[dramatic music] - I want this war to stop also, and that is where I totally agree with the protestors.

Let's stop this war.

Things that are extraneous to that, things that are about insulting other people's identities, like we need to dismantle the university police force, that's a distraction.

[bright music] - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today, we are looking at the student protests that have rocked university campuses for weeks.

According to recent polling, Americans are skeptical of what they're seeing with more of them likely to oppose than support campus protests.

But is that so different from public sentiment back in 1968, before I was born, when Columbia students also clashed with police?

Joining me today to talk about campus protests, past and present, and how today's tumult can reach a resolution, is Eboo Patel.

He runs a national nonprofit aimed at fostering civil discourse on over 600 college campuses.

And then we'll head on campus and hear from Columbia students directly.

[protestors chanting] But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

[bright music] - [Announcer] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains, with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

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Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [dramatic music] - Are the kids all right?

It sure doesn't seem like it.

- [Protestors] KKK and IDF, you're all the same.

From the river to the sea!

- On college campuses across the country, from my own Columbia, to Texas, to UCLA, students have pitched tent encampments.

They've occupied buildings and clashed with local police while protesting Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

More specifically, they're demanding change from their own institutions.

The calls to campus leadership have run the gamut, but the central cry is divestment from Israel, whether that means divesting from Israeli donors or Israeli businesses or other Israeli ties, depends on the campus and the protestor.

But thousands of students have willing to risk suspension, expulsion, or arrest to make their demands heard.

College protests have long reflected the conscience of America, years before the rest of us old folks got with the picture.

[protestors chanting] In fact, last time we saw such fervor on campus quads was during Columbia's 1968 protests when students first took over Hamilton Hall to protest the US involvement in Vietnam and plans to build a segregated gym near campus.

Then too, a central demand was divestment, though at that time it was from the US defense industry or anything tied to Vietnam.

So in that sense, the kids today, they're just following in the footsteps of their boomer parents or grandparents if they were fast about it.

But have the protests been effective?

In some ways, yes.

Students at Brown and Northwestern, for example, have managed to work out deals with their administrators, and a few other schools are heading in that direction.

Campus demonstrations are spreading around the world as the global youth make their discontent with the Gaza War clear.

But not everyone on campus is okay with these protests.

A lot are unhappy about another canceled commencement day, that's four years after COVID stole the class of 2020's high school graduation.

And while some Jewish students have joined the protests, many others have felt ostracized and threatened by them.

And then there is the bigger question.

Could these students actually change US policy towards Israel?

President Biden gave his answer to that question at the very end of a recent White House press conference.

- Mr. President, have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?

- No, thank you.

- Biden's response, while blunt, was hardly surprising, nor was the roughly $15 billion in US military funding for Israel that Congress recently passed, part of a larger foreign aid package.

Campus protestors were never gonna stop that funding from going through.

On the other hand, the oldest president in American history needs that Gen Z vote to win reelection in November.

And if these student protests continue into the summer and the fall, they could spell Biden's political downfall.

In that sense, students have a lot of leverage, and they know it.

Joining me now to talk about the protests sweeping America's universities is Eboo Patel.

His nonprofit, Interfaith America, has been working with hundreds of college campuses to foster healthier discussion and debate.

In other words, he's got his work cut out for him.

Eboo Patel, welcome to "GZERO World."

- Hi, Ian, thanks for having me.

- So Eboo, you run this organization called Interfaith America, and it's had a big impact on college campuses across the country.

Tell us a little bit, just for an audience that might not know it, what your role is and what your role has been in this crisis.

- We are the largest organization in the United States that works with diversity issues, including religious diversity.

We work across diversity categories, but religious diversity is something that we include proactively rather than ignore.

We help colleges design environments of cooperation from presidents making public statements about pluralism to training for every first-year student on cooperation skills.

So, we help college campuses and other organizations be environments of cooperation.

And what I like to say is diversity work cannot be a battlefield.

That's part of the problem right now is people think of diversity work as a battlefield.

Here's how I think we need to approach diversity.

Number one, diversity is a treasure.

Number two, cooperation is better than division.

Number three, identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization.

Number four, faith is a bridge.

And number five, everyone is a contributor.

Those are the kinds of messages that we bring to college campuses.

