Johns Hopkins Won Its Battle With Student Activists. But at What Cost?

The occupation of Garland Hall at the Johns Hopkins University may be over, but the tensions that animated it are far from resolved.

Those tensions escalated for weeks, with administrators eventually warning the parents of protesting students that their sons and daughters were occupying a locked-down building, and with the protesters accusing administrators of bad faith. On Wednesday, Baltimore police officers swept in to Garland, the main administration building, and arrested five protesters.

Later in the day the authorities tried to smooth things over. They announced that charges against the students would be dropped and that only those who were arrested would face campus disciplinary action.

The university won the battle, but it did little to win the hearts and minds of the students, faculty members, and community members who for months have opposed its contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, and its move to win state approval for its own police force.

As the worsening situation made national headlines, the administration’s handling of the protest over hot-button issues like race and immigration drew criticism as heavy-handed and as squandering an opportunity to win over its critics. Defenders of the university’s leaders said that they had avoided the kinds of overreaction that have imperiled other college presidents and that they had brought about a safe conclusion to an increasingly untenable situation that had been unfolding amid a fractious political climate.

Tone-Deaf

The five-week standoff was, perhaps, inevitable, and unlikely to end any other way.

The university alienated many on the campus last year, after it was revealed that it held about $1.5 million in contracts to provide educational services to ICE, the agency at the heart of immigration crackdowns.

“I was horrified,” said Drew Daniel, an associate professor of English who started a petition calling for an end to the deals with ICE. The petition has received about 2,000 signatures from students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Ronald J. Daniels, the president, and Sunil Kumar, the provost, declined to cancel the contracts, citing “faculty decisions made in relation to their research, teaching, and clinical work.”

Also last year, in March, Johns Hopkins announced plans to pursue a private police force, citing increased crime in the city, which is home to its main campus, the Johns Hopkins Medicine campus, and its Peabody Institute conservatory. To many at Johns Hopkins and in Baltimore, the move seemed ill-timed and tone-deaf. Distrust of the Baltimore Police Department among residents has risen to new heights since the death of Freddie Gray, in 2015, from injuries suffered in police custody. Federal inquiries have since uncovered widespread corruption and unconstitutional practices in the force.

“Sociological research into the impact of policing on black and brown communities has shown us that these forces do not make everyone in the community feel welcome and safe,” Daniel, the professor, said. “They make white people feel safe.” Baltimore’s population is about 65 percent African-American, but only about 7 percent of Johns Hopkins’s undergraduates are, according to U.S. Education Department data.

The Maryland Senate voted 42 to 2 for a bill authorizing the new police force — and both “no” votes were from Baltimore senators. Sen. Jill P. Carter, a Democrat, said she had voted against the measure because “the majority of community associations, the majority of students, and the majority of faculty were in opposition of the bill.”

Carter added that university officials had exploited Baltimore’s high crime rate “without producing any data or statistics as to why they particularly need on their campuses, and adjacent to the campuses, their own policing.”

Carter also said Johns Hopkins is insensitive to the objections of those who feel terrorized and targeted by the police, especially African-Americans and the LGBTQ community. Like the #MeToo movement, which has prioritized listening to and believing women, “people need to listen to us and hear us,” she said.

The day after the General Assembly passed the bill, on April 2, students and community members began a sit-in at Garland Hall.

Venue Shapes Reaction

Administrators and students quickly found themselves at seemingly irreconcilable odds. The two sides had little effective contact during the initial month of the sit-in, and on May 2 the protesters chained themselves to stairwells and chained shut the doors of Garland Hall.

The building was an ideal target for a protest. Sitting at the head of a grassy quad near the heart of the university’s main campus, Garland houses the president’s office, the registrar, and other key administrative units. Its centrality to the university — geographically and administratively — made the protest hard to ignore, and it also ensured a reaction from administrators.

Protesters’ choice of venue can help shape an institution’s reaction, said James H. Newberry Jr., a lawyer who represents colleges. Administrators may take a more-relaxed approach “if you’re on the back side of the campus and not bothering anybody,” he said. But if a protest is impeding major functions of the college, “you probably can’t allow that to continue very long at all.”

The university declined to make Daniels or Kumar available for comment. The students declined to comment on the record. In a written statement on May 3, Daniels called the occupation “a troubling and untenable situation.” He said he was happy to meet with protesters to discuss their concerns — “students need not make an occupation, only an appointment” — but would not meet while protesters still occupied Garland.

