Organising in a System Designed to Wait You Out: Power, time, and the limits of outrage

Last week, after publishing my last essay, someone asked me to explain what I meant when I described universities as spaces where “power is diffuse” and “visibility is deceptive.” The reader asking was not distant from this world. They work at a university, are the parent of a current university student, and have been deeply involved in efforts to confront antisemitism on campus. I gave a short answer in reply, but it became clear to me almost immediately that the question itself was worth lingering over.

If someone this proximate to campus life needed clarification, it is likely others did too. More importantly, these two phrases were not rhetorical flourishes. They describe structural realities that quietly shape whether advocacy accumulates into leverage or dissipates into motion.

When I say that power is diffuse on campus, I am pointing to a basic mismatch between how universities present themselves and how they actually function. Universities look like hierarchies. They have presidents and provosts, deans and directors, offices with mandates, committees with charters, and statements issued under institutional letterhead. Those features are real, but they are misleading as a map of causality.

Authority is spread across administrators, faculty governance bodies, legal counsel, student governments, advancement offices, communications teams, donors, and informal norms that rarely appear in policy documents. Responsibility is shared just enough that no single actor fully owns outcomes, and decision-making is fragmented enough that momentum can always be slowed without anyone explicitly saying no. This is not dysfunction in the narrow sense. It is an adaptive system designed to preserve institutional stability under constant pressure.

Power on campus is not absent, it is distributed just enough to avoid ownership.

Advocacy falters when it treats being understood as being effective. Jewish advocacy, in particular, often carries a legalistic or moral imagination: if the violation is named clearly enough and delivered to the correct authority, correction should follow. That logic works in courts. It works in prophetic texts. It works far less well inside bureaucracies optimised to acknowledge critique without internalising it. Universities are exceptionally good at procedural empathy. They convene, consult, commission reviews, issue statements, and promise training. None of that should be confused with institutional movement. In diffuse systems, acknowledgement is cheap. Change is costly.

This is where visibility enters the picture, and where the analysis is often flattened. When I say visibility is deceptive, I am not arguing that visibility is meaningless. I am arguing that it is volatile.

Visible moments (e.g. protests, open letters, viral social media posts, emergency town halls) do important work. They reallocate attention. They recruit people who were previously isolated. They clarify lines and stakes. For students operating in hostile or gaslighting environments, visibility can function as a signal before it functions as a strategy: we exist; we are not alone; this is real.

The deception lies in what visibility reliably produces. Visibility generates reputational heat far more consistently than it generates operational risk. Universities learn, over time, to distinguish between the two. Reputational heat can be managed through language, delay, process, and diffusion. Operational risk is different. It touches budgets, enforcement, personnel, precedent, and governance structures that constrain future behaviour.

Visibility creates heat. Only leverage creates risk.

Advocacy that remains primarily expressive gives institutions the option to wait. Time is their ally. Students graduate. Attention shifts. Administrators remain.

Campuses operate across at least two arenas of power that do not move together. Institutional authority and social legitimacy follow different logics and timelines. Governance resists pressure; peer culture responds to it. Procedures move slowly; norms shift erratically. Advocacy that fails to distinguish between these arenas often mistakes movement in one for movement in the other.

Institutions may wait out visibility; peer cultures often cannot. Visible Jewish presence can shape what other students feel permitted to say, what faculty feel safe assigning or questioning, and which narratives begin to feel inevitable. Those shifts rarely show up in meeting minutes, but they alter the water students swim in.

This creates a genuine strategic bind. Visibility that strengthens social legitimacy can simultaneously provoke institutional defensiveness, hardening bureaucratic resistance. Quiet organising that builds governance access may do little to contest hostile peer norms in the meantime. Students are forced to operate across both terrains with limited time, limited protection, and asymmetric risk.

Treating visibility as either indulgence or solution misses the point. It is an accelerant. Whether it clears space or burns people out depends on what exists beneath it.

One of the reasons Jewish advocacy so often stalls is that we have trained students to speak fluently without training them to read institutions accurately.

Many Jewish students can articulate antisemitism with precision. Far fewer can map who actually controls which decisions, how shared governance constrains administrators, how legal counsel shapes institutional behaviour, how delay functions as strategy, or where accountability reliably dissolves. We have invested heavily in rhetorical confidence and left institutional literacy to improvisation.

The result is advocacy that is expressive in public and naïve in private, where students mistake acknowledgement for traction and internalise failure when nothing changes.

Recent writing on university governance helps clarify why this persists. Universities frequently resist strong governance not because they misunderstand it, but because governance clarifies authority, forces accountability, and makes failure harder to hide. Ambiguity protects institutions. Weak governance produces siloed decision-making, role confusion, and discretionary power that is difficult to challenge from the outside.

From an advocacy perspective, this means that “the university” is rarely a single actor with a single will. It is a collection of partially aligned sub-systems, some movable, some inert, many invested in avoiding decisive ownership. Treating such a system as if it will respond predictably to moral pressure is a category error.

If this analysis is even partly right, it implies a different posture toward campus advocacy, not a new tactic, but a set of disciplines.

First, treat visibility as an input, not an outcome. Visible moments should open doors, recruit people, and clarify stakes, and then give way quickly to quieter work that binds: documented commitments, procedural changes, enforcement pathways, standing relationships that persist after attention fades.

Second, learn campuses as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. Advocacy that does not understand governance, decision-rights, and internal incentives is not principled; it is underpowered. Teaching institutional anatomy is not cynicism. It is care.

Third, design wins that accumulate within student time horizons. Students will not invest in “long games” that never land. Accumulation does not mean spectacle; it means modest, binding changes that alter future behaviour.

Fourth, separate reassurance from strategy. Communities need reassurance. Advocacy needs leverage. Confusing the two quietly sabotages both.

There is an uncomfortable implication here for the adults who stand behind this work. Parents, donors, communal leaders, and professionals often push hardest for visible action not because it is most effective, but because it reassures them. Visibility signals that something is being done, that students are not alone, that fear has been translated into motion. That reassurance is human. It is also dangerous when it becomes the organising principle.

The most honest test remains simple:

If the cameras disappeared tomorrow, would we still do this work the same way?

If the answer is no, then visibility, not leverage, has quietly taken control of strategy.

Diffuse power does not offer clean resolutions. It demands discipline instead: the ability to let visible moments end without applause, the patience to keep organising after attention dissipates, and the humility to accept that serious advocacy often looks unfinished to everyone except those doing it. Pretending this tension can be resolved neatly is how we keep handing students an impossible task.