- If you're the president of a university with major demonstrations going on right now, what are a couple quick dos and don'ts?

- So first, I would deescalate as much as possible.

Talking is always better than fighting.

I would try to remind people that a university is a place where people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies cooperate in the search for truth together, and can we do that?

And then frankly, I would say, from my own personal point of view, that war is terrible, and let's absolutely look to work together to find a way to end this war as quickly as possible.

And the truth of the matter is universities have resources that can help do that.

I'll give you an example.

Many times, universities have expert negotiators on their faculty.

Are there ways that those expert negotiators can play a constructive role in the current conflict?

Those are the kinds of things that I think that university presidents should do.

They should always lift up the chief value of a university, which is cooperation across difference to learn together and to seek truth together.

- Why do you think this is happening right now?

Just generally this level of hatred, contempt, unwillingness to speak to each other, and also specifically, why the Middle East when there's so much that's going on in the world that is deeply contested?

- The media, for good reasons, covers planes that crash and not planes that land.

So, my organization, Interfaith America, we have a network of 600 college campuses.

I'm on a different college campus roughly every week.

In fact, I was on two campuses just this past week, because I'm a a commencement speaker at a lot of places.

And both of them have handled the situation quite well, even though students have had the opportunity, it maybe especially because students have had the opportunity to express themselves, to engage in conversations that are marked by learning and engagement rather than confrontation and fighting.

And so, let's not just pay attention to the 50 places in America where things are looking pretty ugly right now.

Let's remember that there's 2,500 or so universities, and in many, many of them, this is being handled quite well.

That's the first thing to say- - And when you say quite well, you really mean that there might be some demonstrations going on, but they're peaceful.

There are no issues that require intervention.

There is nothing that is newsworthy in the vast majority of campuses in the United States right now.

- That's exactly right.

Most campuses on most days are places of learning that we should be proud of, and places of cooperation that we should be proud of.

I have Muslim friends who are faculty.

I have Jewish friends who are faculty who are telling me that their classroom is a place where people are asking good questions, where they're learning from one another, where they're saying things like, "Oh, I never thought of it that way."

That is what a university should be about.

- Now let's focus though on what's bleeding and leading and why you think it's happening now.

- So, there are a couple of issues in American life, which are deeply divisive.

One of them is abortion.

One of them is the Middle East.

I just take that for granted.

One of the reasons we have universities is, as the great philosopher, Alistair McIntyre says, "To initiate people into the conflicts "of a diverse democracy and to teach them "how to discuss them in rational ways."

I think the problem here, the thing that universities could control, which I think that they have gotten wrong in many cases over the course of the past five years, is the default mode has been set to confrontation, not cooperation.

First year students come on campus and confrontation is romanticized.

People are told that some people are the oppressed, and some people are the oppressors.

The oppressed can never do anything right The oppressors can never do anything wrong, and diversity is a battlefield.

I think that that is the wrong way to approach a diverse environment like a university.

I think that universities should say, "Hey, listen, diversity is a lot more like a potluck.

"We invite people to bring the dishes "that are inspired by their distinctive identities, "and we create a space for creative combinations "and enriching conversations."

That's something that can and should change.

We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm.

- So if you're a student of Palestinian descent, what's the dish that's so tasty that you are bringing to campus right now that everybody wants to partake in?

Because I mean, that's a high bar.

- So, Palestinian culture is beautiful.

All cultures are beautiful.

All cultures have associated with them foods and fashion and language and rights and rituals, that's what we should be bringing.

All cultures have associated with them literatures and songs, that's what we should be bringing with them.

And if you are of Palestinian descent, and you are absolutely shattered by the way the war has gone, I feel that and I understand that, and I think your voice should be heard.

And if you want this war to stop, I feel that and I understand that, and I think your voice should be heard.

And incidentally, if you're Israeli or Jewish and you want that, I think that that is exactly right.

I want this war to stop also, and that is where I totally agree with the protesters.

Let's stop this war.

Things that are extraneous to that, things that are about insulting other people's identities, things that are about, like we need to dismantle the university police force, that's a distraction.

I would like the peaceful protests to focus on stopping the war and being in a cooperative engagement with the university administration, who again, may have a set of resources, like for example, faculty members who are expert negotiators that could actually make a positive difference in this situation.

