Professors at the Protest

When protests against the Israel-Hamas war swept across college campuses this past spring, student activists were joined in some cases by their professors. That’s what happened at Indiana University, where state police led a particularly aggressive crackdown on demonstrators. The professors’ reasons for participating were varied and complex, but their decisions point toward a thorny and persistent question: Do faculty members have any business joining student protests?

Guest: Kate Hidalgo Bellows, staff reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Related Reading:

• Mideast War, Midwest Crisis: Indiana U. made a series of unpopular decisions. Then it called the police on protesters.
• ‘These Terms are Just Absurd’: How One University Disciplined Professors Accused of Assisting an Encampment
• As an 8-Day Protest Shut Down a University, Administrators and Faculty Sparred Over What to Do
• Cooley law firm’s review of Indiana University’s handling of protests.

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle. I’m Jack Stripling.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I think people were on edge all over the United States, worried that there would be an excessive use of force by police and then that could result in someone getting shot and killed. And I think seeing that sniper really placed the whole campus on edge.

Jack Stripling The protests on college campuses last spring riveted the country. Students across the nation demonstrated in throngs, expressing opposition to the war in Israel and Gaza. They built encampments. They shouted “free Palestine,” through megaphones. Hundreds were arrested. As the academic year gets underway at colleges nationwide, many students are returning to campus to find tightened security and more stringent rules about demonstrations. So are faculty members, some of whom joined their students in previous protests and, like their students, faced discipline or arrest. Why are professors participating in student demonstrations? Are they bravely showing solidarity with a common political cause? Unwisely stoking unrest? Or is something different at play? These questions loomed large this past April at Indiana University, where a particularly aggressive crackdown on student demonstrators drove professors out of their classrooms and onto the quad. Many said they were motivated in part by an indelible image from the protests, captured in a photograph that went viral online, that conjured memories of violent student-police interactions during the Vietnam War era.

Today on the show, I’ll talk with my colleague Kate Hidalgo Bellows, a staff reporter at The Chronicle, about what led some Indiana professors to join student demonstrations and what it may tell us about the complex calculus that faculty may again have to make this year: To keep their distance or enter the fray.

Jack Stripling Thanks for being here, Kate.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Thanks for having me, Jack.

Jack Stripling So I want to talk to you about faculty involvement in student protests by way of your reporting at Indiana University. But I think it’s important to have some context for what led up to the demonstrations there this past spring. Tell me about that.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Sure. So there had been a bunch of little flaps in the wake of October 7th that all led to tension simmering on campus. In December, the university canceled an art exhibit by a Palestinian artist for some reasons related to safety. Many advocates felt that they were not in good faith. And in April, members of the Bloomington faculty voted no confidence in the administration.

Jack Stripling So you have something of a free speech debate related to Palestine going all the way back to December. And by spring, some faculty are upset enough with the administration to vote no confidence in them. This feels like an environment that was ripe for protest. What is the history of protests on the campus? What were the rules around protests?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows So for 55 years Dunn Meadow on Indiana University’s main campus in Bloomington had stood as an assembly ground where students were able to set up tents and other structures without getting permission from the university beforehand, just so long as they were removed by 11 p.m.. But on April 24th, just a day before a big protest was expected on campus, an ad hoc committee changed that policy so that at any time of day, people who wanted to set up tents would have to get permission or to do so.

Jack Stripling So this is a totally new rule that really takes people by surprise.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Yes, totally took people by surprise. And then also, many saw it as an example of viewpoint discrimination because they had made that change in light of plans for there to be a pro-Palestinian encampment there.

Jack Stripling So what happens after they passed this new rule?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows So they post signs around the green space saying that this is the policy. You have to ask for permission if you set up any tents at any point. And the criticism from students and faculty members who were there was that it didn’t indicate that anything had been changed.

Jack Stripling The posters didn’t say this just in.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Right, Exactly. It didn’t say this was just change last night. It was as if things had always been that way.

Jack Stripling And so this sets the stage for this kind of dramatic conflict that a lot of us observed through clips on acts and elsewhere. What happened?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Despite the new rules, protesters went ahead and set up an encampment in Dunn Meadow. And in response to that, the administration made a critical decision to call in the Indiana State Police to remove those tents. And as happened a lot of campuses, a conflict ensued between protesters and police. It was pretty violent. If you look at videos and pictures of police officers in riot gear raiding the encampment, hitting, shoving protesters, dragging them across the grass and handcuffing them.

