How best should US universities respond to campus protests?

The University of California, Berkeley has one of the nation’s most storied histories of campus protest. The steps at Sproul Plaza – Berkeley’s traditional centre of student activism – are embedded with a plaque in honour of Mario Savio, the renowned student protest leader who demanded free-speech rights there in the 1960s.

And so, as more than 70 US colleges and universities – including Berkeley – have been roiled by two weeks of sit-in protests in support of Palestinian civilians, leading to hundreds of arrests, Berkeley has largely navigated the moment with minimal disruption.

At least part of the credit, according to university leaders, goes to years of hard-learned lessons and ongoing energetic preparation for such a moment. That includes systems for regular engagement between administrators, faculty and students to hear and address ongoing concerns. Two longstanding organisations were founded specifically for Jewish and for Palestinian students, affording them direct personal access to top campus officials, all the way up to the chancellor.

It’s difficult work and there’s no guarantee that a serious confrontation won’t occur any moment, said Dan Mogulof, Berkeley’s assistant vice-chancellor for executive communications. But even as other US university leaders relent under an escalating drumbeat of pressure from conservative federal lawmakers to fight student free speech with all available resources, Berkeley is sticking to what it describes as an ethos of restraint – talking with students, answering their questions, and reserving force for only when it becomes absolutely necessary.

“Our understanding – from our own experience and experience of others,” Mr Mogulof said, is “that bringing in law enforcement can have unintended consequences, can make matters worse, and can blow back to the detriment of the student body as a whole.”

That reality has been seen over and over again in recent days on US campuses. Two weeks into the coast-to-coast series of sit-in confrontations, the arrest tally is about 1,000, sparked by Republican members of Congress goading university leaders into physical confrontations with students, often regardless of whether and to what degree the initial student behaviour was disruptive to campus operations.

In some instances, protesters have begun responding in kind. At Columbia University – the initial focal point for sit-in protests after lawmakers berated their president at a Capitol Hill hearing – some students subjected to arrests and then suspensions decided to move from their tent encampment, on the main campus lawn, to the actual break-in and occupation of a nearby classroom building.

Elsewhere in the US, there are some emerging signs that calmer heads may be prevailing. Brown University and Northwestern University both announced that they have reached agreements with demonstrators that would end their on-campus tent encampments in return for administration promises to formally assess the possibility of reducing or ending their financial ties to the Israeli military. And the president of Wesleyan University agreed to let his campus sit-in protests persist as long as they remained non-violent.

And not all compromise efforts have proven successful. The new president of Portland State University, Ann Cudd, announced late last week that she was meeting a major demand of pro-Palestinian activists, agreeing to pause any acceptance of gifts or grants from the Boeing Company, a substantial donor to PSU that demonstrators identified for divestment because of its financial ties to the Israeli military. Student activists, however, rejected their president’s idea as meaningless because of its temporary nature, and moved a few days later from a tent encampment to the break-in and occupation of the university’s main library building.

Dr Cudd’s promise on Boeing seemed insincere, student leaders said, because she previously dismissed suggestions of abandoning the company and seems more interested now in avoiding any disruption to her upcoming investiture ceremony. “I do not believe the administration is conceding,” said one student leader, Aqmera Benu-Williams, a senior political science major who chairs the advocacy committee of the university’s student senate. “I believe they are playing a strategic game of PR.”

A similar dynamic of mistrust played out at Columbia. There the administration stopped calling in police to make arrests, to allow for negotiations. But after the talks hit a stalemate, with university leaders ruling out any Israel divestment, the administration threatened to suspend students who remained in their tent encampment. Protesters responded by breaking into and occupying Hamilton Hall, a central classroom building that has been the site of numerous such seizures over the decades. The university again resorted to the police, who climbed inside the building through a second-storey window and removed the demonstrators.

