While most colleges have cracked down on pro-Palestinian student encampments and other demonstrations seeking divestment from Israel, which has resulted in suspensions, campus closures, and mass arrests, several colleges this week have taken a different path.
On Monday, Northwestern University reached an agreement with student protesters to end their encampment. Brown University and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., followed shortly after, reaching agreements on Tuesday.
Both sides have been able to claim victory, even if they haven’t entirely escaped blowback. Student organizers have promoted the agreements as a key first step toward their broader demands, and administrators hailed them as a way to de-escalate tensions and ensure the safety of all students.
“It’s absolutely a win for students to live to fight another day. It keeps the issue in the spotlight,” said Demetri L. Morgan, an associate professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago. “But I think when you sort of study and know how institutions move and operate, I would be breathing a sigh of relief if I was an administrator, because now the terms are back on their terms.”
At Northwestern, the university will permit “peaceful protest” on Deering Meadow, two acres of green space on campus, until the end of their fourth quarter, on June 1. After maintaining 80 tents for over 100 hours, student leaders agreed to take down all but one tent used for aid purposes and otherwise follow university protest policies.
In return, the university will form an advisory committee made up of student, faculty, and staff members to “provide a conduit to engagement” with its investment committee; answer questions “to the best of its knowledge and to the extent legally possible” about its investments held currently or in the last quarter; build a community space for Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students; and fund two full-time Palestinian faculty members for two years and the full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduate students, with a pledge to raise funds for the long-term sustainability of the program. The university also agreed to “engage students in a process dedicated to ensuring additional support for Jewish and Muslim students” through its student-affairs office.
This agreement was forged by the hard work of students and faculty working closely with members of the administration to help ensure that the violence and escalation we have seen elsewhere does not happen here.
“This agreement was forged by the hard work of students and faculty working closely with members of the administration to help ensure that the violence and escalation we have seen elsewhere does not happen here at Northwestern,” the university leaders wrote, calling the agreement a “sustainable and de-escalated path forward.”
Agreements at Brown and Evergreen took similar tacks. Students at Evergreen removed their encampment in exchange for four task forces that will examine questions about socially responsible investments, grant requirements, police presence on campus, and alternative crisis-response models. Contingent on dismantling the encampment at Brown and refraining from further violations of the conduct code through the end of the academic year, the university agreed to assign a committee the task of developing a recommendation on divestment by September 2024 and, regardless of that recommendation, vote on whether or not to divest from holdings in Israel at a governing-board meeting in October 2024. The agreement also stipulates that anyone affiliated with Brown who was involved in the encampment and related protests won’t face “retaliation” from the institution, though students could still potentially be charged with violations of the institution’s code of conduct.
The Northwestern Divestment Coalition proclaimed on social media that the agreement represents “the floor, not the ceiling,” and expressed hope that it would give other student organizers more power. Brown’s divestment coalition similarly declared that the agreement was not “an end to our work, but rather fuel for it.”
Brown declined The Chronicle’s interview request, and Northwestern did not respond. Student groups and representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
The Best ‘Route’
The agreements come as negotiations have broken down elsewhere.
Leaders at Portland State and the Johns Hopkins Universities thought they’d reached deals with organizers, but student protesters have continued their encampments. After negotiations hit a wall at Columbia University earlier this week, the university issued suspension notices and called the police back to campus on Tuesday night in another heated escalation there.
While some colleges called the police or issued suspensions before meeting with students, other students haven’t come to the table even when their colleges asked them to. Student protesters at Pomona College and Yale University have declined meetings with administrators, demanding nothing short of divestment.
The difficulties very likely stem from the fact that the playbook that administrators usually rely on is not equipped to satisfy students’ divestment demands, said Morgan, the associate professor at Loyola, who studies student activism and political engagement.
For example, administrators have sometimes turned to the negotiation table when student-employees call for unionization, or looked to new student-affairs positions, scholarships, or programs in response to identity-based movements, like Black Lives Matter in 2020. But Morgan said it is much harder for institutions to find compromises in the face of clear-cut calls to examine their investment portfolios or make changes to endowments.
