For about a week, the cluster of tents raised by students at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, stood in solidarity with Palestinian civilians in Gaza and with students protesting at other campuses across the US.
Then, on Tuesday, the tents quietly vanished from the grassy quad at the heart of campus. There were no riot-gear-clad crackdowns from police and no assaults from masked groups to spur disbandment. Instead, Brown chose a different path: it negotiated.
While semesters at other schools speed toward a violent close – complete with canceled classes and commencement celebrations, scenes of brutal yet unsuccessful attempts at quelling the protests, and aggression from opposing groups that has heightened already inflamed tensions – Brown is one of several universities that have sought a more amicable solution.
Northwestern University in Illinois, the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Rutgers University at New Brunswick in New Jersey and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis have also brokered agreements with students, while others, including Wesleyan in Connecticut and the University of California at Berkeley, have allowed the protest encampments to continue.
The outcomes from these divergent approaches remain uncertain; while some of the more extreme examples of suppression have been met with public shock and condemnation, protests have persisted. At Brown, students who agreed to dismantle their demonstration in exchange for a seat at the table in an upcoming meeting with the Corporation of Brown University did so knowing that a satisfying answer to protesters’ demands for divestment is far from a guarantee.
But the movement, which erupted in response to a conflict thousands of miles away, has brought one closer to home into sharper focus. The protests in support of Gaza are testing the bounds of students’ rights to free speech and shining a spotlight on the deepening political divides over the culture on college campuses.
“Students are pointing out contradictions between being asked to be free thinkers and then finding themselves challenged when they think they are thinking freely,” said Dr Manual Pastor, a professor and the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, whose research focuses on the power of social movements.
Schools have long grappled with this balancing act, both encouraging diverse perspectives and limiting its expression in the name of safety. But these simmering tensions have come to a boil as political divides widen.
Since the start of the protests on campus last fall, conservatives have argued they are a symbol of how an “out-of-control left” has come to dominate US campuses. It’s an issue the GOP-led House has pursued with vigor, launching an investigation into federal funding for schools where protests have lingered, and scrutinizing presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities whom they allege have allowed an escalation in antisemitism.
That intense scrutiny, and the response of prominent university donors, has incentivized some schools to take a heavier hand, Pastor said. In December, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were forced to resign after a heated hearing on their actions to limit pro-Palestinian protests. The president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, who was called to testify in April, vowed to take a strong approach. The next day, she unleashed swarms of New York police department (NYPD) officers on student protesters.
Meanwhile, tensions on campuses have only intensified.
That’s why some universities have tried to use this moment as an opportunity, choosing to foster dialogues around the emotionally fraught issue rather than trying to remove it with force.
At Wesleyan, where the student encampment has quadrupled in size since Sunday, faculty have taught classes among the tents. President Michael S Roth said that, though it violates university rules, the protest will not be cleared as long as it remains peaceful.
“As long as we all reject violence, we have opportunities to listen and to learn from one another,” he said in a statement posted on X.
In an interview with the Guardian late last year, Roth – who is Jewish and a critic of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement largely driving these protests – championed debate and disagreement.
His mission, he said, was to ensure students feel safe and won’t get harassed or intimidated, “but you’re not so safe that you don’t encounter offensive comments or invigorating debate”.
“I’m trying to model this openness that has limits,” he added.
It’s an ethos echoed in Brown’s approach.
“Universities were built to hold disagreement and grapple with competing views. This is an essential part of our mission of advancing knowledge and understanding,” Brown’s president, Christina H Paxson, wrote in a letter announcing the agreement.
With a nod toward a shared sense of concern about the confrontations seen at other universities and an acknowledgment of stark differences in beliefs about the events unfolding in the Middle East, she added that she is “confident that the Brown community can live up to the values of support for free expression within an open and respectful learning community”.
Student protesters at UC Berkeley say they have, for their part, also tried to engage their community in discussion when confrontations arise, which has helped limit flare-ups of tension and ensured that they can keep the protest going. They plan to stay for the long haul.
“Things are OK on the Berkeley campus,” said Yazen Kashlan, an organizer and graduate student at UC Berkeley on Wednesday. “Students are protesting and exercising their right to free speech, so it hasn’t been confrontational.”
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There have been skirmishes. On Wednesday evening, videos of a small fight began circling on social media as Israel-supporting counter-protesters tussled with someone near the encampment. Campus officials condemned violence on both sides and are investigating the incident, which they said resulted in minor injuries.
Still, the growing encampment has not been met with security or police, and university administrators have kept lines of communication open. Protesters at Berkeley have four main demands: they want the university to vocally condemn the violence in Gaza and call for an end to it, and to divest all UC financial holdings connected to the conflict. They also want UC Berkeley to academically boycott Israeli universities and create a permanent Palestinian studies program.
There are other goals, too, Kashlan said: “The way I see it, one of the wins this movement can already claim is awareness – aligning the struggles of the global south and generally oppressed people in this one cause.”
To Kashlan, a successful outcome is how people connect with the protest and the cause they hope to elevate. “It is a moral imperative,” he added, noting that that’s how students hope to enact change in a conflict that’s so far away.
Even with a more open approach, discussions of a divisive issue firmly rooted in identity, religion and ethnicity have at times devolved into rhetoric that has left some students and members of the broader campus communities feeling targeted or unsafe at some schools. It’s why UC Berkeley administrators say they are investing in more dialogue.
“We are built for a world that’s painted in shades of grey, not black and white,” said Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley. “We need to support diversity of perspective and civil discourse, and dialogue across all variety of divides – that’s imperiled right now.”
The school has doled out $700,000 to fund new plans and programs that encourage a culture shift on campus and promote civil discourse. Among them will be mandatory training for students, faculty and staff on Islamophobia and antisemitism and a new course on conversation across the divides.
“We are not turning a blind eye to any of this and we are not throwing our hands in the air,” Mogulof said. “We are marshaling all the educational resources we can to support our principles of community.” Still, he said, changing the school’s investment strategy isn’t on the table.
As the semester draws to a close, it’s also not a sure thing the encampment will be allowed to continue. Security at the school is keeping a close watch, Mogulof said, and is ready to step in if they deem campus life is being disrupted.
Other schools that first prioritized dialogue have shifted course. Dartmouth, an Ivy League university in New Hampshire, scheduled several events and discussions in recent months discussing the situation in the Middle East. But on Wednesday, soon after the first tents of a protest encampment were raised, officers from the Hanover police department cleared the site, arresting 90 people including history professor Annelise Orleck, a former chair of the school’s Jewish studies department who has taught at the school for 34 years.
And, some protesters have succeeded in getting their calls answered. The Evergreen State College agreed on Tuesday to set up a taskforce that will map out its “divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories”.
Meanwhile, the cause aligning these protesters across the country has largely been lost in the rhetoric over whether their tactics are wrong or right. While crackdowns against student protesters feed the news cycle, updates about the carnage that continues in Gaza has been pushed to the background.
For Pastor, dialogue will be needed to help produce the potential for peace, both at American universities and in the Middle East.
“In the context of all this back and forth, the real pain being experienced in the Middle East is on the part of Gazan parents seeing their children crushed under bombardment or Israeli parents who lost a young person they thought was safely going to a rave,” he said. “Even as we challenge the asymmetry of power and the complex history, that is all being lost right now.
“If we are to return to any kind of lasting peace,” he added, “it will only be lasting if there’s empathy.”