BERKELEY, Calif. — Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Stephen Hawking on the Big Bang. Millions of students for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
They were provocateurs in their time, products of an ideal that considers universities sacrosanct spaces for debate, innovation and even revolution. But Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza are testing that perception, as anger over the brutal military campaign collides with election-year politics and concerns about anti-Semitism in places where It assumes that freedom of expression prevails.
“Where there is a great desire to learn, there will necessarily be many discussions, many writings, many opinions; for the opinion of good men is nothing but knowledge in the making,” wrote the poet John Milton, a student at Cambridge University, in his 1644 treatise against censorship in publications. “Give me the freedom to know, to express and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all freedoms.”
That lofty principle has collided with the harsh reality of the war between Israel and Hamas. Hamas militants who crossed the border killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostage. Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas has killed more than 35,000 people in Gaza, according to the local Health Ministry, and left millions on the verge of famine.
Administrators at some campuses have called in local police to break up pro-Palestinian protesters demanding their schools get rid of Israel in demonstrations that Israel’s allies say are anti-Semitic and make campuses unsafe. From Columbia University in New York to the University of California, Los Angeles, thousands of students and faculty have been arrested in the last month.
“Columbia,” read a sign posted there after the April 30 arrests, “Protect your students (cops don’t protect us).”
Historically, universities are supposed to govern (and police) themselves in exchange for their status as “a kind of secular sacred ground,” said John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education and a historian of higher education.
“One has to think of an American college or university as a ‘city-state’ in which its legal protections and walls include the campus (land, buildings, structures and facilities) as legally protected, along with the rights of a university to confer titles.” he added in an email. Calling the police, as administrators did at Columbia, Dartmouth, UCLA and other schools, represents the “disintegration of both rights and responsibilities within the campus as an academic institution and community,” he said.
The crackdown is reviving memories of student-led protests during the American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Student activism in the 1960s led university officials to call authorities. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on unarmed students, killing four at Kent State University. Four million students went on strike and temporarily closed 900 colleges and universities. It was a defining moment for a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans died.
Half a century later, the conflict between Israel and Hamas has lit another fuse, with claims that “external agitators” have infiltrated protests to stoke tensions.
“The scale, the ferocity, the short period of time since the Hamas attacks, the irreconcilable demands of the current competing protesters, and their occasional violence, have tested university leaders on how to respond,” said John A. Douglass, principal investigator and professor. of public policy and higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Most major colleges and universities have their own police departments, “but invite and request assistance from local community police departments with riot gear, and not only ask them to disperse encampments but to protect rival protesters from each other.” , it is a relatively new phenomenon,” he said. saying.
What do you lose when you call the police?
“Trust between the university and significant parts of its most important constituency: its students,” said Anna von der Goltz, a history professor at Georgetown University. The cost, she said, also potentially includes the university’s credibility “as a community capable of setting its own rules and effectively addressing violations of those rules.”
The wave of pro-Palestinian protests at American universities was inspired by the demonstrations in Columbia that began on April 17.
As protesters set up camp that day, university president Minouche Shafik was called in for questioning before Congress, where Republicans accused her of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism on the school’s Manhattan campus. The next day, university officials called New York City police, who arrested more than 100 protesters, including the daughter of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who had questioned Shafik in Washington.
Similar scenes played out across the country: The University of Southern California canceled its main graduation ceremony after barring its valedictorian, who is Muslim, from delivering her commencement address. Police arrested hundreds of protesters at New York University and Yale. At Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, President Sian Leah Beilock called police to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment just hours after it was set up.
Inspired by protests in the United States, pro-Palestinian camps sprang up in the United Kingdom and Europe earlier this month as administrators there faced the same question: Allow or intervene?
At Cambridge University, the idyll of Darwin and Hawking, a camp of about 40 tents in front of the Gothic towers of King’s College seemed disciplined and orderly after three nights, with a posted schedule that included meals, training, traditional Palestinian kite-making …and strict message discipline as passersby stopped to talk in the unusual sunshine.
Cambridge protester Jana Aljamal, 22, a Palestinian student from Jerusalem, said she doesn’t think American protesters want the focus on themselves: “What’s happening in Gaza is more important.”
“We have our own guidelines,” he added of the Cambridge protest. “To protect the freedom to protest, the freedom of expression and the ability to have these conversations, the ability to have a community behind us, the ability to generate action.”
The scene was more tense last week at several European universities, with the University of Amsterdam canceling classes after pro-Palestinian demonstrations turned destructive. But the protests have not yet approached the intensity of the demonstrations in the United States.
Will there be an analysis of how administrators handle protests over a conflict with no end in sight? Von der Goltz said strategies employed at schools like Rutgers and Brown, where administrators negotiated an end to protests, will come under scrutiny.
“What did they maybe do that other administrators didn’t?” she wrote. “I hope there is some sort of reckoning at Columbia, UCLA, etc., because things have clearly gone very wrong there on multiple levels.”
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Kellman reported from London.
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