Colleges take down encampments — with cops or concessions
Sign on gates at Harvard University, where the pro-Palestinian encampment was dismantled Tuesday. Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
By Beth Harpaz May 14, 2024
As spring semesters around the country end, pro-Palestinian encampments — at least 10 in the past few weeks — are coming down, sometimes as a result of agreements between protesters and administrators, sometimes as a result of forceful action by police.
Most agreements involve amnesty for protesters and give them an opportunity to have input in university investment decisions — though without unconditional promises of divestment in Israel. Some Jewish leaders have objected to those deals, saying they ignore the needs of Jewish students. Members of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance slammed their alma mater for an agreement that they said “capitulates to encampers.”
In other cases, universities have called in the police to end the protests. Thousands of students around the country have been arrested, and many have been suspended, which means their academic standing is in jeopardy and their tuition potentially wasted on classes for which they won’t get credit.
Here’s a look at how things played out on various campuses in the last few weeks.
Harvard
The pro-Palestinian encampment at Harvard ended Tuesday after protesters reached an agreement with the university to hold further talks and create pathways for reinstating suspended students.
The removal of the encampment comes nine days before Harvard’s May 23 commencement. “Participants in the Harvard Yard encampment voluntarily ended the occupation of Harvard Yard today,” the school said in a statement, adding that Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, would arrange a meeting between protesters, Harvard’s Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and other university leaders regarding “students’ questions related to the endowment” and “perspectives regarding the conflict in the Middle East.”
However, Garber has stated in the past that the endowment will not be used as a tool for political means. The university on April 5 also reiterated its opposition to any policy calling for boycotting Israel and its academic institutions.
The statement also said that Garber would ask the university’s schools to “process reinstatement requests expeditiously” for suspended students.
In an email, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance called the agreement “gross mis-governance,” adding: “Instead of expelling students and firing and staff related to the encampment, Garber is rewarding them.”
The protesters, represented by the group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, issued a seven-part statement Tuesday on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) saying they ended the encampment because “the utility of this tactic has passed.” The group added that they are “under no illusions: we do not believe these meetings are divestment wins. These side-deals are intended to pacify us away from full disclosure & divestment. Rest assured, they will not. Our fight for Palestinian liberation does not begin nor end with this encampment.”
Peaceful resolutions elsewhere
Northwestern University was one of the first schools to get protesters to end their encampment. Their agreement allows students to protest until classes are over as long as tents are removed, and it gives students an opportunity to have input in university investments.
Tents came down at the University of Minnesota after interim president Jeff Ettinger met with protesters and agreed, among other things, to drop disciplinary proceedings against them and to let them discuss divestment with its board of regents.
At Rutgers, administrators also agreed to open an Arab cultural center and look into creating a department of Middle East studies.
At Cornell, where classes ended a week ago, protesters dismantled their encampment voluntarily Tuesday. The tents came down as students took final exams — and well before the school’s May 25 commencement.
Why some Jewish leaders object
Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League are unhappy about these deals, characterizing them as capitulations to the pro-Palestinian movement. Shira Goodman, senior director of advocacy at the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider that agreements with protesters “ignore the needs of Jewish students increasingly at risk of harassment and intimidation, or worse, on campus” and have “normalized antisemitism on campus.”
Jewish Insider also quoted Mark Rotenberg, vice president and general counsel of Hillel International, as saying that “people who violate university rules should not be rewarded.”
The alternative: Cops and cancellations
Not every campus has experienced a peaceful end to the protests. Some, like Columbia, called in riot police to evict protesters who had taken over a building. At UCLA, police were accused of failing to intervene when pro-Israel supporters staged a violent late-night attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment. Police then dismantled the encampment and arrested the pro-Palestinian protesters. Police at MIT also cleared an encampment and arrested a number of protesters; the same thing happened at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which led Pulitzer Prize-winning Colson Whitehead to cancel his commencement address there.
Columbia and the University of Southern California canceled their main commencements rather than risk disruptions like the one at Duke, where students walked out as commencement speaker Jerry Seinfeld — a supporter of Israel — took the stage.
In defense of free speech on campus
On May 23, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce will hold its third hearing in a series on antisemitism in higher education. In a statement Tuesday, the American Association of Colleges & Universities characterized the hearing as “further escalation in an ongoing partisan attack on higher education.”
While “hatred and intimidation have no place on a college campus,” the AACU continued, “colleges and universities must treat the protection of academic freedom and freedom of expression as their highest priority.” The organization urged colleges to treat “the discomfort and disruption of student activism in ways appropriate to institutions whose purpose is to educate and engage, not to discipline or silence.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Harvard rescinded student suspensions and planned divestment talks with protesters. The story has been updated to clarify the university’s position on divestment and to show that Harvard created a process for suspended students to be reinstated.
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