Jack Stripling And it’s not the campus police, right? Is that significant to you?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I think that is significant. It’s important to remember that campus police received different training from state troopers or even local police in a college town on how to work with students and staff members and faculty members. So they’re going to receive more training around mental health, for example.

Jack Stripling And there were some faculty in the mix we think?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows There were several faculty members who were arrested. This happened twice the 25th and the 27th of April. And in total, there were 57 arrests.

Jack Stripling So it sounds like there’s a lot of tension, a lot of confusion, maybe some anger. What are professors thinking as this unfolds?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I think professors are feeling like this is a violation of student’s free speech. This is a total overreaction by the university to peaceful protesters. And some of them come out to defend students. So they come out to where the arrests are happening and put their bodies on the line.

Jack Stripling How did they engage with the protest? Were they chanting along with students? Do you know?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Some of them were certainly part of that cause, but not all of them. Some of them were just there trying to make sure that students weren’t hurt.

Jack Stripling Let’s talk more about the faculty concerns for their students. One of the tactics the state police used in response to the protesters was to place an officer on the roof of a student union building holding a sniper rifle. And someone took a photo of that that I remember seeing all over social media. What did professors make of it?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows So one thing that multiple professors said to me was that it reminded them of Kent State that looms large in many of their minds because either they were young when that happened. And then also because we’re in the Midwest here. And so Kent State, you know, National Guardsmen shot and killed several students. And I think faculty really feared for the lives of their students that a sniper could open fire on someone who makes some kind of movement that indicates harm.

Jack Stripling There was thinking that there was going to be a tragedy here. Right.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I think people were on edge all over the United States, worried that there would be an excessive use of force by police and then that could result in someone getting shot and killed. And I think seeing that sniper really placed the whole campus on edge. I think faculty were at their wits end. And so, like universally, when I asked them what was the point at which they lost their trust in the administration, like they said, it was the sniper. They were already at that point. And then that just kind of sealed the deal. And I would say that my source, Alex Lichtenstein, really falls under that. He is a professor in the Department of History and was very disturbed by the arrest and the sniper on the rooftop. So when you talk to people like Alex, the thing that they emphasize is that students have every right to be out there and to be advocating for the cause that they believe. But some of those folks that I talked to did seek to distance themselves from the cause, not saying that they didn’t agree with it or anything, but just that they were there primarily in support of free speech rights. Alex has been pretty active in the criticism of the IU Bloomington administration for the militarized police presence.

Alex Lichtenstein I don’t know why or who thought it was a good idea to put snipers on the roof. Absolutely insane. All of that happened a week after the faculty had already voted no confidence in the president and the provost. Maybe they figured they had nothing to lose, but that the faculty was already so disillusioned with them that they could do whatever they wanted. But it’s just a bonehead move. Yes.

Jack Stripling So I’m curious what happened to these professors. We have a sense that many of them were appalled by what was happening on the campus. They were scared for the students. I’m curious how it turned out, though. How did this sort of end?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows So we had 57 arrests total on trespassing and other charges. Those students and professors received trespass warnings that for the most part, banned them from campus for a year. I talked to a couple people who got five year long bans. Many of those students and professors and community members were able to get those trespass warnings, stayed so that they could have access to campus. In a message to campus after the arrests. President Pam Whitton said the campus had tried to balance, quote, legitimate safety concerns related to unregulated encampments and our commitment to free speech. But many faculty members felt like that wasn’t true. And she acknowledged that this was not a sustainable system for the campus moving forward. Since that time and outside law firm has released a review of the university’s handling of the protests, and it largely supported the administration’s response. But it did say that understaffing of the campus police had caused, quote, myriad negative effects. And it also said that the last minute change to Dunn Meadow protest policy had, quote, unintended negative consequences.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling I can see a scene here where you have long built up tensions on a campus between faculty and the administration. You have a sort of catalytic moment that’s galvanized by a national movement around protest. But I’m still kind of curious about what professors do, how they join these demonstrations, what compels them to do it. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what you heard, because it is a big decision. These are employees of the university. They’re paid by the university. Right. And they are participating in something that is from the point of view of the administration, at minimum, disruptive, if not illegal or a violation of policy. I would think that’d be a big decision.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows It’s important to qualify that. For the most part, faculty members themselves weren’t pitching their own tents on the quad, though that may be what it looks like from media nationally. It was less so like that. Professors got involved in a number of ways this year. They attended encampments to offer their support. That’s a lot of what we saw at Indiana University. They used encampments as an outdoor classroom, and they attended events hosted by student organizers at the encampment. So when I went I went to IU, this was after the waves of arrest, so it wasn’t as tense. I saw professors sticking to the sidewalk around the encampment rather than actually getting on it themselves. But they talked to the student protesters who, you know, really valued the support of faculty members there.