“The biggest consideration is how to find something that is going to appease students when what they’re asking for is very complex, and it requires a lot of time,” he said.
The biggest consideration is how to find something that is going to appease students when what they’re asking for is very complex.
Despite the uphill battles to reach agreements on campuses, open dialogue with student protesters is what the American Association of University Professors has promoted as the best route forward in this heated moment, said Irene Mulvey, president of AAUP.
Instead of responding to multiday demonstrations by issuing suspensions or bringing in the police, Mulvey said, colleges should strive to communicate with students and use the negotiating table as an educational opportunity. “The way forward is through education — to talk to each other, to understand each other, even in disagreement,” she said. “I think [the agreements are] modeling what should be done everywhere.”
Walter M. Kimbrough, a former president of Dillard University who serves as president-in-residence at Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions, sees this moment as an educational opportunity for students, especially because they seem less willing to come to the negotiating table.
Kimbrough, who posted on social media about the need for students to understand the framework for nonviolent action developed by Martin Luther King Jr., said they need to think more rigorously about their demands. “It’s easy to just walk around and chant and shout,” Kimbrough said, “but are you going to come and actually understand what you’re asking for?”
Feelings of Betrayal
Others aren’t convinced the agreements are a victory for pro-Palestinian student protesters or Jewish students — leaving the carefully crafted agreements on potentially precarious ground.
The Jewish United Fund, which oversees Northwestern’s Hillel, said the agreement left Jewish students, faculty, staff, and alumni feeling “betrayed.” Several national Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, StandWithUs, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, have called on Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, to resign. (In a video response, Schill, citing the history of his family’s experience with antisemitism, defended his handling of the encampments.)
“A prestigious institution that is supposed to be preparing our students for the future catastrophically failed to teach responsibility, respect for community values, and the fundamental principle that no one is above the law, regardless of how deeply or passionately they believe in their own cause,” the three organizations wrote in a letter.
A prestigious institution that is supposed to be preparing our students for the future catastrophically failed to teach responsibility, respect for community values, and the fundamental principle that no one is above the law.
While pro-Palestinian student groups celebrated the agreements on social media, some members of those groups said students at Brown and Northwestern had caved to administrators.
“Stop trying to sell this as a good deal,” wrote one commentator on a post by the Northwestern University Divestment Coalition. “The community that organized alongside you feels betrayed.”
“With all due respect,” another commentator wrote, “I’m hoping that other campus encampments don’t follow in your footsteps and allow the administration to fall short on meeting demands.” (It’s not clear if the people who posted are affiliated with Northwestern; the comments received hundreds of likes.)
If history is any indication, Morgan said, the deals may not go as far as some student organizers hope. He pointed to the re-creation of Northwestern’s investment-input committee for students, faculty, and staff, and Brown University’s recommendation of “divestment from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory” in a 2020 report that didn’t prompt action.
What stands out about the agreements to Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, is that protesters received some movement on items they’d long asked for. The key demand of divestment, he said, remains an open question.
“It seems like this appeasement and pacification meets students on some things that may or may not have been on the table originally, and not the principal thing for which we are fighting,” Davis said. “It allows the institute to say, ‘We’ve done something, even if we didn’t do the thing that we’ve been asked or demanded for us to do.’”
Whether or not they’ve made agreements, college leaders shouldn’t expect students to throw in the towel. Today’s student protesters, Morgan said, have come of age in a decade filled with major social-justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, and Me Too. The lack of progress on issues that feel existential to them has instilled a lack of trust in officials.
That’s part of what makes it difficult to persuade students to come to the table with administrators, which is only complicated further by the divisive nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campuses.
“Administrators would do well to honor that more than they are,” Morgan said. “I think they’re like, ‘All these college students are being petulant children.’ It’s like, ‘No, they’ve seen their world turned upside down.’”
Forest Hunt contributed reporting to this story.