Throughout such challenges on US campuses, leading congressional Republicans have persisted in urging harsh police-heavy confrontations over dialogue. Virginia Foxx, as chair of the House education committee, has championed that perspective, arguing that US college students bemoaning the 30,000 Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli bombing are engaged in intolerable acts of antisemitism.

As her ability to stoke tensions has ebbed in some places and flared in others, Ms Foxx reached this week for an even more elevated level of vitriol as she ordered a new set of Capitol Hill hearings on the topic. This time the interrogations will involve the presidents of Yale University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles – along with the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona.

“The committee has a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders: Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of your duty to your Jewish students,” she said in outlining the hearings set for later in May. “No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined. College is not a park for playacting juveniles or a battleground for radical activists. Everyone affiliated with these universities will receive a healthy dose of reality: actions have consequences.”

The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, joined in. After watching Ms Foxx nourish academia’s anxieties, the top Republican in Congress visited Columbia last week to directly taunt student protesters, telling them: “Go back to class,” and, “Stop wasting your parents’ money.” Then, after the Columbia students and outside activists moved into Hamilton Hall, he said that the entire House of Representatives would join the Foxx-instigated investigation of US higher education.

With their famed institutional tradition of political activism, Berkeley students aren’t sitting out the debate over Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians. Dozens of them have run an encampment for more than a week at the Mario Savio Steps, demanding steps that include their university divest from companies working with Israel’s military. And in an especially jarring moment, earlier in April, Berkeley’s dean of law, Erwin Chemerinsky, extended his annual invitation for students to come to his home for dinner and was greeted by protesters accusing him of harbouring Zionist sympathies.

The entire University of California system got a hard reminder about productively handling such emotions, just a decade ago, during the Occupy movement protests against economic inequality. Then, campus police physically attacked demonstrators at California’s Berkeley and Davis campuses. That led to legal action and a systemwide review that concluded with the commitment described by Mr Mogulof to avoid police involvement as much as possible.

The University of California, Los Angeles campus got its own difficult test this week, when a group of pro-Palestinian activists – both students and outsiders – formed a line to physically block students trying to enter the campus. The UCLA chancellor, Gene Block, responded by adding law enforcement and security officers to prevent such problems, while generally allowing protests to continue – including an encampment of at least 20 tents.

But then, after Ms Foxx called for his appearance in Washington, Dr Block joined the California system president, Michael Drake, in issuing statements saying the UCLA encampment had reached the point of becoming unlawful, and that disciplinary actions were being initiated against participating students, with the possibility of suspensions or expulsions.

Neither identified any specific behaviour they regarded as disruptive. Dr Drake said the California system was committed to protecting free speech, “including expression of viewpoints that some find deeply offensive”. Dr Block, though, said that some protester tactics were “shocking and shameful” and put some Jewish students “in a state of anxiety and fear”.

Shortly beforehand, back at Berkeley, Mr Mogulof said that the Occupy movement era was “a very traumatic and challenging period” that left his institution with “very good relationships that stand us in good stead at times like these”.

“Nobody’s complacent,” he told Times Higher Education. “It’s been challenging at times, but we’re going to keep on keeping on with what has worked so far.”

Yet for many other colleges and universities across the rest of the US – especially those in more conservative regions – the difficulties look substantially more forbidding, said Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

“In conservative areas, probably the easiest path to take is to be tough on protests,” Professor Kelchen said. “But that will cause problems with some students and faculty, such as the vote of no confidence at Indiana,” he said, referring to the overwhelming faculty rebuke of Pamela Whitten, the president of Indiana University. In a state where voters have repeatedly backed Donald Trump by large margins, the university under Dr Whitten removed a professor who tried to host a pro-Palestinian event, cancelled an art exhibit by a Palestinian-American artist, and – in recent days – called in state police to arrest protesting students.

“I’m not sure that university presidents have a clear pathway to follow here,” Professor Kelchen said of the current period of protester confrontations. “I ask myself a lot,” he said, “about why anyone would want to be a college president, given the difficulties of the job.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com