Campus Crackdowns Escalate
Police have been brought at universities across the country.
AP (“Police clear pro-Palestinian protesters from Columbia University while clashes break out at UCLA“):
The pro-Palestinian demonstration that paralyzed Columbia University ended in dramatic fashion, with police carrying riot shields bursting into a building that protesters took over the previous night and making dozens of arrests. On the other side of the country, clashes broke out early Wednesday between dueling groups at the University of California, Los Angeles.
New York City officers entered Columbia’s campus late Tuesday after the university requested help, according to a statement released by a spokesperson. A tent encampment on the school’s grounds was cleared, along with Hamilton Hall where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window.
Protesters calling on the Ivy League university to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the war in Gaza seized the hall about 20 hours earlier.
“After the University learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” the school said. “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing. We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”
[…]
Meanwhile, violence broke out at UCLA overnight between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters. Police wearing face shields formed a line but did not immediately intervene.
People threw chairs and shoved and kicked one another. Some armed with sticks beat others. Before the police arrived, a group piled on one person who lay on the ground, kicking and beating them until others pulled them out of the scrum.
“Horrific acts of violence occurred at the encampment tonight and we immediately called law enforcement for mutual aid support,” Mary Osako, a senior UCLA official, told the campus newspaper the Daily Bruin.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spoke to the university’s chancellor and said police would respond to the school’s request, according to a post on social media platform X from her spokesperson Zach Seidl.
The clashes took place just outside a tent encampment, where pro-Palestinian protesters erected barricades and plywood for protection — and counter-protesters tried to pull them down.
[…]
Police have swept through other campuses across the U.S. over the last two weeks, leading to confrontations and more than 1,000 arrests. In rarer instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.
Just blocks away from Columbia, at The City College of New York, demonstrators were in a standoff with police outside the public college’s main gate. Video posted on social media by news reporters on the scene late Tuesday showed officers putting some people to the ground and shoving others as they cleared people from the street and sidewalks. Many detained protesters were driven away on city buses.
After police arrived, officers lowered a Palestinian flag atop the City College flagpole, balled it up and tossed it to the ground before raising an American flag.
Brown University, another member of the Ivy League, reached an agreement Tuesday with protesters on its Rhode Island campus. Demonstrators said they would close their encampment in exchange for administrators taking a vote to consider divestment from Israel in October. The compromise appeared to mark the first time a U.S. college has agreed to vote on divestment in the wake of the protests.
NPR (“New York police have cleared Hamilton Hall and the encampment at Columbia University“) adds:
New York police arrested dozens of people on two campuses Tuesday night after officers cleared out a Columbia University building occupied by protesters.
At Columbia, New York police used a massive armored vehicle to push a bridge into a window of Hamilton Hall, the building demonstrators began occupying the previous night. Officers then streamed over the bridge into a window — quickly retaking the building.
Elsewhere in New York City, police made dozens of arrests at The City College of New York, less than a mile from Columbia. A large number of students were hauled away.
[…]
Early Tuesday morning, protesters hid in Hamilton Hall until it closed and let other protesters in. There were two security guards present, who Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the school released from the building.
“We believe that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University,” she wrote in a letter requesting the New York Police Department’s assistance.
Protesters then chained the doors, used furniture as barricades and used rope to have people outside the building transfer supplies to them, tactics Rebecca Weiner, NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said were taught to other participants.
Some of the protesters have been on the New York Police Department’s radar for years, Weiner said at a press conference Tuesday.
“I’ve been saying for days, if not weeks now, that we should have been a peaceful protest,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said. “It has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators. We were extremely cautious about releasing our intel/information because our goal was to ensure the safety of our students, the faculty, and without any destruction of property.”
Adams said he would not let the occupation turn into a “violent spectacle that serves no purpose,” and urged parents to contact their children to get them to disperse.
NYT (“Columbia Said It Had ‘No Choice’ but to Call the Police“):
Exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation at Columbia University was violently cleared by the New York Police Department, hundreds of police officers moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday night to quell a different kind of antiwar protest.
Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested as police officers entered Columbia’s main campus, which was on lockdown, and cleared Hamilton Hall of a group who had broken in and occupied it the night before.
It was a dizzying and, to many students and faculty, disturbing 24 hours on campus.
Last time, students were protesting the Vietnam War and Columbia’s plans to expand its campus into Harlem. This time, students were protesting the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has killed about 34,000 people, according to health officials there, and trying to force the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
But the students’ tactics were the same: By escalating their protest to the point where the university was unable to function, students forced the hand of administrators, who brought in the police to arrest them. Both times, the students had occupied Hamilton Hall.
The NYT Campus Protests live blog includes this map:
It’s hard to assess the situation from the news accounts. In some cases, leaders are surely overreacting and escalating the situation. In others, they may well be waiting too long, letting the situation getting so far out of hand that there’s not much alternative to calling in the police.
Talk of “outside agitators” is almost always a distraction. While there are indeed people who glom on to existing protests and try to egg on violence, it’s just absurd to think that this is happening at two dozen or so campuses across the country.
The decision by administrators at Brown to give in to protestor demands is interesting. On the one hand, it de-escalates the immediate situation. But if the board votes to divest, it invites every group with a grievance to stage their own shutdown of the campus to get what they want. And, if votes to continue the status quo, I don’t know why the protestors would be mollified.
As to the bigger picture, I wonder to what degree these protests have legs. In the case of the Vietnam protests, after all, the students had a direct stake in the war, as they were in danger of being drafted to fight. I’m skeptical that American college students will spend their summer breaks occupying near-closed campuses to protest a war that they’re merely watching unfold on television.
More recently, even the Black Lives Matter protests eventually petered out in a few weeks. It’s just hard to sustain the energy for mass demonstrations even when the grievances are more immediately salient.
So, no, I don’t think we’re seeing a reprise of 1968 here. There will doubtless be protests outside of the Democratic National Convention in September but I suspect they’ll be comparatively muted. And I continue to think the impact of the war in Gaza on November’s elections will be negligible.
Here are a few tings I have been ruminating on lately regarding the conflict and the protest.
I have read a lot of hand wringing about the phrase, “… from the river to the sea.” One of the comments from more a few opinion pieces I heave read is, “… do they know which river or which sea they are talking about.
When I hear this I wonder, how this phrase is any different then what Israel is doing in practice in the West bank and now in Gaza? The Israeli plan seems to be take over the west bank by flooding it with settlements until its part of greater Israel and bomb the living daylights out out of Gaza until I don’t know what. How is that any different other then they don’t use a pithy slogan?
On the other hand, I don’t hear any of the pro Palestinian activists condemning Hamas for the October attack other then to hand wave it away by correctly siting the activities of Israel over the last half century (see previous paragraph). Whatever Israel has done still can’t justify the slaughter innocent lives, no matter what the sins of Israel may be. You can argue that the Israelis have been doing what Hamas did in slow motion, but it was still a monumental mistake that makes it hard to support the Palestinian cause.
On the third hand no one gave a rat’s ass about the suffering in both Gaza and the West bank until now, which to some I suppose, is evidence that the attack did “work” on some level (unless you are or a close family member is now dead). If not a two state solution (which it seems is unacceptable to both sides) than what? Israel has been grabbing land since it’s inception, and no one thinks that Palestinians, living in Israel are anything but a permanent underclass.
Is there any way out of this?
Here is one columnist opinion on the politics of the response to the protest:
Gov. Greg Abbott and UT’s president fell for Hamas’s trap by crushing student protests
Two questions:
1) Was the campus shut down in any meaningful sense of the word or is this a gross exaggeration?
2) If the campus wasn’t shut down by protestors, isn’t this exactly how protests are supposed to work?
Third, I would like to remind everyone of what the First Amendment says:
If legitimate protests can take place at abortion clinics and military funerals, why not at universities?
(Not, I hope, because it’s somehow OK to have protests against vaginas and icky butt sex, but not OK to do have these against war crimes if committed by “our” kind of people.)
@Rick DeMent:
Two things:
1) Not supporting Israel in its current course of action isn’t the same as supporting Hamas. For instance, support (for either side) can be conditional.
2) The Palestinian cause ≠ Hamas, just as Israel’s cause ≠ Netanyahu/Likud.
