College protests

Helen Benedict, TomDispatch  -  Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise... As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.

Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread antisemitism to take eyes off the astronomical death toll in Gaza — more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than 14,500 of them children — while fretting about the safety of Jewish students instead. The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously and we have methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness.”

Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too... No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.

AP News -  Although it might be tempting to compare the nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement of a half century ago, Robert Cohen says that would be an overreaction.“I would say that this is the biggest, in the United States, in the 21st century,” said Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University. “But you could say, `Well, that’s like being the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas.'" So far, there have been no bombings, like the one in August 1970 at the University of Wisconsin that killed a postdoctoral researcher and did $6 million worth of damage. There has been no repeat of the infamous Kent State massacre of May 1970, when National Guard troops opened fire on protesters at the Ohio campus, killing four... Police have cleared encampments and made more than 2,000 arrests, and some, like the crackdown Thursday at UCLA have involved violent clashes. A police officer involved in clearing Columbia’s Hamilton Hall of protesters Tuesday discharged his gun inside the building. But demonstrations elsewhere have been peaceful and even led to agreements with administrators to address students’ demands.

Axios - Deals between four universities and pro-Palestinian protesters offer a rough roadmap for schools seeking to defuse tensions and shut down encampments before commencement, Axios' Sareen Habeshian writes.Administrators at Northwestern, Brown, Rutgers and Minnesota found diplomatic alternatives to police force. The agreements — including two finalized in the past 36 hours — avoid sweeping and immediate changes to university investments, in favor of scholarships for Palestinian students and expanded academic programs:

1. None of the four schools agreed to divest from companies that do business in Israel or aid the country's war effort, a key demand at schools across the country.
2. All agreed to less concrete concessions around their endowments.
3. Two of the agreements — Northwestern and Rutgers — include scholarships or aid for Palestinian students. They also promised to provide improved space for Muslims on campus.
4. Minnesota told protesters it could explore an affiliation with a Palestinian university.
5. The agreements provide some level of amnesty for students involved in encampments.

MORE.

AP News - A tally by The Associated Press recorded at least 56 incidents of arrests at 43 different U.S. colleges or universities since April 18 stemming from recent campus protests.