Civil Disobedience, Liberated Zones, and History Repeating: The State of Student Protest

Courtesy of Claire Hloytak

Around 4 a.m. EST on Wednesday, April 17, hundreds of students at Columbia University set up tents on the South Lawn to create a ‘Liberated Zone,’ or ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment,’ (GSE) with demands that Columbia University divest funds from corporations that give money to Israel amid Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Columbia University president Minouche Shafik authorized the New York Police Department (NYPD) to intervene and break up the GSE on Thursday, April 18. Later that night, the Columbia Spectator, a student newspaper from the University, published that the NYPD had made over 108 arrests in their initial sweep of the encampment. All 108 students were arrested for trespassing, with two people being charged additionally for obstruction of governmental administration. When asked to comment on the sweep, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell specified that the ‘clear and present danger’ was in the words of Columbia, not the police department, and said: “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Democratic U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th district—whose daughter, Isra Hirsi, a student at Barnard College, was among those arrested and suspended from the University for protesting—tweeted in response to the Columbia Spectator’s article to point out that “even [the] NYPD refused to cover for the President and [NYC] Mayor.” The Congresswoman has visited the encampment multiple times throughout the week to speak in support of the protesting students.

Despite historical encouragement towards protest on campus, the administration restricted access to certain parts of campus, anticipating unrest and protest prior to President Minouche Shafik’s testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on antisemitism on campuses– the same committee that led to the resignations of Harvard president Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill. 

According to CNN, a student-led coalition of over 120 organizations, including Jewish Voices for Peace, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and Students for Justice in Palestine, are leading negotiations and have contracted a list of demands from the University. On Monday, April 22, the University announced that classes on the Morningside campus, where protests are taking place, would be virtual that day and continue to have a hybrid option for students living off-campus who “need a rest,” in the words of President Shafik. 

In the early hours of April 30, Tuesday morning, after repeated threats of arrest and suspension after the school administration denied student demands,dozens of Columbia protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, in reflection of the protests of 1968. Students carried in metal barricades and used chairs and tables to block the doors, while hundreds of other protesters stood outside the building. According to the Columbia Spectator, protesters inside the hall unfurled a banner renaming the building ‘Hind’s Hall,’ after the six-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab who was killed in Gaza by the Israeli military. 

That night, the NYPD arrested 109 Columbia students in Hamilton Hall and the GSE, and arrested 282 overall including protestors at the City College of New York. An email from President Shafik stated that she had called the NYPD in after students “[chose] to escalate” protests through occupation, though some students protested this as a previous email stated the University calling in the NYPD again would be a mistake. Pictures circulated of officers in riot gear entering Hamilton Hall with guns drawn through an upper-floor window, and later dragging students from inside the Hall and the protest outside into NYPD corrections vans. The shelter-in-place put in effect during the arrests meant that students couldn’t enter or leave campus, couldn’t access some buildings, and were threatened with disciplinary action, namely arrest, if they did not comply. Reports from the WCKR radio station, run by students at the Columbia journalism school, emphasized that those reporting to the station from campus were threatened multiple times with arrest if they left the journalism building. Columbia also announced that they would have permanent police presence on campus until May 17th, past the graduation date, a fact that WCKR stated was received poorly by students on both sides of the protests.

What does all of this mean? 

The majority of recent student protests concerning Israel’s war in Gaza have intended to question the role of universities in using funds, especially endowments, to support corporations in general, but especially those with pro-Israeli stances. 

For Columbia students in particular, many point to Columbia’s longstanding history of pacifist protest, reaching back to anti–Vietnam War protests in 1968, when Columbia and Barnard students, spearheaded by the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Afro-Society, occupied several campus buildings for a week, even taking the College Dean, Harry Coleman, as a hostage. This mass protest ended in 700 arrests, over 100 students injured, and the enshrinement of protest into the tradition of Columbia students. 

The world we live in today is astronomically different from that of 1968. For one, the conflict inside universities looks different than the anti-Vietnam War protests did– President Shafik at Columbia cited feelings of harassment and safety concerns for Jewish students as to why student demonstrators were arrested, and worries about antisemitism seem to be at the forefront of universities minds as protests– and, subsequently, hostility and tensions between students– grow in fervor. 