@drj:
I’m at UNC and after the failed attempt to clean out protestors early yesterday morning, the chancellor (A Duke grad recently appointed by the ultra RW and sloppily named “Board of Governors”) decided to shut down campus so he could lead a bunch of police on a march into the heart of the protest to put up an American flag. He then had a press conference. By the end of it, the flag had been ripped down.
We’re less than two weeks from the end of the semester. There are maybe 200 protestors, causing minimal disruption, but the opportunity to look like a strongman is too much for “University leadership” to pass up. The best action is nothing, instead we have an idiot chancellor fomenting police brutality (they injured a man in a wheelchair and pepper sprayed students who were watching from a distance) to stoke his image and ego.
It’s a farce..
Graduation and semester’s end will occur in a couple of weeks, the protests will wind down.
@drj:
I don’t disagree my point is that a lot of the opinions flying around are playing fast and lose with these truths. Having said that, I have not heard much from the pro Palestinian side clearly denouncing Hamas or assigning any blame for their actions in starting this conflict. Similarly, I have heard no one on the pro-Israel side pointing out the counter productive policy in the West Bank that is pretty much “from the river to the sea” that they get so triggered by when Palestinians say it.
@Rick DeMent:
I don’t know if you would include me among the pro-Palestinians (which wouldn’t be unreasonable considering my comments here in recent months), but I have no problem whatsoever denouncing Hamas.
It’s just that it’s not very fruitful, IMO, to focus one’s denunciations on the weaker party in a conflict when the stronger party is doing its utmost to prevent a reasonable settlement.
I have no doubt that Hamas is worse than Israel. The PA isn’t exactly great, either. But that doesn’t mean that we should let a close ally engage in something that is – at the very least – genocide-adjacent.
@Rick DeMent:
The common American phrase “from sea to shining sea” has an rather iffy origin tied to the Manifest Destiny policy, but I doubt most people would argue that singing “America the Beautiful” at a Fourth of July celebration means the audience is explicitly calling for the genocide of indigenous American tribes.
@drj:
This is just the “why are the moderate Muslims silent?” dodge after 9/11. Critics want to make all pro-Palestinian voices collectively responsible for Hamas, so no amount of condemnation will ever be enough.
“It’s finals! Can I go home?!”
Higher-Ed-Kids at Columbia will now be rested and ready for finals. It’s study week, not cosplay 1968 week.
@drj:
Well, Columbia is private, not government so they can set their own rules for protest, just like Facebook and Youtube. But the students trashed and occupied an academic building, doing more damage and staying in the building longer than was done a the Capitol on Jan 6. You know, the US Capitol where
directly applied as it was right in that building where the People to seek redress of grievances was envisioned in the Constitution.
@Rick DeMent:
No.
I’ve been saying for almost seven months now that this is a tragedy in that there is no solution. All parties directly involved – Israel, Hamas, the PA – have behaved abominably. Many of the parties not directly involved – Iran, Russia, Hezbollah – have also been awful. Then you have the US, UAE, KSA and Egypt. The US has less influence than people imagine, and the more we squeeze, the less we’ll have. The KSA and UAE are extremely conservative monarchies with oil money, but not as much as they used to have, and with their own motives and needs which do not include Palestinians. And Egypt is just a military kleptocracy.
A bunch of fucking assholes, in an impossible situation, with no path to resolution other than fantasies. A Palestinian rump state is doomed to be yet another corrupt and oppressive shithole grudgingly bankrolled by the oil states and the international lenders and almost inevitably, site of a Hamas-PA civil war. The Arab version of ‘from the river to the sea’ fantasy is genocide, real genocide. The Israeli version of, ‘from the river to the sea,’ is ethnic cleansing.
The final fantasy is the notion that we just wash our hands and walk away from it all. Which we could do, but which would in short order lead to Israel acting on its worst impulses and marching Gaza into the Sinai and squeezing the West Bank even harder. And then there’s the small matters of the Suez canal and the Persian Gulf. . .
And it’s good to look at the bigger picture, which is ongoing conflict between Arabs and Persians, with KSA, Egypt, Turkey and Iran all working to become the dominant power in the ME. Why anyone would want to dominate this slow-rolling catastrophe, I’ll leave to psychologists.