Two days later, he said in a written statement that he would meet personally with “any student protester who has or is willing to leave the occupation.” A livestream video on a Johns Hopkins web page shows Daniels and Kumar sitting in an empty conference room until it’s clear no protesters are coming.

Critics of the administration’s handling of the protest said such efforts don’t qualify as good-faith discussions. The president offered “to negotiate and meet on his terms,” said Zackary D. Berger, an associate professor of medicine and supporter of the protest. “Negotiation requires meeting also on someone else’s terms.” Such a meeting might have meant something if it involved far-reaching dialogue that might actually change the administration’s position, he added, and “that’s what I think was missing in the president’s offer.”

On May 7, Daniels and Kumar offered amnesty from institutional discipline “to any protester who departs and does not return to Garland Hall.” There were no takers. Early Wednesday morning, the university asked the Baltimore Police Department to intervene. After cutting through the chains on the doors with bolt cutters, officers arrested five protesters for trespassing and two others for obstructing a vehicle. Those arrested were handcuffed with zip ties.

In a written statement, a Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said that university administrators “are unshakeable in our support of freedom of expression, which lies at the core of academic life. We had hoped to find a constructive means to resolve this increasingly dangerous situation, and we are disappointed that the decisions of the protesters necessitated a law-enforcement response.”

During a news conference, Karter James Burnett, a junior and participant in the sit-in, denounced the arrests of protesters, who “have done nothing wrong but wanting to make sure that their friends, their faculty members, and community members are safe.” He vowed that “this movement will continue with or without Johns Hopkins’s support.”

With Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, having already signed the bill authorizing the new police force, it’s difficult to imagine the university reversing course. But that’s not exactly the point, said Berger: “The point of a protest is the normal avenues of dialogue have not been up to the task.” He considers Johns Hopkins’s work with ICE and its plan to put more armed police officers on Baltimore’s streets moral wrongs, and the sit-in “did what protests are supposed to do, which was focus moral attention.”

‘Not a Bad Outcome’

It could have been worse, for both the university and the protesters, said Brett A. Sokolow, chief executive of TNG, a risk-management firm that works with colleges.

He noted that, in the end, the university was able to retake possession of its building so it can finish up the semester. And the students made their point.

The situation was handled by the university with as much sensitivity and tact as it could muster, he added. “Nobody was injured, as far as I know,” he said. “That’s not a bad outcome.”

But Carter, the state senator, said it was a missed opportunity. The university could have tried harder to negotiate and mediate with the protesters rather than resorting to “the old, traditional approach of arresting students as if it was the only alternative,” she said. But university administrators now have the chance, she said, to “show naysayers and those who are skeptical that they are going to operate in good faith and they’re going to include their voices and opinions from here on out,” as the new police force is instituted.

If armed police officers are coming to Johns Hopkins, it may not be as bad as critics fear, said Newberry, the lawyer. “Generally speaking, university police forces are trained in such a fashion that they’re more user-friendly, shall we say, than a lot of city police forces would be,” he said. If the university had its own police, he noted, it wouldn’t have had to call the Baltimore Police onto the campus.

Most major private universities have their own police forces, Sokolow said, and it’s understandable that Johns Hopkins would want to use all means available to protect its community. But universities must also ask themselves if they want to insert more armed officers into a racially charged environment “where individuals are already being subject to not just police maltreatment but potentially even death,” he said. “Do we want to contribute to that environment by making it a college or university function?”

If Johns Hopkins gets its own police force, the university and its community will both have some adjusting to do, said Sokolow. The new police department, he said, will be more intimately interwoven with the campus than the Baltimore Police ever has been — for better or worse.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.

Corrections (5/9/2019, 10:58 a.m.): An earlier version of this article contained a number of errors. Swarthmore College did not shut down its fraternities in response to a student protest, as originally stated; the fraternities voted independently to disband. Johns Hopkins officials still intend to subject students who were arrested to campus disciplinary proceedings; only the student protesters who were not arrested will be cleared. Garland Hall remains closed, contrary to an earlier version of this article; the employees with offices there worked offsite during the building’s occupation and continue to do so. We also reported that Gov. Larry Hogan was “poised to sign the bill authorizing the new police force”; he has already signed it. A Hopkins spokeswoman rejected an assertion that administrators and students had “communicated about the sit-in largely through written statements and news conferences.” She wrote: “There was lots of verbal communication between administration and the students. Student-affairs staff and university officials talked with them regularly. And the president talked to them at the beginning.” The article has been edited to reflect these corrections.