Jack Stripling So I think if you listen to news coverage of this or if you saw clips of it, a popular narrative would be liberal faculty are mad about the war in Israel and Gaza. They’re sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. And they’re either joining with these students because they agree with that position. Or even more cynically, they’re using students to advance that agenda. And I’m wondering if that squares with what your reporting told you.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I spoke with many of the professors who had been punished or disciplined at IU, as well as those who just watched in shame from afar. And I can really boil it down to three types, those professors who do support the Palestinian cause there. They’re calling for a cease fire and divestment. They’re there with the students 24 seven. But there were also those who were disturbed by their arrests because they really believed in the value of free speech on campus and felt like the university wasn’t respecting it in this case and they wanted to take a stand in support of that. And this, I think, is actually the most interesting part of it, is that I think many faculty members saw themselves as caretakers that had the responsibility of protecting their students, especially when police were called. So whether the students feel like they need protecting from faculty members is up for debate. But some of those arrested at Indiana University said to media afterwards that they were there because they didn’t want to see their students brutalized. And I did have several interviews with professors who said that they didn’t want to sound like they were adopting and in loco parentis position, and they knew that their students were adults. But they felt like these were some of the most vulnerable individuals that were at risk of getting arrested and facing negative consequences from the university. And they wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen for exercising their free speech rights. So I definitely think that there was a fair bit of overlap between those two groups, that there were those who were both pro-Palestinian and believed that they needed to protect their students. And there were many who were in favor of freedom of assembly who were also adopting that caretaker position. I do think that there is a more cynical interpretation of this that you may see from media outlets, which is that the students who were shields for professors who wanted to communicate their opinion on progressive causes or were very frustrated with the administration over decisions, including what happened at Dunn Meadow on April 25th and 27th, as well as everything we talked about earlier, the general public is less likely to feel sympathy for these professors who say that university officials are the enemy and are making their lives harder, more dangerous or what have you, than they are to feel sympathy for those who are just trying to put their bodies on the line to protect their students.

Jack Stripling [My sense is that there’s varying views on whether professors have any business involved in a student led demonstration. Are they inflaming these situations? Are there different views on that?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Yes, definitely. And I think as we’re talking about the national discourse, a lot of that homes in on the idea that these students have been radicalized by their professors and that they are simply microphones for the causes that are espoused by professors. And so when professors get involved, it confirms many existing narratives about why they are so sympathetic to the protesters and that that’s more about ideology than it is about wanting to protect students from physical harm.

Jack Stripling I wonder if you could drill down more deeply into the consequences professors are facing, not just in Indiana, but everywhere across the country

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Professors are facing discipline not only from their local police, but also from the universities and colleges themselves that have taken them out of the classroom, suspended them, ban them from campus. At Northwestern, for example, police charged several employees for obstructing law enforcement. Those charges were later dropped by the local state attorney’s office.

Jack Stripling And I know that this has fired up all sorts of people about free speech issues which are long standing in higher education. I’m curious, though, since the encampments were such a big part of what happened in the spring and maybe will reoccur, what have free speech advocates said about that? Can you set up a tent for two weeks and on a college campus? Is that okay? Is that First Amendment protected?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows So even free speech advocates acknowledge that colleges have the power to remove or arrest protesters who refuse to leave encampments or don’t disband them at night. There’s a well-known free speech group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or Fire, which acknowledges that colleges can restrict time, place and manner of demonstrations. Obviously, private colleges have more discretion in that area than publics. Students and faculty are allowed to engage in civil disobedience that purposefully violates law policy, but they are subject to legal and disciplinary consequences for that. But - and this is a big but that I think many advocates pointed to in conversations with me - colleges have to be viewpoint and content neutral with enforcement so they can’t be singled out for discipline or arrest one group of protesters because they don’t like their message. And many pro-Palestinian advocates have pointed to a concept called the Palestine Exception, which posits that there’s an exception to free speech about Palestine and Israel because the administrations don’t like that message.

