Professor Robert Cohen Weighs In on Student Antiwar Protests

Following a spate of student protests across college campuses last spring, Cohen has become a featured national expert for his historical knowledge.

Following a wave of student protests against the war in Gaza on college campuses across the country earlier this year, Robert Cohen, professor of social studies education at NYU Steinhardt, has become a nationwide voice in this national discussion.

Due to his scholarly expertise in student activism and social protest in 20th century America, Cohen has been tapped as an expert by multiple publications for stories about these antiwar demonstrations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vox, and more.

“The country has moved quite a bit to the conservative right since the large-scale student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War, so when people—including higher education administrations—saw these protests on college campuses, they overreacted with arrests and academic suspensions,” says Cohen. “I think this suppression is an incorrect and dangerous response to a relatively small and 98 percent nonviolent movement, and people have lost a lot of perspective.” 

While student movements have never been particularly popular in the U.S., Cohen sees a kind of cultural conservatism at play here in which “students should be seen and not heard.”

“The idea that students are doing something wrong and that they should just go to class is completely false; they are doing something they’re supposed to be doing, which is thinking critically and challenging orthodoxies,” says Cohen. “What we should be thinking about is why students feel it's necessary to camp out to have a voice because they’re not being listened to in the halls of power across the country.”

What people ought to be concerned about, Cohen believes, is that the panicky use of police (or National Guard) to suppress student dissent can yield bloodshed. For example, in 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed college students on the Kent State University campus during a rally opposing the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. This act led to major antiwar demonstrations across more than 1,300 college campuses and involving more than four million students.

“The student protests against the war in Gaza from Spring 2024 are much smaller, and the degree of emotion is not as strong in America as it was at the end of the Vietnam era,” says Cohen. “Colleges and universities don’t have to side with student protestors, but they should allow them to speak and promote a dialogue. Most universities were arresting students instead, which is a terrible model.”

With a presidential election coming up this semester, Cohen views it as sad that many universities have been so punitive and so tightened up time, place, and manner regulations that many students are afraid to engage in protest activity. 

“We risk replacing the vibrant political atmosphere of last semester with political quiescence: the peace of the graveyard,” says Cohen. “Is that what we want on our campuses in this crucial moment for American democracy?”

Read more of Cohen’s thoughts on the recent student protests in additional articles by QS Insights Magazine, Yahoo News, AP News, The Hill, and ABC 7 News.