Rob Henderson’s story is nothing short of inspiring – it is an almost Platonic realisation of the meritocratic ideal – a testament to how your life can change day and night when you put in the work. Ever since I chanced upon his book in a bookstore in Singapore, I was hooked. The story of this man winning at life even when all the odds were stacked against him was really striking and rendered my own qualms trivial. 

However, a video-style essay published by Henderson in the New York Times last month made me reconsider the nature of his beliefs. The focus of Henderon’s video were students from elite colleges protesting across America, who he supposed were too privileged and had no skin in the game. Fair enough. His video featured some brazenly nonsensical posters paraded around campuses by college students: Defunding the police, decriminalising drugs, getting rid of standardised tests and getting rid of marriages. He rightly points out that the marginalised do not want any of this, and in fact want more of the opposite - the poor in the US want more police intervention, more control on drugs, more standardised tests and many look up to marriages as auguries of stability.

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All of this is perfectly cogent. College students can support absolute rubbish in the pretext of a campaign for ‘Justice.’ But there is a massive gloss-over. The missing keyword is ‘sometimes.’ College students can sometimes support absolute rubbish. In his five-minute disquisition, Henderson does not seem receptive to that keyword. He appears to categorically reject the legitimacy of every single college protest by virtue of them being premised on an oversimplified and ostensibly elitist narrative. 

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Despite there being inherent flaws with this view, it sounds correct on the surface. Especially when the video juxtaposes students holding a ‘legalise drugs’ banner against the backdrop of a solemn veneration for the Civil Rights protests of the 1950s, in tandem with poignant music that likely primed most viewers to dismiss college protests as a form of elite entertainment. 

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Elitist reductionism is perhaps a phrase that Henderson would love.

He might make the case that elite students should peruse texts positing different views, learn about the complex history surrounding issues and then partake in protests. But all of that is possible only on paper.

I count myself among the lucky-few that have always had a penchant for history. I can endure the pages of Rashid Khalidi and Benny Morris’ books for hours and hours in my quest for a reasonable explanation as to why things are the way they are right now for Israel and Palestine. This from both anecdotal experience and research is a rarity. With an attention span of just over 8 seconds, my generation thrives on short-clips running all over social media and we certainly have a proclivity for oversimplifying things. But the essence of meaning is not lost in that process because we’re still human. Ofcourse, we understand the cruxes of causes that matter.

Most of my friends at college don’t even have a sliver of interest in history, yet all have strong, righteous opinions on Israel and Palestine—just like many other Gen-Z. A deep dive into the past is not needed to formulate what is essentially a moral argument. These students are caught up in some sort of unyielding black-or-white, right-or-wrong thinking, just like me: Ceasefire over war. Any person with a conscience can discard the history books on my table and still conclude that a ceasefire is imperative. They derive that from instinct, not some hefty books. Hamas was wrong to kill 1,163 Israelis on October 7, and so is the Israeli government for ending the lives of over 33,000 Palestinians for the sins of a few hundred extremists.

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The charge of oversimplification is increasingly wielded to cudgel college protests that have at their core, a deeply humanitarian ethos. Sometimes it quite simply is black or white—to wage war or not. Oversimplification is not an absolute failure of discourse, it can also be an accurate amplification of it. Henderson overlooks this simple fact.

It is easy and expedient to cherry pick examples of college protests embracing ill-conceived and redundant rhetoric that are also oversimplified and then extrapolate that like an umbrella over all college protests. If a select few protests are wrong, that does not make all protests wrong. To suppose so is to dangerously generalise, and by extension, an oversimplification in itself.

His second point: College protests are solely about students vying for attention and not actually founded on a genuine concern for victims. That I’m inclined to agree with. It may be true. Perhaps the students just want to skive off lectures. Perhaps they are on the grounds protesting because there’s this class of a professor they don’t like coming up. Or because they just don’t like college. All of these are real possibilities.

But the motivations behind college protests are immaterial because they don’t change the outcome. Hands-on consequentialism wins over arm-chair deontology any day. Student protests remind people around the US and the world that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not just another run-of-the-mill headline to scroll past; it's a tragedy that should make us sick to our stomachs. Protests at colleges like Harvard and Columbia breathe life into a cause that might otherwise seem too abstract, too distant and too disconnected. Protests are good at mobilising people, pressuring politicians and forcing a response.

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More than anything, Henderson’s argument hits unjustly hard at the fighting spirit that has always been the hallmark of students around the world. Students led the Hungarian uprising against the USSR in 1956, the South Korean protests for freedom in the 1980s, the Arab Spring that overthrew authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and most recently ousted an iron-fisted dictator in Bangladesh. Henderson might argue that all these movements involved students with skin in the game. Surely American college students have nothing to do with a conflict in the Middle East? As citizens of the United States – a country with a telling track record of power to shape the future of the Middle East – I’d wager they do have skin in the game.

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His video finishes off with a melancholic aerial shot of all the mess that protesting students left behind as they scurried home for the summer. I’m not going to defend that. That is indefensible. There is nothing that can justify littering. Perhaps Henderson's five minutes of fame would have been better spent teaching these students the virtue of picking up their trash rather than launching a narrow-minded assault on the substance of their protests.