By Ross K. Baker As I walked by the statue of William the Silent on the quad at the Rutgers campus in 1969, I noticed a group of students holding placards protesting the war in Vietnam. A few weeks ago, as I was packing up my office to prepare for retirement, I found the stairwell in my office plastered with flyers calling for demonstrations to protest the war in Gaza. The symmetry was perfect: my 50-year academic career was neatly bracketed by student uprisings. The slogans of 2024 were different from those of 1969. Over the years, they had mutated from “hell no, I won’t go!” to “From the riv…