by Jyoti M. Rao
International experts have concluded that recent crackdowns on campus protests have created “a widespread hostile environment for the exercise of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association” and recommended that universities find ways to respect and support their students. Still, student activists and their allies have seen escalating disciplinary actions taken against them for speaking out against the horrific human rights violations in Gaza as a result of military bombardment substantially underwritten by the U.S. government. These actions against students have included extensive surveillance, involvement of armed law enforcement, suspensions, threats to employment, and declarations of tenured faculty as personae non gratae for participating in protests. In the early months of 2025, escalation of this hostility has included withdrawal of federal funding from universities at which protests took place and an executive order targeting students and casting their political activity in propagandistic terms.
While narratives about contemporary student protestors portray them as uniquely suspect and deserving of punishment, activists and reformers have been maligned throughout U.S. history:
“How far do we go in tolerating these people and this trash under the excuse of academic freedom and freedom of expression?” (President Ronald Reagan, referring to Free Speech Movement student protestors in California, 1967)
“If anyone came into my store and tried to stop business I’d throw him out. [He] should behave himself and show he’s a good citizen. Common sense and good will can solve this whole thing.” (President Harry Truman, referring to Southern lunch-counter desegregation activists, 1960)
“They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” (Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, referring to student antiwar protestors, 1970; Rhodes subsequently ordered the Ohio National Guard to suppress campus protests against the Vietnam War, resulting in the Kent State Massacre)
“It’s an excess of free speech to use—to resort to some of the tactics these people use.” (President George H. W. Bush, referring to ACT UP members seeking care for people with AIDS, 1991)
“They don’t know very much at all…about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.” (former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, referring to pro-Palestinian student protestors, 2024)
“You see these bums, you know, blowing up campuses.” (President Richard Nixon, referring to student antiwar protestors, 1970)
“[They] cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left [them] free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.” (Senator Jesse Helms, referring to southern civil rights activists, 1963)
“So ridiculous. [She] must work on her Anger Management (sic) problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend.” (President Donald Trump, referring to climate activist Greta Thunberg, after she was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine at the age of 16, 2019).
“[He] is the most notorious liar in the country.” (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, referring to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964)
This rhetoric is notably consistent in its condemnation of activists and activism across time, context, location, and issue. In these accounts, activists are repeatedly described as dishonest, contemptible, intrusive, ignorant, excessive, undesirable, dangerous, pathological, and punishable—the same devaluing terms in which student activists are described by many in power today. Yet almost all the quotes above refer to people and causes we now rightly credit for their efforts to win essential gains through their activism.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, negative portrayals of activists are rooted in a form of transference, a re-experiencing in the present of past affective and relational formations, broadly construed. Although clinical psychoanalysis has focused intensively on the dynamics of the transference between the patient and the clinician, Freud theorized transference as a ubiquitous feature of interpersonal life, an aspect of all relational interactions. This has led to a proliferation of conceptualizations, including what is known as institutional transference: patterns from the past that shape one’s perception of institutions and what transpires within them. Similarly, in psychoanalytic work in public health settings, some analysts have posited a bureaucratic transference: subjective perceptions in the present that have their origins “in prior experience with social agencies and social configurations.”
Building on this work, I have proposed a concept that may assist in understanding stubborn antagonism towards student activists—what I’ve referred to elsewhere as “social transference,” which is a particular form of transference emerging from the larger social context and directed at specific groups and at individuals understood to represent those groups. Social transferences may be positive and idealizing, as in white supremacy or adulation of the wealthy. Or they may be negative and devaluing, as in the case of attacks against people who are Palestinian, trans, poor, undocumented—or who are vocal in their defense, such as contemporary student activists. Ascribing qualities to others via projection in pre-scripted and repetitive ways is a hallmark of transferential process, as is the revivification in the present of relational patterns from the past. Sigmund Freud noted that we repeat in the transference what we refuse to remember; this may be especially salient in areas of longstanding trauma, such as social injustice.
