Inside a Campus Crackdown Over Wokeism in France
Still, it’s noticeable that media reports about threats were everywhere, while Kinzler describes his situation as follows: “1500 unread messages since the day before! Skimming through a few dozen, I see that they all express support for me.” The threats the media were referring to were most likely those on the original poster. The threat they were interested in was the one contained in the charge of fascism and “Islamophobia”; they seemed entirely uninterested in the torrent of threats precipitated by yelling about “islamogauchisme” in every newspaper and talk show.
The threat, by this line of reasoning, was saying that “Islamophobia kills,” as the students had done on their poster, a poster initially seen by a handful of people on an Alpine campus and among the social media followers of a student union. The idea that blasting an academic as an “islamogauchiste” on TV, radio, and newspapers might lead to messages like “Let her die with her ass stuffed with red rags and her mouth open,” as 73-year-old Alain B. said on Facebook about Amilhat Szary, did not seem to enter the equation.
This is where the story of Grenoble becomes the story of the university in the present age. The present age, meaning, in this case: a resurgent far right and a liberal, centrist establishment that seems increasingly ready to share the far right’s vocabulary and preoccupations. By December 2021, when the second round of stories about Sciences Po began to hit the international papers, the institute director told a French broadcaster that she was “stunned to discover the image of the IEP in the media.”
Grenoble was finding itself at the center of one of those campus stories that are effective, or maybe even meaningful, only when seen from the maximum possible distance. Within France, barely anyone seemed to bother to try to understand what had actually happened; and in the story’s international reception, that tendency was, if anything, heightened. Swiss newspapers could use the account to scare their readers about what might soon make its way to their own institutions of higher learning. German newspapers could combine it with a few American campus anecdotes to tell the tale of a woke virus that was threatening to spread to the Fatherland. It was that kind of international mythmaking that had led the Macron government to fixate on “islamogauchisme” in the first place. Now it was used to metabolize the events in Grenoble.
What Sciences Po experienced is something that has begun to characterize campus life in many Western countries. The strange magic by which a demand suddenly becomes a threat, while very real, very material threats somehow fail to register. The campus where an ineffectual administration barely contains the threat from within is apparently embodied by a group of undergraduates who have gotten hold of some paper and a canister of paint.
In the United States in 2023, seven university presidents were hauled before Congress to be yelled at by representatives of both parties for failing to discipline their students. Media and commentators seemed to desire nothing more than combat boots and truncheons raining down on blue-haired undergraduates (and in many places got exactly what they desired). The dynamics that enveloped the pretty campus in the Alps in 2021 have become an export item.
When U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York started her crusade against elite colleges, she mostly avoided talking about Islam. She instead described a university that, as she wrote in the New York Post, had been weakened by “decades of moral decay, intellectual laziness and dangerous far-left radical groupthink.” The notion that the West has weakened its institutions through relativism and thus primed them for takeover is widespread in conservative circles, but it is worth saying: Stefanik’s reasoning is “great replacement” logic applied to the university quad. During congressional hearings, Representative Kevin Kiley went further, and suggested, for instance, that Harvard’s Claudine Gay regarded “antisemites” as her “constituency.”
The idea that woke multiculturalists were in secret and intentional alliance with Muslim terrorism has become a favorite go-to of the second Trump administration. So has the idea that this supposed alliance never had to be substantiated by more than vibes. Each letter that goes out from the interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism draws on a mishmash of actual complaints about antisemitism; conservative grievances over free speech, wokeness, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; and accusations of terrorism. In using Title VI claims and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and by linking these to “woke” or “postcolonial” theories, the administration has created the perfect cudgel to attack campus life. Its aim appears to be, in each instance, state control. In April, the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard University. The top-line items—mandated appointment of conservative scholars, curtailing of faculty governance—got most of the attention. But in between all the other demands, the federal government expressed the opinion that the venerable university literally shields students “supportive of terrorism.”
Again and again, leaders were not responding to what was actually happening on local campuses—they were reacting to what they had been told had happened at faraway campuses. “Islamogauchisme” wasn’t explicitly invoked, but the idea that when students object to war crimes, “Hamas” is “taking over” the campus draws on the same connection. The charge of “islamogauchisme” is a rumor about the university, insubstantial, changeable, impossible to disprove. And it is destructive of the very institution it pretends to be so concerned about.
