The students were told their protest would cause trouble. Others argued they were overreacting; some called their actions inappropriate. Keep your head down, don’t draw attention, don’t get police involved.
It’s not hard to imagine the chatter from parents and professionals in the weeks and months before McGill University students succeeded in forcing the institution to fully divest from banks and corporations doing business with apartheid South Africa in 1985. Their protest was the culmination of a sustained, multi-year effort that saw dozens of students occupy university buildings and a company’s head office, where protesters were arrested and charged with “illegal occupation.” That this dissent faced considerable opposition, both from within McGill and without, is of secondary importance today. What matters is that the students won.
McGill’s anti-apartheid student protests, part of a wave of similar protests in Canada, have certain parallels with today’s campus occupations related to the siege of Gaza. The decision to take over a campus space might look like an impulsive act, but such occupations are typically an expression of frustration after other pressure tactics fail to produce meaningful action. The protests are not mass mobilizations—they involve, at most, a core cluster of students, whose numbers can vary. While the present occupation at McGill, which began in late April and now involves dozens of tents, has been described as a “tiny city,” this is more a reflection of the services provided—wooden walkways, stockpiles of donated supplies, a library—than sheer numbers. While encampments weren’t part of the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s, just about everything else remains the same: a polarizing social justice issue, the occupation of “elite” spaces, and demands for divestiture. McGill students today aren’t really doing anything that different from what their parents’ generation did in decades past.
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