BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Stephen Hawking on the Big Bang. Millions of students for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
They were provocative in their time, products of an ideal that sees universities as sacred spaces for debate, innovation – and even revolution. But Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza are testing that perception, as anger over the brutal military campaign clashes with election-year politics and concerns about anti-Semitism in places where free speech should reign .
“Where there is much desire to learn, there must necessarily be much strife, much writing, and much opinion; for the opinion of good men is nothing but knowledge in the making,” wrote the poet John Milton, a graduate of Cambridge University, in his 1644 treatise against censorship in publishing. “Grant me liberty to know, utter, and argue freely according to my conscience, above all liberties.”
This lofty principle collided with the harsh reality of the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas militants who crossed the border killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas have killed more than 35,000 people in Gaza and left millions on the brink of famine, according to the local health ministry.
Administrators at some campuses have called local police to disperse pro-Palestinian protesters who have demanded their schools distance themselves from Israel, as Israel’s allies say they are anti-Semitic and making campuses unsafe. From Columbia University in New York to the University of California in Los Angeles, thousands of students and faculty have been arrested over the past month.
“Columbia,” read a sign held up there after the arrests on April 30, “Protect your students (the police don’t protect us).”
Historically, universities were expected to govern — and police — themselves in return for their status as “something like a secular hallowed ground,” said John Thelin, a University of Kentucky College of Education professor emeritus and a historian of higher education.
“Think of an American college or university as a ‘city-state’ whose legal protections and walls enclose the campus – grounds, buildings, structures – as legally protected, along with a university’s right to award degrees. he added in an email. Engaging the police, as school leaders did at Columbia, Dartmouth, UCLA and other schools, represents a “breakdown of both rights and responsibilities within the campus as a recognized academic institution and community,” he said.
The raids bring back memories of student protests during the American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Student activism in the 1960s led to campus officials calling law enforcement. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on unarmed students, killing four, at Kent State University. Four million students went on strike and 900 colleges and universities were temporarily closed. It was a pivotal moment for a nation sharply divided over the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed.
Half a century later, the Israel-Hamas conflict has lit another fuse, with claims that “external agitators” infiltrated the protests to inflame tensions.
“The scale, the ferocity, the short period of time since the Hamas attacks, the inconsistent demands of current competing protesters and their occasional violence have tested university leaders about how to respond,” said John A. Douglass, a senior research fellow and Professor of Public Policy and Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Most major colleges and universities have their own police departments, “but inviting and soliciting help from local police departments in riot gear to not only break up encampments but also protect rival protesters from each other is a relatively new phenomenon,” he said.
What is lost when the police are called?
“Trust between the university and significant parts of its most important constituency: its students,” said Anna von der Goltz, a history professor at Georgetown University. The cost, she said, may also include the university’s credibility “as a community capable of setting its own rules and dealing effectively with violations of those rules.”
The wave of pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses was inspired by demonstrations in Columbia that began on April 17.
As protesters set up camp that day, the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called before Congress for questioning, where Republicans accused her of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism on the school’s Manhattan campus. The next day, university officials called New York police, who arrested more than 100 protesters — including the daughter of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who had questioned Shafik in Washington.
Similar scenes played out across the country: The University of Southern California canceled its main commencement ceremony after barring its Muslim valedictorian from opening her keynote address. Police arrested hundreds of protesters at New York University and Yale. At Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, President Sian Leah Beilock called police to break up a pro-Palestinian camp just hours after the attack.
Inspired by protests in the United States, pro-Palestinian camps emerged in Britain and Europe earlier this month as administrators there faced the same question: Allow or intervene?
At Cambridge University, the idyll of Darwin and Hawking, a camp of about 40 tents outside the Gothic towers of King’s College appeared disciplined and tidy after three nights, with a posted schedule that included meals, training, classic Palestinian kite-making – and much more included strict message discipline as passers-by stopped to chat in infrequent sunshine.
Cambridge protester Jana Aljamal, 22, a Palestinian student from Jerusalem, said she didn’t think the U.S. protesters wanted to turn the focus on themselves: “What’s happening in Gaza is more important.”
“We have our own guidelines,” she added of the Cambridge protest. “To protect freedom of protest, freedom of expression, and the ability to have these conversations, the ability to have a community behind us, the ability to take action.”
The situation became more tense at several European universities last week when the University of Amsterdam canceled its classes after pro-Palestinian demonstrations turned destructive. But the protests have not yet reached the intensity of the demonstrations in the United States.
Will there be a reckoning over how the administration is handling protests over a conflict with no end in sight? Von der Goltz said the strategies used at schools like Rutgers and Brown, where administration has negotiated an end to protests, will face scrutiny.
“What may they have done that other administrators have not done?” she wrote. “I expect there will be some sort of reckoning at Columbia, UCLA, etc., because clearly something went very wrong there on multiple levels.”
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Kellman reported from London.
