David Dawson, a senior here at the University of Texas at Austin, said it all happened so fast. He and other students involved with the Palestinian Solidarity Committee had planned to walk from the campus gym to the lawn in front of the campus’s Main Building, and occupy that lawn, inspired by the protests at Columbia University. The plan had been to hear speakers and hold a teach-in.
But when the students arrived at the gym, they found that officers with the Texas Highway Patrol and the Austin Police Department were there waiting for them, and ordered them to leave.
“The organizers were actively trying to get people to peacefully disperse,” said Dawson, an exercise-science major and one of the few students who gave interviews to the press. Suddenly, he said, one of the organizers was tackled to the ground by several officers and taken into a police car. The charge, he said one officer told him, was trespassing.
Campus Activism
Encampments and sit-ins proliferated across the country in April, May, and June. Our map has been updated to include recent encampments at Wayne State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a handful of other institutions.
“We are all liable to be arrested,” said Dawson. “Right now, they just seem to be grabbing whoever they can.”
The scene Wednesday afternoon looked like that on many other campuses across the country: Hundreds of students thronged on and around the lawn, as dozens of police officers in riot gear and mounted on horses organized themselves into lines to push the students off the grass and back to the sidewalk. The students chanted slogans like “Ceasefire! Now!” — and, at the police, “Off our campus!” Now and then, screaming would erupt as the police grabbed a few more protesters and marched them away.
Pro-Palestinian campus protests have multiplied across the country in recent days, as students have demanded divestment, administrators have cited safety concerns, and political figures across the spectrum have weighed in. Posting on X, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote “These protesters belong in jail.” More than 20 students were arrested, according to news reports.
Late Wednesday, Jay Hartzell, UT’s president, explained his response to the protest in an email to the campus. “Today, our university held firm, enforcing our rules while protecting the constitutional right to free speech,” Hartzell said.
Hartzell said that the protesters — many of whom weren’t students — violated campus policies, disrupted the learning environment, and ignored warnings to disperse. “Our university will not be occupied,” he said.
The demonstration had attracted students from campus with different perspectives, and although verbal debates had erupted here and there, the only physical confrontations seemed to happen between police and demonstrators.
The Scene at Morningside Heights
On Saturday, protesters on either side of the entrance presented different forms of activism.
Zachary Siegel, a senior, held up an Israeli flag on one side of the lawn in a silent counterprotest. “In the four years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen a demonstration like this,” he said. “It’s important that we stand as Jews, we’re a united people, we stay strong and we can’t be scared into silence.” Asked if the Israeli-Palestinian debate had affected the discourse on campus, Siegel said he believed that some courses at the university were “definitely anti-Israel, antisemitic,” but “I can’t necessarily comment because I haven’t experienced it myself.”
Josh Sklar, a graduate student in library studies, stood a few yards away from Siegel, wearing both a yarmulke and a keffiyeh, the scarf that symbolizes Palestinian solidarity. As a member of the campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, he said he “despises Zionism” and that the debate over Gaza is “all I think about.”
Many of the pro-Palestinian students at the demonstration refused to talk to the press, directing journalists to the protest organizers, who had either already been dragged off or who were busy managing the throng. Sklar felt a responsibility to speak. “The history of Judeophobia is being used as a cudgel, and I want to say that I don’t approve of that,” he said. He said that he didn’t think of himself as a victim, but that his ancestors were — and that standing up to injustice is a way of honoring them.
The protest also drew people from off campus. Andrea Kaji, with dark sunglasses and a black scarf covering her face, was on the other side of the lawn, heatedly debating Owen Shroyer, a conservative media personality associated with Alex Jones and Infowars. Shroyer traveled through the crowd shadowed by a burly bodyguard. (Some of the protesters wore scarves or masks that concealed their faces, but Kaji explained that the scarf and sunglasses covering her face were not intended to hide her identity; she had just gotten a platelet-rich plasma facial and had doctor’s orders to stay out of the sun.)
Kaji — who is Middle Eastern, with family in the Palestinian territories, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq — said she lives in Austin but is not a student at the university. “I listened to him,” she said of Shroyer. “I can agree on a lot of points, but his delivery was just like, You’re all anti-American. But at the end of the day, we still had the same idea, which is to keep our money here and stop funding these wars across the world.”
She said that as a millennial on the verge of turning 40, she looked at the Gen Z students here — both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel factions — with admiration.
“I really love seeing this,” she said. Colleges are supposed to be about free speech and debate, with everyone being heard, she said. But the police in riot gear made it feel like a military state. “This is incredibly scary.”
