These Times

A visit to a university campus

Kirk Ericson | May 16, 20240

I received a text Thursday morning from our youngest son, Ryan, a 19-year-old almost junior at the University of Washington in Seattle.

His text included a photograph of the Quad, a pastoral rectangle of stone and flora on the campus that’s hemmed in by Gothic academic buildings. The rectangle is filled with cherry trees, finely tended grass, and it’s segmented by several brick walkways, all precisely considered and precisely placed. You feel smarter just walking through it.

But the photograph our son sent Thursday showed scores of tents and canopied structures on those lawns, insulting, I’m sure, the elegant geometry of the Quad’s designers. Thursday morning was also a loud morning, Ryan said, prompted by a meeting of the UW regents and the protesters’ desire to be heard. “The sounds of protest litter the campus,” he wrote.

“Seems as if you might have to make an opinion,” Ryan wrote me.

“Yeesh,” I wrote back.

I haven’t been paying close attention to the protests that started on several college campuses in April and sprouted at the UW at the start of May — I had told Ryan that I wished the protests would end so I wouldn’t have to have an opinion about them. The barbarity that sparked these protests is beyond my ability to weigh, the suffering and depravity too disheartening.

What Hamas did in Israel on Oct. 7 and what Israel is doing in Gaza right now has made me withdraw from that section of the news. This has happened to me before with certain stories over the years. I sometimes can’t bear this side of human beings.

I have a friend who has spent time in Gaza, who has witnessed rocket fire in Gaza, and who has visited conflict zones around the world where he’s witnessed the work of the worst sadists imaginable. He’s told me that when he’s around people at the peak of their suffering, he’s able “to be right there with them in their deepest pain.”

He’s a better human than I.

But Ryan was right. I should see this protest at the UW, and the next day I did.

We walked into the Quad as a group of about 40 Muslims, females in back and males in front, began Friday afternoon prayers. I’d never seen this live. It’s a call-and-response regimen, where the prayer leader speaks and the others respond in unison, like I’ve seen in Buddhist meetings and Catholic services. They were all facing east, just like I’ve heard, and they rise, kneel and prostrate themselves often. There’s a lot of up and down going on during Islamic prayers, just like in the Catholic church.

I was raised Presbyterian. Not a lot of up and down there.

During the prayer, everything else in the Quad went silent. It was a silence more silent than mere silence. There was a stillness of movement, too. I remember no sound except for the sound of prayer, and the stillness lingered in the Quad long after the prayer was done.

Here’s how quiet it was. Several minutes after the prayer ended, I had Ryan walk 50 yards away — otherwise known as half a football field — to have him speak in his normal volume to see whether I could hear him. Amid at an area that had at least 100 people and nearly 150 tents, I could hear him.

After the prayer finished, a woman approached and asked whether I was with the media — she had seen me taking notes. I am, I said.

We chatted, and I mentioned my son is an aeronautical engineering student. She arched her eyebrows. Interpreting her arch, I said he has no intention of working for Boeing.

“That’s a good choice for his mortal soul,” she said.

Having the university sever financial connections to Boeing and Israel are the principal demands of the protesters. A full break is unlikely to happen, but what might be lost by having the discussion? Perhaps compromises could be found. Compromises always seem unlikely in big matters like these.

We spent an hour in the Quad, talking and taking in the scene. I saw a man wearing a purple yarmulke pushing a stroller as he passed without interruption along a path bordered by several people wearing keffiyehs, the symbol of Palestinian nationalism.

At the end of our hourlong visit, we ended up at a canopy where a woman was selling soap made in Nablus, a town in the West Bank that has been a center of soap-making for hundreds of years.

The woman said she was an Ashkenazi Jew whose ancestors come from Eastern Europe, mostly Ukraine and Poland, and that all the money made from her soap sales is used to buy more soap to sell. I bought two bars. It’s good soap.

So … now I have an opinion. At this university, on this day, amid those people gathered on this campus, the kids are pointing in the right direction.