When New York Police Department officers in riot gear arrested 100 pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on Thursday, President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik took a step few campus leaders have been willing to take since the outbreak of war in Gaza in October. While the police have intervened during the occupation of buildings, or when protests have turned violent, antisemitic, or unruly, colleges have generally left peaceful outdoor protests alone. That could be changing.
“This was a protest that was designed, clearly, to be as minimally disruptive to the functioning of the university as possible,” said Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism who is an adjunct assistant professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. “Occupying a lawn is not interfering directly with the functioning of the university in any way. For that protest to produce such a strong response … that frankly surprised me.”
On Wednesday morning, students and other protesters set up encampments on the South Lawn of Columbia’s Morningside campus, calling on the university to divest its endowment of holdings connected to Israel. The university warned the students to disperse by 9 p.m. on Wednesday or risk suspension, but many stayed. Shafik sent a letter to the police department the next day, explaining that the protesters were trespassing, and officers arrived just before 1:30 p.m.
A spokesperson for Columbia cited its time, place, and manner restrictions on protests in response to questions about the arrests.
“We remain in regular contact with our students and student groups, and are committed to ensuring the core functions of the university continue,” the spokesperson said.
Columbia’s action on Thursday, a day after Shafik survived a congressional hearing about her university’s response to allegations of antisemitism, opens the possibility that other colleges will feel empowered to crack down on student protesters as they haven’t before. But it also may signal the end of the hands-off approach to disciplining student activism that has prevailed in higher education for the last 10 years.
If photos of the arrests at Columbia on Thursday seem ubiquitous, from the internet to the front page of The New York Times, pictures of a police officer pepper-spraying protesters at the University of California at Davis in 2011 were even more so.
The images, Johnston said, “resulted in a tremendous amount of attention of the world’s media on California colleges and universities, and they led administrators in many cases to pull back and be less and less aggressive in the use of police, both in direct confrontations with students and in the tactic of mass arrests.”
A little less than a decade ago, protests at the University of Missouri at Columbia over the police killing of Michael Brown resulted in few arrests, although there was an infamous confrontation between a professor and a student journalist. In 2021 students at Howard University camped out for weeks in protest of housing conditions, among other things, and voluntarily dispersed when they came to an agreement with the university; there were no known arrests.
But Katherine S. Cho, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago and an expert in campus activism, said that while there may have been less-direct clashes during this period, college administrators found ways to limit protest, including by tightening time, place, and manner rules. She cited as examples the University of Virginia’s crackdown on when and where outsiders could protest following the neo-Nazi march in 2017, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s policy that says protests cannot “impede or disrupt the academic mission.” The latter rule has drawn criticism during the recent wave of pro-Palestinian student activism.
“There are ways that university policies, specifically with student conduct and handbooks, are turning those direct confrontations into indirect confrontations, where students have even less power and less ability to fight back,” Cho said. “Because ultimately, it’s the university who creates those policies, and students have to abide by them.”
Since December’s disastrous congressional hearing over antisemitism, colleges have altered their speech rules and restricted when, where, and how students can protest.
Could we be entering a new era, in which colleges take a harder stance against activism?
It could come at a steep cost, Johnston said, with no guarantee that students would ease their rhetoric. If anything, it could get more fervent.
Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the graduate school of education at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was reasonable for colleges to try to figure out how to balance preserving free speech with retaining a sense of normalcy for the students who just want to get to class.
What Columbia did “is a very dramatic action,” Ben-Porath said. “But it is not a wake-up call to other universities. They are all wide awake already.”
At Miami University of Ohio and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, students on Friday set up encampments in solidarity with the Columbia students.
