The campus protest talk doesn't seem to stop
Drake's rap beefs may have to wait
Looking at those kids on the lawn: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the new ‘youth’ movement on display in campus protests across North America
The young people are having a party and we’re not invited…
From foreign wars to culture wars, pro-Palestinian campus protesters are (incidentally) changing the media narrative
As pro-Palestinian encampments pop up across Canadian campuses this week, protesting against university ties to Israel and threatening to keep their tents pitched until the war in Gaza ends, it helps to understand the broader context of how this all began. And if you ask the Columbia University students at ground zero of this movement how they feel about the media circus they’ve created, they’ll tell you frankly: they didn’t ask for it.
That’s what many of them told Justin Ling, a Montreal-based freelance reporter who visited the New York university to see the original tent city firsthand. But that deflection belies an inescapable paradox. Maybe they didn’t want all this media attention, but they’ve made themselves the main characters of this story, shifting the focus from a faraway foreign war to North America’s culture wars. Now the movement has snowballed into something far greater.
Ling joins Bonjour Chai to explain what he saw, share his takeaways and debate with the hosts about the merits of student activism—and whether it should be allowed at all.
Check out more of what we’re reading for future contemplations on the podcast…