Although all transferences begin as internal psychological processes, they may result in material actions taken against activists in the external world, including arrests and other disciplinary actions. Civil rights workers fighting for voting rights and desegregation faced physical violence, including lethal force, at the hands of both law enforcement and white supremacist gangs. Just days before the Ohio National Guard opened fire on Vietnam-era student antiwar protestors at Kent State University, killing four, student activists were maligned by President Nixon as “bums blowing up campuses” and squandering their opportunity to learn, and by Ohio’s governor as “the worst type of people”—accusations similar to those directed at present-day students protesting the dire conditions in Gaza. In the aftermath of the murders, a local resident was quoted as saying: “I don’t feel sorry for the kids, they asked for it.” In early March 2025, the federal government took the extraordinary step of initiating proceedings to deport former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent U.S. resident and green card holder, for his role in campus activism.
The open aggression and absence of empathy towards these student activists is, at least in part, the product of negative social transference, which leads to the vilification of activists as dangerous, lazy, overly entitled, irrational, undesirable, and disposable agitators. Abuses of power are facilitated by these transferences, in which negative attributes are assigned to activists and ostensibly reasonable action is taken against them as if these attributes were real.
Transferential dynamics may make our perceptions feel accurate despite their sometimes extreme distortions of reality. Thus it is crucial to view these negative portrayals critically—indeed, to consider them within a psychoanalytic “hermeneutics of suspicion.” While valid disagreement and critiques of contemporary student activism exist, it is essential to distinguish them from the powerful transferential elements that have been used to justify over 3600 arrests in largely non-violent protests, to obscure widespread support for student protestors among students themselves, and to justify federal transgressions against lawful citizens. Anti-activism tactics capitalize on negative social transferences to polarize the public and undermine the integrity of civil society.
Transferences may be perniciously paired with structural forces, such as Jim Crow in the post-Civil War South and the nationwide Lavender Scare of the 1940s and 1950s—phenomena that helped set the stage for unchecked negative social transferences to converge with the political exclusion of Black and LGBTQ+ citizens who might have acted as reality-checking deterrents to what so often followed: state violence used with impunity against those who resisted oppression with social justice activism.
Similarly, the banning of affirmative action and current purges of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have already led to steep declines in diversity on many college campuses, weakening the opportunities for learning and solidarity that such diversity provides. As the renowned scholar Robert Jay Lifton writes, scholarship and activism share important, mutually informing resonances. Weakening one results in the weakening of the other, a fact that is currently being used strategically to undermine both.
Social justice activism, including student activism, holds interpretive value that may contribute to a “working through” of the social transference. The transformation of negative social transferences is part of the potential for therapeutic action inherent in the interpretive action of social justice work. Other therapeutic actions offered by activists include the provision of direct emotional support and opportunities for introjection, catharsis, insight, and identification. In psychoanalytic terms, repression of student activism is a violent acting out of the negative social transference and a resistance against the interpretations being offered by activists to those who will listen.
In the case of students protesting Palestinian suffering, campus activists are drawing attention to the violent deaths of upwards of 46,000 people, at least half of them women and children. Over 60,000 children in Gaza will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year, a condition which carries the risk of lifelong illness. Nearly all children in the area face dire mental health consequences from the trauma they are enduring. Student activists on campuses today, with their understanding of the present and their vision of a different future, are being punished to quash the interpretive potential of their activism as they persist in drawing attention to the nation’s failure to safeguard basic human rights and to foster the capacity for love.
Suggestions for further reading:
Binder, Amy J., and Jeffrey L. Kidder. 2022. The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Catlin, Samuel P. 2024. “The Campus Does Not Exist: How Campus War is Made.” Parapraxis 4: 40–47, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist.
Catsam, Derek Charles, editor. 2024. Struggle for a Free South Africa: Campus Anti-Apartheid Movements in Africa and the United States, 1960-1994. New York: Routledge.
Cohen, Robert. Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism. New York: New Press, 2016
Conner, Jerusha O. 2020. The New Student Activists: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cunningham, Philip J. 2009. Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death [1915]” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 273-300.
Hall, Amanda Joyce. 2023. “Students are the Spark: Anti-apartheid in the Long 1980s.” The Journal of African American History 108.3: 369-297.
Makari, George J. 1994. “Toward an Intellectual History of Transference,1888-1900.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 17.3: 559-70.
Rhoads, Robert A. 2016. “Student Activism, Diversity, and the Struggle for a Just Society.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 9.3: 189-202.
Rosenfeld, Seth. 2012. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Schulman, Sarah. 2021. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works. New York: Random House.
Thrift, Erin, and Jeff Sugarman. 2024. “Social Justice in Fractured Times.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 21.2: 1-16.