Jack Stripling You know, I’m wondering, as we look at the academic year ahead, it would be sort of easy to say this was a fleeting moment in the history of higher education that got a lot of attention, but that it’s over now. Do you think there are longer term ramifications to what happened in the spring that could continue to play out this year?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I do think universities and colleges are going to have to do a lot of work to gain back the trust of both their students and faculty members. And students have just arrived back at their colleges and they are continuing to advocate for Palestine as the war continues. And it’s going to be incumbent on the administration to try to rebuild the trust with students and faculty members who are disciplined or arrested. And I don’t expect that to be easy work. There were some people I talked to who their greatest takeaway from everything that had happened was that the tensions had split apart factions of the campus that had previously been united. So I talked to a graduate student who was from Syria who compared what was going on there to his war torn home country. He spoke about how traumatizing it was to see the campus split apart like this, to see faculty members arguing with each other constantly and students the same. And so I think that when it comes to rebuilding a united campus community that has all the hallmarks of closeness and community that will hold so near and dear about our college campuses, it’s going to be really difficult for for colleges to repair those fractured bonds.

Jack Stripling So there are some political concerns here that we haven’t talked about overtly. We’ve kind of talked around them. Can you talk about the pressure that academic leaders are under right now from politicians?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows College leaders are under immense political pressure right now to respond to claims of anti-Semitism within the pro-Palestinian protest movement. We saw this during congressional hearings over the past academic year. The presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT and others were harshly questioned over their responses to claims of anti-Semitism, and the fallout was severe. Of course, three of those presidents have all since resigned. Those are at Harvard, Penn and Columbia. We’ve seen members of Congress criticize universities for how they’re responding to protests. And there are also, of course, concerns about anti-Arab rhetoric and discrimination. And the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened dozens of investigations into whether protests created a hostile environment. So college leaders are on notice that this is a big deal. And the political pressure, particularly from the right, is about cracking down on protests.

Jack Stripling So there’s a lot of political pressure to rein in protest. And we’ve certainly seen protests that got out of control. Protesters at Columbia and Cal Poly Humboldt occupied buildings. They did a lot of property damage. At the same time, you know, I’m thinking about activism historically on college campuses. And, you know, it is something that creates a sense of community on college campuses, for lack of a better word. And whether that’s through demonstrations or the faculty teach ins that we saw in the 60s. How do you think the political backlash against these recent protests has affected that sense of community on college campuses nationally?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows I should start by saying that the sense of community had been strained ever since October 7th. So I talked to many Jewish students who felt like they weren’t able to trust their classmates or that they felt like they were being iced out for their activism around Israel. Talked to many pro-Palestinian students who said the same thing, that they felt like all the activism that their universities had sold their identity on to parents and incoming students and etc., that they were turning back on that. So I think that many students and faculty members felt like the colleges had betrayed their espoused missions in order to cave in to political pressure. Students I talked to at Columbia University, for example, said that the college had been so proud of its legacy of student activism, not just Columbia. Other universities, too, had been so proud of that legacy, only to turn their backs on the students who were participating in activism as soon as it wasn’t politically convenient for them anymore.

Jack Stripling It sounds like you’re describing a sense of disappointment or sadness.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Disappointment and sadness and lack of trust. I do think that it is important to keep in mind, and this is how I closed the piece about Indiana, that much of this thing that’s happening is not touching all corners of the campus. So I decided after I had been reporting on the ground there, I just walked through. Areas of Bloomington around Indiana and see what students and professors were up to. It was move out day. Things were kind of just normal there. And so I closed this piece on this anecdote of seeing these two guys moving a mattress across the street as you would on move all day and a party going on, you know, nearby with music from the early 2000s. The purchase seems so big when you’re looking at it on TV or social media, but on the ground it is a minority of students and faculty members who are feeling the everyday effects of this. And that’s true of the faculty we’ve been talking about. Some professors are going to have to make a big decision this year about whether to join students in further activism. And some of them aren’t giving that a second thought. They’re just trying to get their grading done.

Jack Stripling Okay, understood. Well, we will watch with great interest to see what unfolds in the coming weeks and months. And I know you’ll be on top of it. Kate. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows Thanks, Jack.

Jack Stripling If you want to read Kate’s great story on what went down at Indiana, check it out at chronicle.com.

College Matters from The Chronicle, is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our original podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas.

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