Americans do not believe in insoluble problems, which is immature. People who think ‘we’ just ‘need’ to ‘do something,’ are as clueless as George W. Bush, blundering around naively in a land that eats idealists for breakfast. None of the answers are answers. There’s just more can-kicking ahead. Exactly what I said seven months ago.
@Scott:
I couldn’t disagree with this more. Philosophically Abbott is a Jim Crow governor. He needs to set groups against each other and use the government to violently put down the disfavored in his society as both a warning to others and as lions-and-Christians entertainment for the masses. He didn’t fall for Hamas trap, he welcomes it.
@JKB:
I’m impressed it took you this long to crack open the “Columbia protests are at least as bad, if not worse, than January 6th” bottle of copium.
I look forward to your future follow-ups like “Why aren’t the Columbia students being criminally charged as seriously as the Jan 6th patriots?!” to go along with your past “no one ever prosecuted the BLM protestors” comments (which, btw, is a bold-faced lie).
Also looking forward to the eventual “The Unite the Right event was held in just one city over two days. These protests are far, far worse” comment… or did you use that one already? I haven’t been following these threads closely.
@Michael Reynolds:
Agreed with all you wrote up until this point. Well, I don’t actually disagree with it being a fantasy, but it is a false choice. There are other actions to take other than “wholeheartedly support Israel” or “wash our hands an walk away”. As you point out, the latter isn’t in any way realistic. But what we should be doing is recognizing this is a Saudi/Yemen situation, not a Ukrainian/Russia one. Israel is no more a democracy than South Africa was and there is no meaningful momentum in the government or in the populace for anything but subjugating the Palestinians and taking their land. Hamas is a bunch of bloodthirsty religious fanatics and it goes without saying there is no momentum for a reasonable solution there, and there doesn’t appear to one in the populace either. The US should steadily be distancing ourselves from Israel as a special ally, and moving them to the “despotic but essential in some ways, and for the moment” category that we assign to the Saudis.
I think a lot of people will support the idea of protests being legal and tolerated. I think that occupying any buildings on campus will lose them that support. You can make the argument that protesting is or ought to be legal, but not occupying buildings. Those people should be arrested.
Steve
As a rule of thumb, no one likes protesters. They’re loud, smelly and in the way. The most damaging thing you can do to them (and their cause) is to simply ignore them. Maybe add a little bit of belittling.
At least for peaceful protesters, which is what we have seen across campuses this year.
Police responses are almost invariably over the top, and far more violent than anything the protesters are doing.
It can also backfire spectacularly, like the BLM protests that became national news because of the police response, and then a national movement. In Seattle, police attacks against protesters escalated things so badly that police literally lost control of several city blocks for weeks — a far greater disruption than the original marches.
There has been no reason for the riot police response the pro-Palestine protests have gotten.
Meanwhile, it is the pro-genocide protesters who are getting violent — launching fireworks into the crowd, pepper spraying people, etc.
https://x.com/Esqueer_/status/1785637622582309038
I await news that the Israeli Fan Club Folks are being arrested. I expect I will be awaiting a long time.
How so? Far left groups like Antifa and far right groups like the Boogaloo Boys were involved in esclating violence at separate BLM protests in cities over the country.
NBC: “NBC News reported last weekend that members of the “Boogaloo” movement were seen at protests in states including Minnesota and Texas, as well as in Philadelphia.”
Buzzfeed: “Boogaloo Bois: The killing of a federal officer in Oakland, the shooting of a police station in Minneapolis, and a plot to supply Hamas with weapons weren’t isolated cases, according to a federal indictment.”
ABC: “A masked, umbrella-wielding man accused of helping incite riots and looting in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police-involved death has been identified as a member of a white supremacist group that aimed to stir racial tensions”
Yahoo News: “A Texas man pleaded guilty to a single count of rioting after traveling to Minneapolis from the San Antonio area to create chaos under the shroud of the 2020 protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.”
Do we think such groups have disbanded, or that they must only operate only in one location or else everywhere all at once?
It’s fully possible for the usual suspects to have infiltrated some campus protests and not others. I’d say it’s probable.
@DK: “Outside agitators” has been a police trope going back to at least the Civil Rights era. The degree to which it happens is wildly overblown.
