Pro-Palestinian encampments on the campuses of Columbia and Brown, Ivy League universities, were cleared last week following several days of protests.
While a building takeover, a large-scale arrest, and public criticism of the overwhelming police presence tarnished the seeming conclusion of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampments, encampments at Brown and other universities, including Northwestern University, were dismantled willingly.
Additionally, agreements were amicably struck with demonstrators at other public campuses, such as the University of Minnesota and Rutgers University.
Remarkably, not a single school consented to completely divest from businesses operating in Israel—a demand that student protestors have frequently mobilized around the nation to support. Despite criticism from both sides, the agreements at Northwestern and Brown helped to defuse a heated situation that had reached a boiling point at other colleges and universities around the nation.
College administrators must strike a careful balance between promoting discussion and granting freedom of expression while maintaining campus security. Some schools succeeded in doing so, if only momentarily, and avoided a scenario where the arrival of police to disperse encampments resulted in violence and terror.
Professor Sophia Rosenfeld of the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches a free speech course, said that schools that had an administration that “was willing to lay a little lower and treat the speech going on in their public spaces as not a catastrophe but something that might be dealt with through dialogue have done better.”
According to Rosenfeld, Brown’s dialogue, not his compromise, was sufficient to put an end to the encampments.
According to Lena Shapiro, head of the University of Illinois College of Law’s First Amendment clinic, universities need to take proactive steps to ensure that everyone has a place to protest.
“Every student’s safety is of utmost importance,” she declared. According to Shapiro, colleges should maintain open lines of communication with protestors in an effort to establish common ground, even while they can impose reasonable restrictions on the protests’ timing, location, and style in order to maintain order.
Early on, a few school administrators set the tone. For instance, on October 7, Northwestern President Michael Schell released a statement in which he expressed his outrage at the Hamas attack on Israel. The Jewish president Shell was careful to draw a line in the sand between himself and his public persona in the same letter. In addition, he reiterated his support for the Chicago Principles, a set of free speech guidelines that many universities have embraced.
To be clear, we do not give up our rights as individuals in a democracy to have and express our own personal political and social opinions. We just must state unequivocally that we are speaking for ourselves,” wrote Shell.
Northwestern announced a deal to disband the encampment with the demonstrators on Monday. The institution consented to pay five Palestinian students’ entire tuition costs and to provide greater openness regarding its precise investment holdings.
If there was just one tent, Northwestern permitted protestors to remain on the campus grass known as Deering Meadow until the end of the quarter.
In order to explore divestment and fund scholarships for at least ten displaced Gazan students, Rutgers agreed to meet with student protestors. Northwestern and Rutgers agreed to increase the number of spaces available on campus for Arab and Muslim students.
Rutgers added that it would “revisit and follow up” on its current partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and take into account the possibility of implementing a study abroad or student exchange program.