- We can then have a long conversation about the Middle East, because clearly, the majority of Israelis don't agree with the idea that the war should be stopped right now, at least not until more has been done against Hamas.

But I am more interested in what you think is and isn't appropriate on campus.

So specifically, where do we start talking about limits of appropriate free speech being breached?

In other words, what should be considered beyond the pale in speech that might make a student of Jewish descent or of Palestinian descent feel unsafe, legitimately unsafe, not that you said something mean or that they disagree with, but something that actually requires some level of policing by the university?

- Yeah, so Ian, I'm gonna shift the question just a little bit.

I'm gonna stay within the general, I'm gonna say, if I was a professor and teaching a class on effective protest, not romanticizing protest here, I'm teaching a class on how do you have an effective movement for constructive social change?

It's a very high bar, right?

One of the things that I would say is whatever you say or do to another group, you have now made fair game to say and do to you.

So if you call another group baby killer, and you beat drums outside of, say, their cultural center, I'm making this up, but it's not implausible.

Well, it's not impossible that that could happen to you.

If you burn a flag that another group cherishes, it is not impossible that somebody else may burn a flag or an item that you cherish.

If you chant, "From the river to the sea," somebody else can chant, "From the river to the sea."

And so, I don't know how to think of this as a senior administrator, because part of what senior administrators have to think about right now is when, not only are we crossing lines of speech into harassment, but when are we provoking violence as happened at UCLA, or involved in a situation that can very easily become violence, as happened at UCLA, physical violence?

But I would say, as a professor in the intellectual space, I think a really important consideration is as soon as you start to engage in something, you move that action or slogan into a territory called fair game, and now somebody else can do it.

And so, one of the things that I think is important just as somebody who seeks to set norms is if there are a set of things that you don't want to be called, and you want a norm of other people respecting your preferred names or pronouns or whatever, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask other people how they want to be engaged with.

I think that that is a norm of civil discourse, and absolutely, a campus has to be a place of civil discourse.

Because one of the things that makes universities such a treasure of American civilization is precisely because they gather people from an impossibly wide range of identities and an impossibly diverse spectrum of ideologies into the same place.

And we literally say people who pray like you, people of different ethnicities like you, they're at each other's throats on the other side of the world.

But here in this magic space of the university, we are lab partners, we are roommates.

I think that that is so special.

And in order for us to strengthen that, we need to shift the default setting from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm, and we build up the muscles and skills to do that.

It's a skillset.

It's not easy to cooperate.

- So, my pushback is coming from a place of hope here, but I also see there are a lot of people on campuses that think of what Israel is doing on the ground in Gaza right now as genocide.

That is obviously not a characterization that is agreed with by the majority of the Israeli people.

There are a lot people among the Israeli population, Jewish populations, that see Hamas, and anyone that supports Hamas, as a terrorist.

What do you do with that in today's college environment?

- Actually, I think that that is a stunningly rich learning experience.

And so, I would love to see students who are within two or three of each other politically, and by the way, I think most people are.

Most people are somewhere between center leftish and center, right-ish.

And what would it be like if 500 campuses in America, instead of having dueling protests in which the language people are calling each other is becoming increasingly insulting and provocative, if they said, "We're going to have a teach-in "on what a ceasefire agreement could look like."

A bunch of 20 year olds got together at 500 campuses and they said, "We're gonna figure out what a ceasefire looks like, "and we're gonna put it in one-page documents, "and we're gonna send it to Washington DC."

And we're gonna say, "If we can figure this out, "you can figure this out."

- We have elections coming up in November.

Do you think that students and youth more broadly are gonna be more engaged in these elections as a consequence of all this, or no?

- Boy, it's really hard to say.

It's a long, you know, May and November, it might only be five or six months, but it's gonna feel like six seasons in American life.

What I would think is, I would say is like the kind of responsible people, so to speak, we have to be busy building spaces where people with different ideas and views can find common ground.

Walt Whitman says, "There's nothing as holy "as common ground," and I believe that.

Look, the only way to have a diverse democracy is for people to be able to disagree on some fundamental things and work together on other fundamental things.

And I will tell you what the nightmare situation is in American life is if firefighters, walking into the fire station, look at each other, and they say, "Hey, you're wearing a Trump hat."

