One week ago, after months of intense pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Pomona College hit a breaking point.
Students had been camping on the small California campus’s main quad for several days, alongside a 32-foot-long art installation they put up to highlight harms done to Palestinian people. The morning of April 5, students had voluntarily taken down all their tents.
By that evening, however, the situation had taken a turn. G. Gabrielle Starr, the college’s president, called the police after a group of student protesters made their way into her office as dozens more students and faculty members amassed outside. The police arrested 20 students, and Starr suspended the seven Pomona students involved and temporarily banned them from campus.
Since then, hundreds of students across the Claremont Colleges, a seven-campus consortium that includes Pomona, have staged protests. Student tour guides went on strike. And Pomona’s faculty passed a resolution that condemned “the present and future militarization and use of police on the campus.” Professors urged the college to immediately drop criminal charges against students and reverse their suspensions.
Pomona is one of many college campuses roiled by tensions over the Israel-Hamas war. One aspect that stands out is the escalation in response from Starr, the college’s president, who says her administration exhausted all other options before deciding to call the police on students.
That decision, along with the controversial arrest of a professor back in December, has prompted demands that the college should not call police officers on its own students or employees. Meanwhile, student activists say they will continue pressing Pomona to divest from Israel and weapons manufacturers, and to sever all related financial ties; the college has a $3-billion endowment.
As student activists seem poised to turn up the heat, and the administration stands firm by its decision, faculty members are questioning how — or whether — it’s possible for the college to avoid more ugly confrontations in the future.
“There were only two buttons: walk away or call the police,” said Kenneth Baxter Wolf, chair of faculty at Pomona. “Now, there’s really only one button, and that’s walk away. One kind of has to worry because … we didn’t really offer a path forward.”
A ‘Graduated’ Response
In messages to the campus and alumni, as well as an entire website, Pomona officials have defended their handling of recent activism in detail.
“Unidentified, masked individuals have repeatedly disrupted and/or forced the cancellation of events on our campus” over the past six months, the website states, including Pomona’s annual family weekend and the inauguration of the new president of Harvey Mudd College, another consortium member. “Our response has been graduated, with repeated warnings and reminders of policy.”
Protesters have also interrupted admissions tours and “carried out prolonged harassment” of campus visitors, according to the college.
On April 5, the protesters in Starr’s office refused to identify themselves, Starr said in public statements, and were “deemed to pose a threat” to campus safety. After asking them several times to leave the building, Starr said she made the decision to bring in the local police department, as the college does not have a sworn police force. Officers showed up in riot gear, which the college said it did not request.
So far, among students from the consortium who were arrested, only the seven Pomona students have been disciplined.
The college has finished conducting preliminary-review hearings for suspended students, and told The Chronicle that some students will remain off campus while others may return. The college declined to provide updates on “private judicial proceedings.”
“I do not take these steps lightly,” Starr wrote in an email to alumni. “As a college, we must be able to carry out our educational mission in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.”
After months of advocating for divestment and many students feeling like the needle had not moved, it was not surprising that the situation boiled over, said Heather Ferguson, an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, which is part of the consortium. “Choices have been made all along to create a polarized environment,” Ferguson said.
Sinqi Chapman, a freshman at Pomona who was among those arrested and suspended, pointed to a student referendum in which around 85 percent of students who voted agreed that Pomona should disclose financial ties to all companies “aiding the ongoing apartheid system within the State of Israel,” while 81 percent said the college should divest from such companies. (About 60 percent of Pomona students participated in the vote.)
The administration’s claims about safety, Chapman said, were excuses to arrest students. “They very clearly feel threatened by students who are challenging the very fabric of their institution and investments,” Chapman said.
In a statement to The Chronicle, a Pomona spokesperson said that “escalating acts of harassment and intimidation” by masked individuals who could not be identified is “inherently unsafe and unsustainable for the operation of our campus.”
‘Missed Opportunity’
Pomona faculty have spent hours over the past week debating the April 5 protest, said Wolf, the faculty chair.
The Monday after the arrests, some faculty members were outraged that the police had been called on members of the campus community. Others were “sympathetic” to the judgment call that Starr made under “unusual, extraordinary circumstances,” Wolf said.
On Thursday, the pendulum swung toward supporting the resolution that condemned the police presence on April 5 and going forward, with two-thirds of voting faculty in favor. The vote wasn’t a condemnation of Starr as president, Wolf stressed. All along, he said, the broad consensus was to separate the concerns about this decision from general feelings about Starr as a leader.
“Let’s talk about the fact that there were police on campus. Let’s not turn this into something more than that,” he said. Still, “it would not have been a comfortable thing for the president to sit through.”
Wolf believes that the campus had a “missed opportunity” to resolve issues that contributed to the April 5 events. The December arrest of a Pomona professor, who was playing pro-Palestinian music near a campus rally, sparked outrage across the Claremont Colleges. Afterward, Pomona’s faculty voted no confidence in the campus-safety department, which made the decision to call the police without the administration’s approval.
As colleges grapple with heightened tensions due to the Israel-Hamas war, many institutions, especially private colleges, have been examining their speech codes and protest policies. Institutions have also faced conflicts over the role of policing on campus.
Wolf supports the idea of an “intermediate” intervention between relying on the Claremont Colleges’ campus-safety resources and calling the local police. He hopes to form an ad hoc faculty committee to discuss such alternatives.
But given how students have been protesting recently — concealing their identities in the digital age to avoid doxxing, and refusing to talk with administrators as a form of protest pressure — Wolf has his doubts about what will make a difference.
Chapman, who remains suspended and banned from campus after the review hearing, said that protesters are not deterred by their punishments: “Students who were arrested will not rest.”
