Why Universities Have Started Arresting Student Protesters

Over the past couple of months, more than 2,000 students have been arrested at colleges and universities around the U.S. for protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. That’s more student protesters arrested than at any point since the massive anti–Vietnam War demonstrations of the late 1960s. Those protests, and the sometimes violent response of police invited onto campuses to quell them, shaped for a generation how universities have responded to student protests — generally with more negotiation and less force. So what explains the apparent willingness now of university administrators to abandon those lessons and have so many student pro-Palestinian protesters arrested?

It isn’t because today’s pro-Palestinian student protesters are particularly violent or disruptive. According to one study, of 553 U.S. campus demonstrations between April 18 and May 3, fewer than 20 resulted in serious interpersonal violence or property damage. That’s about 3.6 percent, which isn’t zero, but in the context of student protests on an issue that divides the university community, it’s reasonable to see the number as a success.

Which again raises the question of why so many universities have responded with a heavy hand. At NYU, where I teach, president Linda Mills and her staff have called in the NYPD to arrest students simply for protesting. Dozens of students and faculty were arrested at an April 22 demonstration at Gould Plaza (in front of NYU’s Stern School of Business) that was raucous but peaceful. The administration cited unspecified instances of “disorderly, disruptive, and antagonizing behavior” but pointed to no incidents of violence, threats of violence, or other lawbreaking. (The NYU student government and the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors have issued statements forcefully rejecting the administration’s account of disorder. In particular, the NYU AAUP, in a report based on testimony from faculty present at the event, accuses the administration of a “gross distortion of facts.”)

Sometimes, the narrative is more complicated: The circumstances of arrests have varied between universities and even between different protests at the same university. For example, on April 18, immediately following Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s grilling in Congress over alleged campus antisemitism, her administration called in the NYPD to arrest more than a hundred students who had set up tents on school property. Columbia complained that these students were trespassing and disrupting university functions. But some have been accused of more serious misconduct. For example, the several dozen students arrested on April 30 after occupying and barricading themselves inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall have been charged with criminal trespass. However, if press reports of breaking and entering are correct, at least some of them could also have been charged with burglary.

But in the relatively recent past, even these kinds of disruptive protests haven’t always led to arrests. In 1985, anti-apartheid student protesters at Columbia occupied the same building for three weeks and erected an encampment at the entrance. Columbia administrators didn’t call the cops. They negotiated with the students and then filed a lawsuit asking a New York State court to order the protesters to leave. The court granted that request — but the judge also took care to balance the university’s interests with the students’ right to protest, designating an area on the steps of Hamilton Hall and in the adjoining quadrangle in which demonstrators would be free to peacefully assemble. By October 1985, Columbia essentially gave in to the students’ divestment demands, selling $39 million of South Africa–related holdings (including stock in companies like Coca-Cola, Chevron, Ford, and American Express), making it the first Ivy League school to do so.

Much the same was true at the University of Pennsylvania, where I went to college in the mid-1980s. When I arrived at Penn in the fall of 1984, protests against South African apartheid were beginning to heat up. In late January 1985, students began a series of peaceful but disruptive sit-in demonstrations, culminating in the round-the-clock occupation of Penn president Sheldon Hackney’s office. A larger student group, the Penn Anti-Apartheid Coalition, conducted a 20-day sit-in occupying the centerpiece of Penn’s campus, College Hall. Penn students also set up an encampment, which they named “Millersville” after Paul F. Miller, then chairman of Penn’s board of trustees. The name was not meant as a compliment. As with Columbia, Penn did not respond by calling in police to make arrests. Rather, it threatened to apply ordinary university disciplinary measures, but Penn’s administration also negotiated with student leaders. By June 1986, Penn’s board of trustees established a timeline for divestment.

All of which only sharpens the contrast with Penn’s decision earlier this month to call in police in full riot gear to arrest students in a peaceful (albeit disruptive) pro-Palestinian encampment on its campus.

