by MAUREEN E. RUPRECHT FADEM
Carry on, Students Interrupted: in precisely the way Vermeer’s painted girl averts her gaze and in so doing shuts down the imperious authority that looms—not in a leisurely way but steadfastly, as committed choice.
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter who made profound narrative images, pictures set in the stoniness of dry paint that nevertheless contain movement. They have trajectories, like stories do. One of his best-known is “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” (1658-61). This one, permanently installed at The Frick Collection in upper Manhattan, pictures a girl of perhaps 16 or 17 years who is being schooled presumably on the cittern, a Renaissance era guitar. She is educated by a man many years her senior, a man who noticeably presides over her. He presides, that is, rather too much, is both too encroached on her personal space and too wrapped around and curtaining her. As to the girl, Vermeer’s subject, she looks the other way. For all her tutor’s efforts to crowd and dominate, to train her focus on matters he brings to hand, this girl is occupied by some other matter, indeed some other urgency. Whatever crisis that may be, it is perceptible in her facial expression and in the intense, almost painful craning of her neck, her gaze demonstratively turned toward her viewer.
That Girl is Vermeer’s subject; and she is not being schooled; rather she has refused the education imposed upon her; rather, she is saying something, but what? That she looks away is not subtle. No—this girl’s rejection of the authority swathing her, blocking her light, is sharp and jarring. It is as if she is interrupted by something truly ghastly, something that calls to her in the voice of Antigone, something like a genocide. Whatever that “something” is, the Dutch painter has taken pains to show that she considers it vastly more critical than whatever her too-invasive education concerns on this day.
That is to say, Vermeer’s “Girl Interrupted” is a metonym for Generation Z. Her posture in relation to her education matches their posture in relation to theirs. She, a simulacrum of today’s encamped student. Her male instructor, stand-in for the authoritarian institutions comprising today’s university system and its failed leadership. Certainly Vermeer was thinking about power, about sexual and institutional politics, in applying his brush strokes to this canvas. Certainly nearly every U.S. college where encampments have been installed has not seen fit to tolerate their students’ insistent focus on Palestine, their unbroken, virulent concern for the genocide in progress, a genocide that now advances into and ups its own appalling ante in Rafah.
Girls interrupted, gazes averted, necks craned, in your strength, your lionhearted giftedness, your principled politics, be undaunted as you herald the righteous call to justice, humanity, life, and, most importantly, to love.
And now they are stopped—by Harvard’s refusal to let 13 graduates graduate. Harmed, physically and viscerally, by an extremist attack at UCLA that was allowed to carry on for hours; the next day, adding more insult to more injury, the police came back to brutalize the students once again. Harmed, by the felony charges unleashed on them by the combined force of the administration of the City University of New York and the state—the deceitful, violent lawlessness of the Eric Adams administration. Harmed for life in being given criminal records unlawfully. The lives of those students have been cruelly interrupted because they interrupted the power the institution holds over and drapes around them, as in the painting. But those punishing disciplinary interruptions lose all legitimacy because their purpose is to continue a genocide. No criminal at all, today’s student is criminalized because they protest mass slaughter and manufactured hunger. Meanwhile, their college leaders remain too gutless themselves to speak out about that which they know to be wrong. Wrong unequivocally, wrong under the rule of law, wrong under Antigone’s natural law.
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