Conflicting reports have come out of the University—some students within the camp share stories and videos of peers cooking for each other, hosting teach-ins, giving speeches, and forming dance circles. Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted on Instagram on Saturday, April 20, Columbia’s admitted students weekend, inviting prospective students to join them instead of scheduled activities. Oren Root, the executive editor of the Columbia Spectator from 1968-69, published an op-ed in the Spectator to compare President Shafik’s actions to that of the 1968 Columbia administration and said: “It’s time to go, Minouche.”

On the other hand, Rabbi Ellie Buechler of Columbia/Barnard Hillel urged Jewish students to “return home as soon as possible” due to “extreme antisemitism and anarchy” after ten pro-Israel counter-protesters were harassed with antisemitic shouts and posters. Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted a statement to Instagram shortly afterward urging students not to antagonize counter-protestors and emphasizing their peaceful protest approach. Jewish professor Shai Davidai of the Business School— who has come under fire by the SJP for harassing pro-Palestine students of color— was recently refused entry to the main campus, as Columbia police told him he was “not allowed on campus because [they] cannot ensure [his] safety.” 

The complexity of the student protest situation reflects the complexity of the war they protest in the Middle East– Zionism, the originally 19th-century movement to establish Israel as a Jewish homeland, is the primary target of the protests at Columbia and similar institutions. Though generally acknowledged as initiating in 1948, land conflicts between Israel and Palestine reach back to the late 19th century. After the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a political militant group, designated as a terrorist organization in the U.S., in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, Israel launched a counter-offensive that has since killed over 42,000 Palestinians, the extreme majority of whom were civilians, according to ReliefWeb, a United Nations humanitarian publication. For some Zionist Jewish students and faculty at Columbia, the anti-Zionism protests have toed the line of antisemitism, with some individual students perpetuating harmful stereotypes about Jewish people and wishing violence on the state of Israel. Though the pro-Palestinian student groups that run the protests, especially Jewish groups, uphold that they are not antisemitic, despite some instances of antisemitism by individual protesters, the conflation of Zionism with Judaism can change the narratives of their protests.

The White House, too, issued a response strongly condemning the protests at Columbia, which they described as “blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous,” having “absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States,” and as “echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the world massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” 

Resounding waves of academic protest answer Columbia.

This recent wave of student activism has led to much reflection across the country on the role of university students in effecting social change. For many, this recent wave of student activism is an opportunity to reflect on the role of university students in America—and their power. Brown University was recently in the news for its own student occupations and an eight-day hunger strike undertaken in February by 19 pro-Palestinian student protestors demanding Brown’s divestment from corporations allied with Israel. On April 30, Brown University announced their corporate board would hold a vote to divest from Israeli interests in exchange for students taking their encampment down. 

Over 400 students set up an encampment in Yale’s Beinecke Plaza on Friday, April 19, in solidarity with Columbia students and to protest Yale’s investments in military weapons manufacturers. Last fall, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) determined that divestment from military and law enforcement manufacturers was not necessary, as it did not meet the threshold of ‘social injury’ that would warrant reconsideration, as opposed to gun manufacturers, from which Yale did divest. On the morning of Monday, April 22, the Yale Daily News reported that between 47 protestors were arrested by both the New Haven Police and Yale Police and charged with trespassing—a Class A misdemeanor in Connecticut, the most severe kind, meaning the arrested students can face up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. 

Other institutions, including NYU, Harvard, MIT, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Washington University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Boston University, have led mass walk-outs and constructed smaller encampments to support protestors at Columbia. Videos from protests at Cal Poly Humboldt, USC, and UT Austin went viral, showing riot police and state troopers in head-to-head confrontations with students, including Texas state troopers tackling students, some of the clearest examples of physical violence between protestors and law enforcement. At NYU, reports from students allege the use of LRAD, or long-range acoustic device, a sound cannon that emits extremely high-power sounds used for crowd control, during the Maghrib prayer– one of the five mandatory Islamic prayers– at sunset. 

After over 100 arrests took place the night of Wednesday, April 24, at Emerson College, videos surfaced the following day of city crews cleaning blood from the sidewalks. Reports from a student protester at the College allege that police at the encampment were seen turning off body cameras, throwing students to the ground, and beating protesters with batons. 

