A wave of student activism has spread across the country this month following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. And more activity is likely in the coming days, with the national Students for Justice in Palestine group issuing a second call to action for its campus chapters this week.
The demonstrations and the reactions to them stand out in the long history of campus protests, experts say. Students are more skeptical, more influential, and simultaneously more vulnerable than ever.
Dozens of student organizations have staged rallies, held vigils, and organized other events in response to the attacks by the Hamas militant group in Israel as well as retaliation by the Israeli government in Gaza. The ongoing violence in the Middle East has left thousands dead.
Conflict on Campus
Donors are cutting ties. Professors and presidents are facing calls for their jobs. And students want more support from their institutions.
Many of the pro-Palestinian rallies have been met with counterdemonstrations from students supporting Israel, as well as intense backlash for Students for Justice in Palestine’s messaging. Donors to some colleges have threatened to cut ties if administrators didn’t condemn the protests, while faculty members have faced scrutiny over their support of the Palestinian movement. Some administrators have received calls to resign.
Campus activism in response to conflicts between Israel and Palestine has occurred for years. But environmental factors have raised the stakes for student organizers, three experts on student activism told The Chronicle.
Changing Attitudes
Over the past few years, events like the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic have opened a lot of students’ eyes to issues of systemic oppression, said Katherine S. Cho, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago. Students have often questioned their administrators and others in power, Cho said, but they’ve recently felt even less supported by their colleges.
Colleges’ responses to national and global issues often result in “a lot of unmet promises and a lot of broken dreams,” Cho said. “Just because an institution says that they care about students, that doesn’t mean anything.”
Students are also engaging with issues that are beyond their campuses and even outside of the United States, said Angus Johnston, a student-activism historian and professor at the City University of New York’s Hostos Community College.
While students have in years past demonstrated against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War or colleges’ treatment of undocumented students, over the past week and a half, they’ve expanded their demands to the actions of a foreign government, Johnston said. The last time he remembers a similar wave of activism was during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
In its latest toolkit for campus chapters, Students for Justice in Palestine called on protesting students to make two demands: that colleges “fully divest” from corporations that “arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” and “an immediate end” to both Israel’s siege on Gaza and U.S. military funding to Israel. The organization’s messaging over all has also taken a more global stance by blaming the Israeli government for the ongoing violence.
Jewish and Palestinian student groups have also held vigils for victims of the violence. Some students have read lists of names during demonstrations, shared stories about friends and family who’ve died, or hung photos on campus.
“There is some criticism of the U.S. government, but really the current wave is primarily objecting to something that is happening in another country,” Johnston said, “and hoping to influence U.S. policy around that.”
Rise of Social Media
Social media has also fundamentally changed how campus protests play out. Student groups are able to spread information faster and further, Cho said.
Students for Justice in Palestine and many of its chapters across the country have used social media to post statements condemning the war or their colleges’ responses to it. Some student groups have used messaging platforms like WhatsApp to spread information about where events are happening or the best ways to organize.
But online organizing has also created a more dangerous environment for student activists.
Social-media platforms like X and Instagram have put campus activists under a “microscope” over the past few years, Johnston said. Students who led protests decades ago were able to engage in activism without drawing much attention beyond campus. But with video and social media, people can immediately react to events on a campus or even individual students who spoke out.
After more than 30 Harvard University student groups issued a statement last week “entirely” blaming the Israeli government for much of the ongoing violence, critics online called for employers to blacklist the students affiliated with the organizations. The following day, a truck displaying photos of many students involved in the groups drove across campus.
The president of New York University’s Student Bar Association also reportedly had a job offer rescinded at a prominent firm after writing a similar statement to the organization.
“That’s a level of scrutiny that student activists have been under for the last 20 years or so,” Johnston said. “That really didn’t exist before.”
Social media has also allowed misinformation to spread quickly and created environments where people react hastily and firmly, with nuance stripped away, Cho said.
“There are so many layers to this because of the ties with religion, the ties of occupation. There is antisemitism, and there’s also anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian and there’s anti-Blackness — that’s all rooted and tied together,” Cho said. “When information is moving as quickly as it is, we’re missing a lot of the nuance of these conversations.”
Internal Divide
Students are more readily scrutinizing one another and accusing other campus organizations of moral failures. This conflict among peers also sets this movement apart, Johnston said.
Throughout the “Day of Resistance” last week, some demonstrations were met with counterprotests from campus community members supporting Israel. Reports of tension between Israeli and Palestinian students have also spread, and an Israeli student was allegedly assaulted with a stick on the Columbia University campus.
In the past, liberal student activists have often taken a united position against a conservative status quo, Johnston said. But now they’re divided over outrage against Hamas and outrage against the Israeli government, he said. To Johnston, an ideological divide between people who are often “allies” has a wrenching effect.
“When you have within a movement or within an organization, people who are disagreeing with each other in ways that cut across what everybody had sort of assumed was an ideological affinity, that could be really painful for people on all sides of the issue,” Johnston said.
The divide stems from a greater trend where liberal beliefs often don’t address Palestinian oppression, said Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor with the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Many college leaders’ responses to the war or the pro-Palestinian protests “have all but erased and disregarded Palestinian suffering,” Davis said. This has further contributed to an imbalance of power for those who support Palestine’s independence and goes against many colleges’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, he said.
With limited support from college leadership, student groups may work closer with the surrounding community to organize protests, a tactic that campus activists have taken on in recent years, he said.
“The limits of our recognition and understanding of standing on the side of the oppressed seems to stop at Palestine,” Davis said. “We find that that seems to be a limit for many of these institutions where they do not want to be taken to task, because somehow what’s been happening to Palestine by Israel is a thing that we should not be speaking about.”
Uncertain Future
The future of student activism around the Israel-Hamas war is uncertain, Johnston said.
As a result of the pandemic, many of the informal mentoring and guidance networks within campus communities have fallen apart, he said. Students who were learning remotely for a year or more weren’t able to mentor younger students, and information on how to organize didn’t get passed down and spread.
“That knowledge, which is almost always in the student environment passed on orally, is going to experience a rupture,” Johnston said. “A lot of the students who are organizing now are students who are having to learn to organize in a very different environment than they would have if the pandemic hadn’t happened.”
Many activist groups also haven’t found which tactics work the best for this movement, he said.
“Students are still finding their legs,” Johnston said. “They are still figuring out how to protest, what the forces against them are, how to manage the internal disagreements that they’re having, and they are going to be in the weeks and months to come.”
