The Encampment as Curriculum

In a recent essay in  The Chronicle of Higher Education ,  “Where are all the student protesters now?,”  Northwestern professor Rachel Webster offered an account of why her students are not protesting this spring. The essay catalogues surveillance, ICE, and administrative caution at length. But its most revealing line is none of these. It is this: The April 2024 encampment “marked the first time that most students had participated in democracy as a real-life process.” Read that sentence twice. These are Northwestern undergraduates, many of them juniors and seniors by spring 2024. Their professor is telling us the first time most of them experienced democracy was a tent on a university lawn. If that is true, it is not a vindication of the encampment. It is an indictment of the institution that credentialed them, beginning with the faculty who formed them. Democracy is not a tent on a lawn. Democracy is the slow work of self-government: arguments and ideas constrained by procedures, disagreement bounded and constrained by shared norms, and persuasion across difference under conditions where the other side cannot be silenced or expelled from the room. Students encounter democracy in a functioning classroom, where a peer they find odious gets the same speaking time, and where a professor presents the strongest version of the position the student came in hating. They encounter it in student government, in a campus newspaper that prints the letter no one wants printed, in the habits Tocqueville thought essential to the American experiment: associational life, deliberation, the small republic of the seminar table. Webster inadvertently reveals the imbalance. Her generation, she writes, “probably read Hannah Arendt” but “were far more likely to teach about, and against, settler colonialism.” She frames this as generational reaction. It is a curricular choice with consequences. When the political science department teaches the genealogy of grievance but not  The Federalist Papers , when the English department teaches the writer as “witness” but not the citizen as deliberator, when the contemporary humanities course treats institutions as suspects rather than inheritances to be stewarded, the result is what Webster now laments—students who can identify oppression in five frameworks but cannot articulate why a procedural republic protects them. This is the cloister Webster does not see. She locates it in surveillance and administrative caution but the deeper cloister is curricular. It is a four-year experience in which a student can encounter Foucault but not the Federalist, settler colonialism but not subsidiarity, the carceral state but not the jury and then be told that her first taste of democratic practice was a tent. The university mistakes political activation for civic formation and expressive solidarity for democratic education. And this matters because what students encountered at the encampment was not democracy at all. Webster reports that she “did not hear any antisemitic slurs during the first two days at the encampment.” The  House Education and Workforce Committee’s documentary record  tells a fuller story. Former Northwestern president Michael Schill conceded in his  August 2025 transcribed House interview  that no students had been disciplined—contradicting  his May 2024 sworn testimony  that “ discipline has been meted out to many of the students .” According to the  committee record , a Jewish student wearing a yarmulke reported being spat at; another reported being told to “go back to Germany and get gassed;” others reported being called “dirty Jew” and “Zionist pig.” Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, in his  December 8, 2025 letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon , confirmed that the city “denied” Northwestern’s request for police assistance. Webster’s defense is that the encampment was “organized largely by Jewish students” and that the antisemitism charge “disregards the many Jewish students who helped to plan the protest.” This is the substitution of one group of Jews for another. Jewish Voice for Peace members appear on her moral map, holding seders inside the protest. The Jewish students who reported being spat at, told to get gassed, and called “dirty Jew” do not. The presence of the first is offered as proof that the second’s experience cannot be true—or, if true, does not matter. There is an older word for what a classroom is supposed to be. The rabbis called it a  beit midrash— a house of study where  machloket l’shem shamayim , argument for the sake of heaven, is the discipline by which a community is formed. The encampment is the opposite of a  beit midrash . It is the abandonment of argument for the comfort of consensus. It rewards moral performance over intellectual encounter. If our students reach senior year never having sat in one, the question is not why they are quiet now. It is what we were doing while they were with us—teaching them to identify oppression, forgetting to teach them why a free society deserves defending. The post The Encampment as Curriculum appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .