Early Thursday morning, police arrested 108 protesters at Emerson College in Boston. At the University of Texas in Austin, state troopers in riot gear, urged on by Gov. Greg Abbott, arrested almost 60 protesters Wednesday. That same day, officers took 93 people into custody at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Smaller numbers of arrests have been made at the Ohio State University, Princeton University, and at Emory University, in Atlanta.
The wave of campus actions and police responses followed Columbia University’s decision last week to call in the New York Police Department to clear protesters from campus. That call led to 108 arrests, infuriating students and supporters of Palestine across the country. Students have now established encampments on at least 20 college campuses across the U.S., including Harvard University, Brown University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and George Washington University. Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have harshly criticized university administrations for failing to suppress the demonstrations.
It’s hard to know what would have happened had Columbia not made the decision to call in the police, but there’s no denying that the drama from those arrests fueled this protest movement. While college students have organized in opposition to Israel’s actions—and, in this case, their own schools’ investments in defense companies with ties to Israel—before, and have even done so since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, we have not, until now, seen universities crack down so strongly on dissent related to the war in Gaza. For institutions with long histories of encouraging debate and activism as part of free expression—at least in theory—it’s been a remarkable turn.
To understand how universities got to a place of such open conflict with their students, Slate spoke with Katherine S. Cho, a professor of higher education at Loyola University in Chicago who studies university administrations’ relationship to social justice activism. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Slate: Over the past week, schools’ responses to student activism have suddenly become quite dramatic. Should we have seen this crackdown coming? Or did this come out of the blue?
Katherine S. Cho: Colleges and universities, including Columbia, have histories of making mass arrests of students, particularly in the 1960s. So it’s not uncommon as a response, especially when it’s about students protesting specifically the university’s actions. And that type of distinction is important, because for the students fighting for Palestinian freedom, a lot of them are specifically in opposition to the university. And that’s where you see more of these aggressive forms of responses from universities.
But there haven’t been these kinds of arrests since the war started. If arresting students is a standard response to protest activity, why is this recent wave so different?
We could argue that we haven’t seen as large numbers of students getting arrested because in reality, a lot of this fight is happening before students can even protest. Following a lot of the student protests from 2015 to 2016 [held in response to incidents of racism on campus at the University of Missouri], we’ve seen student conduct codes, handbooks, and campus policies changing so that it makes it much more difficult for students to protest in the first place. For example, for some schools, if students have more than 50 or 60 students participating, they have to get permission. Universities already created and have been enforcing policies to make sure that you never escalate that much.
What are the consequences of these new policies?
Senior administrators and crisis response teams have documentation that students demonstrating are going against their own student conduct code that they’ve agreed to. So for students protesting right now, we’re going to start seeing language about how they were in violation of campus policies or student conduct codes, etc. But students don’t have any power to fight those codes, because there aren’t any channels for that.
Why did those new policies come about?
A bunch of these policies came about because of the protests of 2015 and 2016, and 2020. But a lot of this is especially in response to 2017 and 2018. With [the Unite the Right march in] Charlottesville, campuses freaked out, in the sense of, OK, what do we do about the surrounding community coming onto the college campus? UNC had a similar thing [with the Silent Sam protests]. The concern then was, OK, who is allowed to be on campus? When are they allowed to be on campus? And so a lot of that is now much more rigid, including for students.
So you’re saying that the universities tightened the rules out of fear of what unpredictable outside agitators might do—but that ended up making it hard for everyone, including students, to protest?
Yeah. In 2017, if you remember, conservative pundits were coming to college campuses, and there were a lot of fights on college campuses about First Amendment rights. Nonaffiliated people were coming onto campus, either to support the students protesting or trying to egg them on, or goad them, or create clashes.
[Creating an event] doesn’t take three weeks of showing flyers to people anymore. Somebody can post on Twitter and be like, Hey, everybody meet us here on this campus, we need to support students, or Hey, there’s a protest happening, we need to fight students. And then they can get big crowds to come. And so I imagine that that is a lot of the fear, and why colleges are using the language of safety. They’re saying: We need to cancel classes because we’re afraid for student safety; we need to shut down this protest because we’re afraid for students’ safety. There you see the weaponization of safety as a way to criminalize students.
What do you mean by the “weaponization of safety”?
The language is about wanting to make Jewish students feel safe. But there isn’t that other side of the conversation, which is: Are Palestinian students feeling safe? Some students are afraid of doxing, and there aren’t conversations about that.
OK, so the school policies have changed. Are there any other ways things have changed in recent years for student activists?
I do think that one of the things that has changed is that there are ways universities are, for example, deactivating access cards, taking students out of dorms, and rapidly creating material consequences—consequences relating to housing, tuition, fees, expulsion, etc.
Those move much faster, in large part because of technology. You can, by a click of a button, deactivate students’ cards. It’s increased the speed at which universities can respond.
And then, for example, with things like Twitter or TikTok now, there’s the difference between a university president making a statement that’s posted online, versus in the past, when that might have just been an email or in a student newspaper.
What does that conversation occurring publicly mean for this whole dynamic?
It allows for more scrutiny. So when colleges and universities, for example, created statements in 2015 and 2016 about anti-Blackness and police brutality, a lot of those statements were about standing against hate, etc. And then in 2020, as colleges and universities were once again creating the statements, there were student groups that brought up the 2015, 2016 statements being like, What have you done since then? Students are able to say, “You posted about this, and we’re trying to hold you accountable to that.”
What do you think drove schools like Columbia to take such a dramatic disciplinary step in these cases? Do you think this situation was specific to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or standard for any kind of protest?
I think colleges and universities feel like this is very complicated. There’s less of a desire to make a stance, and colleges and universities are wary of making statements; often, statements are 500 words or less, and there needs to be, like, a book. So, I think that that’s part of what makes universities nervous.
Looking at Columbia, as an example, this is a PR nightmare for them. To arrest students now, when there’s so much scrutiny, and then to do it in such a cruel way—students have been talking about only having 15 minutes to collect their belongings, that their belongings were thrown in the trash immediately. And to do that on a scale of 100 students, and then to double down on that, and then say that they’re doing it for safety, doesn’t make a lot of sense. So what that tells you is that Columbia is likely facing a lot of pressure from people who do not want students to be protesting. To the point where they’re making what seems like a very irrational decision.
