By Paul A. Djupe, Data for Political Research

Students occupied buildings. They set up lasting encampments. They disrupted classes. They produced pamphlets. Eventually, some faced jail time and expulsion. They did this in order to draw attention to the war in Gaza and the long plight of the Palestinians. How did Denison avoid this?

In fact, Denison has avoided major confrontations with student protestors for as long as I’ve been here – a lifetime’s worth of years. And it’s not like there was a shortage of things to protest. Campuses have blown up, almost literally, over canceling conservatives, various American wars, the Trump Administration and much more. Denison just doesn’t seem to have a protesting culture.

Maybe one reason is that students just don’t think they’re very effective. Sure, protests are sometimes necessary without access to power and with the need to call out injustices. More than three-quarters of students agree that those ideas are true, leaving very few to disagree. But that’s just in theory. When asked in March 2024 if protests are successful, students either don’t know or at least are equivocal. More than a third think protests create more backlash than support (while 38 percent don’t really know). It’s about the same for evaluations of the BLM protests – arguably the largest American protest movement in history. Only about 36 percent agreed that the movement was successful. And if they weren’t successful, then how would other, smaller movements fare?

There’s some politics behind that figure that you might expect. Protests in general are often thought of as a liberal tactic. Of course that’s not true and conservatives have protested a wide range of things, including abortion. But in this context, I’ll bet most were thinking of left-leaning protests like BLM. And students who lean to the left are modestly more supportive of protest – they see less potential for backlash and they think BLM was more successful. And it’s only Republicans who object to the idea that injustices may need a public outcry, which surely would change if the political framing of these questions shifted to the right.

But there may be other reasons why Denisonians aren’t much the protesting type.

We’re coming up on the anniversary (October 7) of the Hamas incursion into Israel that left over 1,000 people dead and hundreds taken hostage. Israel went to war and the war sparked protests against the war and against Israel, especially since support for the Palestinians has been an article of faith for the Left. There are some strong feelings about the two sides that I explored in the spring. Two things are clear in the figure below – there’s not a lot of love for Israel and also there’s not a big spike in pro-Palestinian sentiment. It doesn’t take an entire campus to protest, but there’s not a groundswell of deeply polarized support for Palestinians, at least as of March 2024. And all but the most polarized of students modestly agree that protests create more backlash than support.

Just today, the NYT reported that the President of Rutgers was stepping down. The Black history professor was deeply committed to civil discourse and the free exchange of ideas, but the campus culture wars, including post Oct 7 protests, ground him down. He’s not the only one, the politics of reactions to the protests drove out other high-profile college presidents, including of Harvard (Claudine Gay – a Black political scientist) and Penn (Elizabeth McGill – a White legal scholar). So far, Denison has avoided that kind of toxic protest culture and our White sociologist is still at the helm of a college ranked by USNWR as 32nd in the nation among LACs – Denison’s highest ranking yet and a few rungs above Kenyon.

Paul A. Djupe is a local cyclist who runs the Data for Political Research minor. He started onetwentyseven.blog a few years ago in a bid to subsidize collective action and spread accurate knowledge about campus and what goes on there. He also writes about religion and politics in the US.