So why are universities cracking down so much harder on today’s pro-Palestinian student protesters relative to 1980s anti-apartheid student protesters? Some have argued that universities’ willingness to curtail their students’ speech rights has grown out of the academic left’s abandonment of free-speech principles. This argument maintains that the university’s commitment to free speech has waned as many on the academic left promote restrictions on right-wing speech designed to make campus life more welcoming for minorities and members of other historically marginalized groups. If speech can be restricted to protect the feelings of Black or transgender students on campus, the argument goes, then it’s more difficult to hold the line on protecting pro-Palestinian speech when some Jewish students feel threatened by it.

There is some truth to that perspective. Anyone who spends time on an American campus today can’t avoid noticing how the academic left has adopted the rhetoric of “safety” — i.e., the idea that students from marginalized groups cannot thrive unless they are protected from regressive political ideas and speech. This view is inimical to the central purpose of the university, which is not to make people ideologically comfortable but rather the opposite — to expose them to all manner of ideas, even ideas that may offend or undermine them. And it is also tailor-made for abuse: Now, the concept of safety has been weaponized to suppress pro-Palestinian speech — like “From the river to the sea” — that is not explicitly hateful but that questions the legitimacy of the Jewish state and can be interpreted as a call for war against it. All of which understandably makes some supporters of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish, deeply uncomfortable.

I suspect, however, that universities would be cracking down even if no campus leftist had ever argued that some right-winger’s freedom of speech was less important than a minority student’s safety. The central reason for the crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests is both simpler and sadder: America’s universities are, and long have been, only situationally committed to free speech. Specifically, universities are unable to adhere to their own avowed commitment to student free speech whenever an important part of their community disagrees with the message.

It was relatively easy for universities to tolerate disruptive 1980s anti-apartheid protests because no one in the community was making the case for the racist South African government. (Although there were, predictably, a few apartheid sympathizers at Dartmouth.)

In contrast, virtually every university community is deeply divided over the Gaza war, as they were over the Vietnam War back in the 1960s. And in both those instances, we saw universities engaged in repression.

The pressure on universities today to crack down may be even greater than in the past. What with billionaire alums meddling in university decision-making and egging on New York’s mayor to send the NYPD into Columbia, Jewish students filing (risible) lawsuits alleging institutional antisemitism, and members of Congress agitating for the firing of university presidents and threatening inquisitions, powerful forces are lined up against the student protesters. In this environment, what university administrator would be brave — or foolish — enough to step forward and say, for example, that the Jewish state’s legitimacy or whether Zionism is a form of racism are fair topics for discussion at their school?

Of course, blame does not lie all on one side, and it is true that some pro-Palestinian student protesters have said and done dumb and offensive things: for example, the reports that at some protests students barred “Zionists” from their encampments, or the Columbia student-protest leader who was captured on video saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Given the history and continued presence of antisemitism and the heinous crimes committed against Jews in living memory, some students have employed edgier slogans and more provocative behavior than perhaps was wise.

That said, I’m not indulging students when I note that their moral clarity is, as it is with most young people, at the same time their greatest strength and weakness. The students are less likely than us cynical oldsters to shrug their shoulders as Israel makes Gaza unlivable and wipes out tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, including women and children, who had nothing to do with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities. Yet the students are less likely to have the longer-term perspective needed to recognize the moral complexities of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian dispute and to allow those complexities to temper their actions and rhetoric. We usually understand this about the young. But on this issue, many of us are willing and even eager to point to actions and slogans we don’t like and use them to tar the protests as a whole.

So what comes next? It may be that university administrators, having gotten through graduation and looking forward to a long summer with students off campus, think they have the situation under control. But it seems more likely that we are at the beginning, not the end, of an extended period of trouble on campus. The immediate causes of the protests — the Gaza war and Palestinian suffering and dispossession — aren’t likely to abate anytime soon. A January poll found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the extraordinary destruction the Israeli military has inflicted on Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed providing relief supplies, including food and medicine, to Gaza’s civilians. The facts seem increasingly to fit the student protesters’ narrative: The barrier standing in the way of justice for Palestinians isn’t Benjamin Netanyahu but Israel.

That is a message a big part of the university community simply will not tolerate. Can university administrators arrest enough student protesters to silence the message? I doubt it. But September isn’t too far off. We’ll soon know.