while, and then Democrats provide some votes to pass the CR in both chambers of Congress.

Schumer played by the normal rules. However, since Trump/Musk/Vought are running roughshod over laws, illegally closing agencies (USAID, NIH, CDC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe), his behavior struck many close observers as bizarre. Indeed, middle-of-the-road Democrats such as Susan Rice urged Schumer to take an aggressive approach to block the CR. To these moderate but highly aware Democrats, Schumer appeared unready for the moment.

It’s been argued that Schumer had no good options. That may be. But what is clear is that he chose an option that gives the impression of business as usual.

Politics as public education

Chris Eisgruber has explained that we are well outside the normal operating range of American life. He is a person who carefully avoids any mention of partisan politics in public (and I can’t recall him doing so in private either). And as a leader who has emerged from the last two years of warfare relatively unscathed, he has some claim to speaking on behalf of a broad sector of higher education.

For those of us not in leadership, it can be hard to speak out. Many colleagues of mine are not citizens, or have sensitive research programs, or simply don't want to stick their necks out. I’ve seen an explosion in traffic on the encrypted platform, Signal. I understand that fear. But I also think it's time to start talking, as a means of making the attacks on democracy a normal topic of conversation.

The numbers game: How Many People Does It Take?

I'm immersed in a book from a few years ago, How Civil Resistance Works, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. The authors find that often, non-violent protest is more likely to succeed than violent protest. One big reason is that violent protest is, in some sense, exclusionary: it leaves out people, courts, businesses, churches, schools, universities, and local associations. Nonviolent conflict can include all of those sectors, and build a larger movement.

Think of the civil rights movement. Many sectors of society came together in favor of civil rights, and it became quite popular to speak out. Bob Dylan is portrayed in A Complete Unknown as joining up in order to meet girls. That civil rights movement helped drive the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other improvements in the lives of Black and other nonwhite Americans.

Chenoweth and Stephan analyzed hundreds of nonviolent protests around the world. They found that as a protest movement became larger, it was more likely to succeed:

The threshold where the probability of success goes above 50-50 is 1.5% of the population. So 1.5% is a good target for popular action.

That’s a lot: it’s 5 million people. Tesla Takedowns, Stand Up For Science, and other protests don’t seem close to that, yet. But the number of outrages is increasing.

Consider the following categories:

• Transgender-identifying people comprise about 1.6 million of the population.

• The scientific research community. Close to 2 million people work in scientific research, more or less. Only some fraction of them are angry about what's happening. But movements such as Stand Up For Science can increase that number.

• Colleges and universities. Total college enrollment is about 19 million. This is an essential population, since their educations depend on the survival of the system. However, it’s also a population with highly varied interests. There is a question of how many of them can be mobilized.

• Users of the federal government. OK, now we're getting someplace. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers whose jobs are threatened, quite a lot of people use the government directly. For example, about 73 million people receive benefits of some kind from Social Security. Add in patrons of national parks, weather forecasts, vaccines, prescription drugs, and It seems that the assault on functions of federal government, taken as a whole, might eventually mobilize meaningful opposition.

By the way, for the very data-minded, let me get into the weeds for a moment. If you read that curve carefully, it appears that there is a network effect: twice as many people leads to a four-fold increase in success. It’s like a matching-gift program, where network effects provide a matching gift for your activism.

Why Leadership Matters

Because it is frightening to stand up on one's own, it seems highly significant when a prominent person such as the president of Princeton University is willing to make a statement. Perhaps I have an inflated idea of the influence of a leader of higher education. Such a visible statement communicates the crisis of our moment. Otherwise, how will we know that something has gone deeply wrong in the American government?

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) has pointed out an important synergy in fighting authoritarianism. According to Raskin, “if you have just a legislative strategy to try to stop an authoritarian takeover, it only works about a third of the time. If you just have a popular resistance strategy on its own, it works about 30 or 40 percent of the time. But if you have a legislative strategy coordinated with a massive nationwide popular resistance and opposition to fascism, it wins more than two-thirds of the time.”

In this light, Schumer has failed on at least one count. His handling of the budget showdown appears to have weakened his ability to hang on as minority leader. If you have a Democratic Senator and want to weigh in on that, the U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.