As protests grow and arrests and police tension rise, many have begun to question university responses to student protests. At NYU, lines of faculty formed to protect students were arrested, and at other colleges, videos of professors being tackled by police have surfaced, often as they are arrested for trespassing at the universities they teach at. In addition to arrests, many students have found themselves suspended or expelled from their universities, locked out of dorms, and, at Columbia, seen walls built around academic buildings, with many classes going virtual or being canceled– some protestors are calling a victory for the students at disrupting life at their universities. One X user drew parallels between the situation at Columbia now and the 1970 Kent State University and Jackson State University killings– “the last time the national guard came to college campuses.” Signs at the encampment at Vanderbilt University read: “Protesters expelled= 3. Rapists expelled= 0.” 

At the University of Connecticut (UConn), students continue to protest against and argue with school administration while pressuring them to end ties with Israel and weapons manufacturing companies with their own encampment. Their demands target academic ties and study abroad relationships with Israeli universities, as well as the removal and disassociation of all ties to companies like RTX, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and their subsidiaries. In particular, the demands ask for the resignation of Bryan Pollard, Associate General Counsel for Operations with RTX, from the UConn Board of Trustees, and the renaming of academic and athletic facilities named for these companies and subsidiaries.

From speaking to students at the encampment, throughout the rallies and enactment of the camp, or the UCommune, on Thursday, April 25, police presence was heavy and often physical as attempts were made to tear down the tents set up and break through the ‘human circle’ formed by protestors around the camp. Several students were arrested, and throughout the initial conflict with cops, the police were on camera pushing a disabled student to the ground and taking bags and supplies from organizers. Minimal but persistent police presence became steady after the UConn administration sent an email at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 26, clarifying to students that tents, tarps, encampments, electrical cords, and generators, among other things, are prohibited at outdoor gatherings. Protesting students took offense to this, as camping outside athletic facilities is a common practice for many students before basketball games. 

Despite the administration’s perceived unresponsiveness and hostile attitude toward student demands, the encampment was lively and full of students writing and drawing in chalk across the plaza. They hosted know-your-rights teach-ins, film screenings, and a Passover Seder and Maghrib prayer event in partnership with UConndivest and the Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective. One Jewish student at the encampment spoke about the importance of the Passover Seder as a place for students at the University to worship without “enforcing genocidal regime.” As the protestors set up for another cold night at the encampment, one student emphasized that it was essential for all students across the country to remember what they were there for: “We’re here holding it down for a free Palestine, and we’re proud to stand as part of a national and international movement, joined by students on international campuses all standing for Gaza, and against genocide and apartheid.”

According to the Hartford Courant, the morning of Tuesday, April 30, the police encircled and dismantled the encampment at UConn, arresting 23 student protesters and charging them with disorderly conflict. Arrests came after protestors continued to use ‘amplified sound’ during the quiet period of the University’s finals week and refused to clear tents from the plaza. Pictures from students showed dozens of police standing around the now empty former site of the encampment with tents, banners, and student possessions having been cleared and removed. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said publicly in response to American protests that he believed “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities… they call for the annihilation of Israel [and] attack Jewish students.” Many reacted online to this questioning the deployment of state troopers and the National Guard at the behest of a foreign country. Contradicting reports come out of UCLA, where pro-Israel counterprotestors were on video shoving and hitting pro-Palestinian protestors, including throwing fireworks and tear gas into the encampment.

The reality at Conn.

Unlike large public or Ivy League universities, Connecticut College doesn’t have the same monetary ties or public influence. Our investments work on a smaller scale, and, most importantly, our administration is more receptive to student demands and less faceless. The CC Feminist Coalition and Muslim Students Association placed Palestinian flags around campus, and some student have chalked the areas outside of the library, Cro, and Harris, with pro-Palestinian messages. Even without a consolidated chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine or other pro-Palestinian student organizations, students at Conn are still organizing and communicating their demands on individual and collective levels outside of official clubs. Students are in conversation now with the administration and Board of Trustees to discuss student demands on divestment from Israel, with the objective of changing Conn’s investments so that they conform to BDS guidelines, and continue to protest for pro-Palestinian demands.

The situation at Conn is distinctly different from other, larger universities. The administration here, from the deans to the Board of Trustees, isn’t as faceless as they are at larger colleges and universities, and there are more opportunities for communication and conversation with students on their needs and wants – the College is responsive and wants to hear the thoughts and concerns of students. In addition, administration and faculty are supportive of the student right to protest and make demands, and encourage students to be in conversation and make their voices heard. Despite this difference, these recent protests are a modern opportunity for university students across the country to reflect on what they want to see changed and how they can influence that change, both within their universities and in the broader country and world.