And somebody else says, "Well, you're wearing a Biden hat."

And they say, "We can't fight fires together."

And by the way, that happens in other countries.

Let's not forget that most societies over most of civilization have been societies where people of different ethnicities, religions, or races either do not live together, because they live in homogenous communities, or they are at each other's throats.

The most important thing that we do in the United States of America is we build a society where people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies can cooperate.

We need to cherish that, and we need to strengthen that, and I think colleges are the best place to do it, but we need to do a better job there.

- That's a great message for our students, Eboo.

Thanks so much for joining us.

- Thanks, Ian.

[bright music] - After weeks of protests and police activity on Columbia's campus here in New York City, administrators announced that the university-wide commencement will be canceled, which is really sad.

What's it like to be a graduating senior on campus during this historic moment?

As it turns out, a member of our own GZERO team knows a thing or two about that.

For more, here's Alex Kliment and Riley Callanan.

[gentle music] - [Protestors] Free, free Palestine.

Free, free Palestine.

- [Alex] The past few weeks of protest and police activity have been the tensest moments that Columbia University has seen in more than 50 years.

GZERO's Riley Callanan not only covered the upheaval from the ground, she's also a senior at Columbia herself, preparing to graduate under circumstances she never could have imagined.

Riley, tell us a little bit about what it's been like to cover this story while wearing these two hats at the same time, being both a student and a journalist in the community where this is all happening.

- I mean, it's obviously been difficult.

It's a really challenging time on campus.

I have reported on my fellow students being arrested more than once, as well as my peers who have gone home, because they don't feel safe on campus, as well as my friends who are just really bummed that we're not gonna get a commencement ceremony in two weeks.

- When House Speaker, Mike Johnson, came to Columbia to give his address on the steps of Low Library, you were there.

You were basically as close as a person could be to Mike Johnson as possible.

- There is an appropriate time for the National Guard.

We have to bring order to these campuses.

We cannot allow this to happen around the country.

We are better than this, we're better than this.

- That was a really interesting moment, because if you were watching it on the news, you saw a press conference where he was ostensibly addressing students, but if you were there and you were a student, you couldn't hear him.

And I think knowing that my peers down below couldn't even hear him was really symbolic of all of these national figures coming to campus to put their stamp on one side or the other.

The real audience is people watching it at home.

- Let me ask you about that.

What do you think the national media narrative that grew up around the protests, in general, but about Columbia in particular, what do you think it misses?

- A lot of students have nuanced views and right now, on campus, our dialogue is a little broken, but I think we are all pushing for progress, and I think a lot of the national news audience, I think, because also of these public figures that are coming on campus, and using it as press ops and things like that, are really perceiving it through their own biases, rather than if you're really on campus, you get a more complete picture.

- What are your classmates talking about right now about this issue?

- Right now, everybody's talking about commencement and how it's been canceled.

I think that there is a deep sadness, especially in the class of 2024, given that so many people graduated from high school during COVID and didn't get their last graduation.

But I also think that there is a lot of solidarity and that we know that we're living through a moment in history.

And I think especially graduating during the COVID pandemic and having losing so much college because of COVID, that the class of 2024, in particular, understands that sometimes you live through history and events that are bigger than you can take away these big moments, and that they're just not guaranteed.

- [Alex] So this time of year, people should normally be worrying about studying for finals.

How are people studying for finals?

How is campus life happening right now?

- Campus is completely shut down.

That's why we're in this park a few blocks away.

The university is completely shut down.

There's police everywhere.

You need an ID to get in.

So this is the closest place that students can gather at the moment.

It feels almost like an echo of COVID-19.

Everybody's alone in their dorm rooms, taking classes online, taking finals online.

- After all of this upheaval and tension, is there a positive takeaway that you have from all of this?

- I think one thing that I have found really inspiring has been watching my generation become politically aware in real time.

A lot of my friends at the beginning of this year didn't have a feeling about or an opinion on the two-state solution either way.

But now I'm watching my friends read and debate and discuss, and watching students use their voices to speak out against the war in Gaza is translating to them finding their voices on other issues, and I think that that's inspiring.

[gentle music] [bright music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you want to take over your own campus, go ahead and check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[bright music continues] [bright music continues] [bright music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains, with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by... Cox Enterprise is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music]