Escalating protests expose three fault lines on American campuses

PRO-PALESTINIAN protests and police crackdowns are escalating at American universities. A phalanx of New York police with battering-rams entered Columbia University on the night of April 30th, joined by an armoured vehicle with an elevated ramp known as a BearCat, a cross between a tank and a fire engine. They breached a building occupied by demonstrators, arrested more than 100 students and other protesters and led their zip-tied detainees onto police buses.

Hours later at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) counter-protesters tried to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment and hurled debris and fireworks inside. Police eventually broke up the fighting. Campus police at the University of Arizona used “chemical irritants” to subdue demonstrators. The total number of campus arrests nationwide is now over 1,500. Yet tented encampments—the signature motif of pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators—continue to bloom like spring flowers from coast to coast.

The blame game is also intensifying. University leaders are again in the firing line, accused by both Democratic and Republican politicians of having brought the chaos on themselves by coddling student trespassers and allowing antisemitic speech to go unpunished. Yet teachers at Columbia and elsewhere are castigating their administrators for turning to the police. Student protests, they argue, should be handled as a teachable moment via negotiations and campus discourse.

The Gaza protests have exposed three fault lines in the governance of American universities. First, they have destroyed an already tenuous compact governing free speech on campus. Second, they have made plain that the tools that universities possess to enforce regulations are limited and often counter-productive when, predictably, students make a mockery of the rules. Finally, the protests have also revealed university leaders to be no better than C-plus students when challenged by a nuanced case study familiar from political-theory syllabuses: when does collective security trump individual rights?

The most important problem is speech regulation. Rules at private universities are not as permissive as the First Amendment, for good reason. In America, constitutionally protected speech can be hateful, false, outrageous or all of these—just about anything goes, short of targeted incitement to violence. Such a free-for-all cannot be permitted in a classroom, just as it is not tolerated in workplaces. Yet for pedagogical and ideological reasons, private universities prioritise free speech much more liberally than a typical workplace would.

Through trial-and-error university leaders in recent years have forged workable “time, place and manner” rules to regulate robust demonstrations and lectures by unpopular speakers. Yet they have struggled with the problem of hate speech aimed at individuals or small groups and they were plainly unprepared for what the polarising war in Gaza has provoked. A chant like “Globalise the intifada!” might be protected by the First Amendment but is understandably unacceptable to the thousands of Jewish students enrolled at Columbia.

Badgered by politicians for not doing enough, and cautioned by faculty against intervening ham-handedly, college heads have often fallen back on bland formulations. Brown University, wrote Christine Paxson, its president, in a letter sent this week to student protesters, “has a long-established history of recognising protest as a powerful form of expression. But protest cannot violate university policies that are intended to ensure the safety and security of members of the Brown community.”

Dr Paxson has succeeded with a salutary approach, however: she negotiated a deal with protesters. They have pledged to voluntarily dismantle their encampment in exchange for a commitment to talk further about the students’ demands for divestment of university endowment funds from companies that support Israel or make armaments. Northwestern University, outside Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore announced similar deals with demonstrators this week.

Columbia was unable to find such a compromise. On April 18th, just a day after pro-Palestinian protesters set up tents on campus, Minouche Shafik, the university’s president, asked the police to clear the encampment, resulting in the arrests of more than 100 students. New tents immediately popped up nearby. Dr Shafik, facing a backlash for having so quickly summoned the police, then opened talks with student demonstrators. When those negotiations foundered, she set a deadline of 2pm on April 29th for encamped students to disperse. The university announced that it would suspend those who stayed put, potentially depriving them of university housing and the prospect of a degree. The protesters responded by seizing a well-known building, Hamilton Hall.

Would negotiations from the start have produced a different result? The question will join those about Columbia’s storied 1968 student occupations and mass arrests as fodder for classroom debate at a university that is uniquely positioned to teach about the complexities of protest and public order by examining its own repetitive crises. Dr Shafik said she summoned the police on April 30th “with the utmost regret” because the protesters presented “serious safety concerns.” The police will remain on campus through graduation ceremonies in mid-May, she added, to “maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished”. Columbia and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, blamed outsiders for “hijacking” student dissent.

At UCLA a policy to allow demonstrators to speak out, even provocatively, may have fuelled the anger that led to physical confrontations. Messages such as “Divest” and “free Palestine” but also “fuck Israel” and “fuck Zionism” adorn the plywood walls of the main pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. Across the lawn pro-Israel demonstrators have been screening graphic video of dead victims of the October 7th attacks, above the caption, “This is Hamas”. The installation was erected by the Israeli American Council, a non-profit organisation not affiliated with UCLA.

“It’s important for both sides to be able to express their opinion,” said Stephano Lopez, a 21-year-old undergraduate studying political science, as he observed the scene. “Granted, there’s rowdiness…The hooligans come out at night.” ■