@James Joyner: I presume the “outside agitators” who were prosecuted for helping incite violence and riots in separate and far flung locations during the BLM protests were not prosecuted based on a trope, but on documented evidence of their activity.
@JKB: You just sort of glossed over that whole “peaceably assemble” part in reference to January 6th.
@DK: I think Dr. Joyner was going more for “wildly overblown” as equalling “nonexistent” or “no reason to lay off the beat down.”
But I may be too cynical.
@just nutha: I’ll post at length on this tomorrow. The short version is that it’s a way for local leaders to absolve themselves of responsibility. No, it wasn’t the decent people of Minnesota or the upstanding students of New College that were at fault but some dastardly other.
@James Joyner: I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of it was just local assholes seeing an opportunity to be an asshole.
@James Joyner: Ironically, perhaps, there are also reasons why organizers hate “outside forces” as well. It also can be used to suggest that the local movement is weak or, ultimately, that there isn’t that much support for a movement.
James, if/when you get to writing that, this article from a few days ago seems pretty juicy (I have only scanned it) and could be really helpful:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/27/us/campus-protests-palestine-outside-agitator-cec/index.html
I had thought I might write something on it, but I have absolutely no time.
@JKB: The founders knew the difference between a grievance and an insurrection. Apparently you don’t.
When I was a kid, I remember having to cancel visits to our cousins who lived a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus due to clashes between the National Guard and protesters. Compared to what went on in those days, the current protests – or at least what I’ve seen of them on TV – look like book club meetings.
Officials escalating the situation with riot police are making a terrible mistake, but, being who they are, it is not surprising.
@DK:
I note that all your examples are far right.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think there is a solution but you won’t like it.
The notion of two states died with Rabin. However the Israelis could annex the West Bank and make them limited status citizens. This is the policy we should be recommending instead of maintaining the fantasy of Two State, which in fact serves the Israeli far-right agenda more than anything else.
They must abandon another fantasy for this to happen, the fantasy that democracy is suitable for all people everywhere. The Palestinians will have to accept living in a Jewish minority run state, which I believe most would accept in exchange for fair treatment in the courts particularly on the issue of land rights. Not ideal but far better than the alternative of being at the tender mercies of the settlers, which they currently must suffer.
@just nutha:
I have no thoughts on the level of ‘overblownness’ re: the involvement of certain groups not organically involved in a protest, but who instead latch on specifically to escalate, using the unrest as cover. And due to the outside groups’ desire for “revolution” or violent government overthrow, etc.
My response was to the earlier assertion that it’s “absurd” to suspect such groups might now be getting involved in campus unrest. It’s not absurd when federal and local law enforcement has recently documented such behavior, leading to indictments and prosecutions.
At Columbia, law enforcement has already said their preliminary assessment of arrestees has identified some non-students.
Absurd? No. It’s reasonable to guess that attention-seeking outsiders are getting involved here, per usual.
Overblown? Perhaps. I don’t know how if or how many officials are asserting all or most violence and chaos on campus is only or mostly due to outside agitators.
Hmm, on Jan 6, they didn’t hold anyone hostage as the Columbia students did refusing to let the janitors leave the building for over an hours. That’s kidnapping/unlawful imprisonment.
At UCLA, the “higher-ed kids” denied Jewish students access to campus and the classes that they’d paid tuition to attend. That’s denial of civil rights.
Civil lawsuits may be coming for denying rights that can delve into those financially supporting these criminals.
@JKB:
Yet another obvious lie. The politicians the J6 terrorists wanted to kill had to kept in safe rooms for the duration of the rampage, which lasted hours.
Do you think the people on this website are as stupid and uninformed as those at the white supremacist websites you frequent? You should know better by now that your nonsense isn’t going to work here.
@DK:
Well, if you are generous, you can say it lasted 4 hours from Capit0l police moving up Capitol steps at 1:30 to Congressional leaders announcing resuming operations soon at 5:40 as interior is cleared. 8pm Capitol police declared building secure.
So 7 hours at the outside.
Biden finally proves to be a uniter as campus protestors find common ground
@JKB: So it’s still not catching on for the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps that most people are as tired of them, and of Israel, and of Palestine as Joe Biden must be.
@Stormy Dragon:
No, but it is implicitly celebrating the genocide of Native American tribes.