Student protests take over some campuses. At others, attention is elsewhere

BOSTON — Boston College students held a rally last week against the war between Israel and Hamas.

Megaphones were banned because the noise would not disrupt studying for final exams. Tents were not allowed. Students arrested at other protests on the Boston campus were excluded. After an allotted hour, the students quietly returned to their rooms.

A student protest movement has swept the country since police first tried to dismantle an encampment at Columbia University in New York nearly two weeks ago. But while fiery rhetoric and tumultuous arrests have occurred on high-profile campuses from New York to Los Angeles, millions of students across the country have continued their daily routine of navigating their way through school, socializing and studying for exams.

In yet another way, the protests reveal stark differences among Americans in 2024, even among groups that tended to be united at different times, as in the 1960s.

Take Boston, the city most identified with American higher education and which provides a glimpse into the diversity of student organizations’ responses to the war between Israel and Hamas.

Students have set up encampments on at least five campuses, including Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. But elsewhere in Boston there was peace.

“It’s just not the atmosphere at this school,” said Emmett Carrier, a junior studying biology at Boston College, a Jesuit institution with an enrollment of 15,000. “I don’t think they’re as committed to it here as they are at other schools.”

Boston College faculty and students had discussed the war between Israel and Hamas in class discussions, through a faculty vigil and at a meeting last week, “all of which were civil and respectful,” Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn wrote in an email .

“It’s an atmosphere where students are very polite,” says Brinton Lykes, professor of community psychology. “They will discuss things, debate intellectually, but they are shockingly rule-bound.”

Juliana Parisi, a sophomore who attended the meeting, said she thinks many students who want to protest are afraid of the consequences, but also thinks many students don’t want to get engaged.

“I think there’s a fair amount of apathy on campus,” she said.

It’s worth remembering that most campuses don’t have encampments, says Robert Cohen, a professor at New York University who has studied the history of American student protests. Even among those that do, the number of students involved is often not enough to fill even one large lecture hall, he noted.

A day before the Boston College meeting last week, Lykes helped organize a faculty vigil where speakers spoke about grieving those killed in the conflict and the history of events in the Middle East. She said there were uniformed and plainclothes police at the event. She received requests to check university identification and to let people leave their backpacks outside and found some of the demands ridiculous, she said.

At Boston University, a sprawling urban campus not far from Fenway Park with a student enrollment of more than 35,500, students have avoided camps but set up chairs to represent Israeli hostages and held die-ins to draw attention to the deaths in Gaza. On Wednesday, many of the school’s students sat hunched over laptops in study halls and cafeterias, preparing for the end of the school year and impending final exams.

“We have our final exams next week,” said Matt Przekop, a junior engineer. “If people were passionate, they wouldn’t really let this stop them from protesting.”

Brandon Colin O’Byrne, a freshman who is also studying engineering, said students are debating the issue but are not sitting in tents on campus.

“We got the school involved, we got students involved, we got individual groups involved,” he said. “We also have tensions between Jewish and Palestinian students, but it leads to productive debates,” he said.

A protest at Emerson College in downtown Boston ended with police forcibly removing demonstrators and arresting more than 100. Another protest at Northeastern was also broken up by police, who arrested more than 100 protesters who had created a tent camp on campus.

Other local universities have allowed protests and tent encampments, including at MIT, Harvard and Tufts University, although officials at some schools warned that protests cannot continue indefinitely. At Harvard, school officials opted to close the gates of Harvard Yard — where protesters set up camp — to all but those with school IDs.

One thing that has remained the same over decades of student protests, Cohen said, is that they remain unpopular with the public. But the campus movement increases public awareness of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Cohen said he believes the protests will likely subside in the summer as students return home. They could easily start up again as the U.S. election season progresses, he said.

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Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire.