That’s enough.
That’s the message from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Pennsylvania, from Columbia to the University of Chicago, as U.S. colleges take a hard line against student protesters, resorting to arrests, suspensions and threats of expulsion to subdue the unrest triggered by the Israel-Hamas alliance. war.
Graduation season is underway and families are arriving on campuses for the festivities, raising the stakes for administrators seeking to ensure public safety. Smaller demonstrations by pro-Palestinian activists took place at weekend graduations, including at Duke University and the University of California at Berkeley.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld avoided addressing the protests at Duke, where about 30 students shouting “Free Palestine” and waving flags walked out as the university president introduced him as the keynote speaker. Seinfeld, who has publicly supported Israel since the October 7 attacks by Hamas militants, did research at Harvard University.
“You’ll never believe this, but Harvard used to be a great place to study — now it’s Duke,” Seinfeld told the crowd in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke has awarded nearly 7,000 degrees, including an honorary doctor of arts to the comedian.
An encampment of pro-Palestinian students remained on the Harvard campus over the weekend, contrasting with MIT and Penn, which cleared similar encampments last week.
See more information: What America’s Student Photojournalists Saw in the Campus Protests
At the University of California, Berkeley, a small group of pro-Palestine protesters emerged during graduation ceremonies at California Memorial Stadium on Saturday, waving flags and singing. A university spokesperson said the protesters left the stadium voluntarily, without violence or arrests, and that the ceremony went ahead as planned.
Two thousand miles away, a group of students staged a silent protest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium. No arrests were made, the Associated Press reported.
“A small number of the thousands of students who attended Saturday’s graduation chose to speak out, but the ceremony itself was not interrupted,” UW Madison spokesman John Lucas said in an email.
Hard line on divestment
Responses to the turmoil have varied among schools, although most wealthier colleges have signaled they will not give in to demands for divestment from companies with ties to Israel and have evacuated student protest camps.
Columbia, where the camps began, canceled its main university-wide graduation ceremony last week after protests culminated in a police raid and more than 100 arrests after dozens of people barricaded themselves inside a university building. .
The University of Southern California hosted a scaled-down ceremony on Thursday, a far cry from the grand graduation that typically brings 65,000 people to the Los Angeles school — after canceling the Class of 2024 valedictorian’s speech because of her social media posts about the Middle East. Comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Will Ferrell chimed in with pre-recorded messages for the graduates.
See more information: USC faces backlash over alleged ‘censorship’ of pro-Palestinian valedictorian’s speech
MIT issued four warnings that protesters would be arrested if they did not abandon a nearly two-week encampment that ended Friday morning with the arrest of 10 protesters. President Sally Kornbluth said she had “no choice but to remove a high-risk flashpoint right in the center of our campus.”
The University of Chicago declared the “intractable and inflexible” aspects of the protesters’ demands incompatible with its principle of institutional neutrality and emptied a camp of students last week after nine days.
Harvard, which began suspending students on Friday, also signaled that administrators are losing patience with protesters who have set up tents in Harvard Yard, where a graduation ceremony attended by more than 30,000 people is scheduled for May 23.
See more information: Harvard commencement speaker Maria Ressa denies accusation of anti-Semitism
Campuses across the US erupted in protests following Israel’s military assault on Gaza, which followed the attack on Israelis by Hamas militants who infiltrated from Gaza. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the US and the European Union. Protesters’ demands include college divestment from Israel-related entities, which they say are held in university endowments.
George Washington University in Washington, a school of 26,000 students that has become the target of politically charged recriminations over pro-Palestinian protests on its campus, has kept its scheduled May 19 commencement.
People who disrupt the event on the National Mall in the nation’s capital will be asked to leave or “will be removed by authorities,” according to the university.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
