With graduation near, colleges seek to balance safety and students’ right to protest Gaza war
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The University of Michigan is informing students of the rules for upcoming graduation ceremonies: banners and flags are not allowed. Protests are okay, but in designated areas, away from the cap-and-gown festivities.
The University of Southern California canceled a planned speech by the school’s Muslim valedictorian. At Columbia University, where 100 students were arrested last week after protests, officials temporarily canceled in-person classes Monday while they worked to find a solution to the crisis.
This is the early season of 2024, marked by the tension and volatility that has roiled college campuses since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. In response, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.
Since the war began, colleges and universities have struggled to balance campus safety with the right to free speech amid intense student debates and protests. Many schools that have tolerated protests and other disruptions for months are now enforcing harsher discipline. A series of recent campus crackdowns on student protesters have included suspensions and, in some cases, expulsions.
Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, said the conflict in the Middle East is terrible and she understands that many are experiencing deep moral distress.
“But we cannot allow one group to dictate the terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones, like graduation, to advance their point of view,” she wrote in a note to the school community on Monday.
The new measures have done little to stop the protests. Just Monday, pro-Palestinian protesters set up camps on campuses across the country, including at Columbia, the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University, where several dozen demonstrators were arrested after officials said they ignored warnings to had braved departures. .
While the majority of protests on college campuses have been peaceful, some have turned aggressive. Some Jewish students say much of the criticism of Israel has turned to anti-Semitism and made them feel unsafe.
Protesters are asking universities to take a number of actions, such as calling for a ceasefire in the war, or divesting defense companies that do business with Israel.
“The weapons that are made in this country are sent to Israel and used in the war against Gaza, and so it’s clear that we need to make those connections,” said Craig Birckhead-Morton, a Yale senior who was arrested Monday after he refused to leave. a protest camp. “We must highlight the difficulties the Palestinian people are going through.”
At MIT, protesters have also asked the university to stop what they say is funding from Israel’s Defense Ministry to university projects with military objectives.
“We believe we have a platform that students from other universities do not have because of our unique ties to the Israeli military,” said Shara Bhuiyan, a 21-year-old senior studying electrical engineering and computer science.
The intense emotions on both sides have created a climate that has unsettled both Jewish and Muslim students. More than half of these students, and a fifth of all students, reported feeling unsafe on campus because of their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a report published in March by the Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago.
Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League sent an open letter to college and university presidents, urging them to “take clear, decisive action” to ensure graduation ceremonies run smoothly and safely.
“We remain deeply concerned about the potential for substantial disruptions to commencement ceremonies,” Shira Goodman, ADL senior director of advocacy, said in an emailed statement.
On Thursday, Shafik, the president of Columbia, called on New York City police to clear a pro-Palestinian tent camp from the university’s campus after student protesters ignored repeated requests to leave — which she described as a ” extraordinary step” to keep the campus safe. .
All of the 100 or so students arrested were charged with trespassing and several were subsequently suspended — but as of Monday, a large protest encampment was once again set up on the main campus lawn, the very place where graduating students and families will gather next month. .
The arrests came a day after Shafik vowed to strike a balance between students’ safety and their right to freedom of expression during a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism. After similar testimony last year, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — in response to accusations that universities failed to protect Jewish students — resigned.
Several other college campuses across the country started the new year with revised protest rules. In January, American University banned indoor protests. Harvard began the spring semester with guidelines that effectively limited protests to outdoor spaces.
The University of Michigan issued a proposed Disruptive Activity Policy earlier this month. Violations of the policy, which has not yet been implemented, may result in suspension or expulsion of students and dismissal of university staff.
The proposal came in response to a raucous March 24 protest that ended the school’s annual honors convocation, a century-old tradition before the May 4 graduation ceremony. Protesters interrupted a speech by university president Santa J. Ono with shouts of: “You are financing genocide!” and unfurled banners reading: “Liberate Palestine,” forcing an abrupt end to the ceremony.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan said in a letter to Ono that the policy is “vague and overbroad, and risks chilling a significant amount of freedom of speech and expression.”
But in a letter to campus, Ono noted that “while protest is valued and protected, disruption is not.”
“One group’s right to protest does not trump the right of others to participate in a joyful event,” he wrote.
At Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, more than two dozen anti-Israel protesters stormed the university president’s office in late March and refused to leave for hours. Three of the students were expelled, including freshman Jack Petocz.
“It’s a very scary moment,” said 19-year-old Petocz, who is appealing the decision. “It’s about the crackdown on free speech on campuses, but it’s also about campuses becoming police states.”
On Monday, the University of Southern California cited “substantial safety and disruption risks at commencement” when it announced it would break with tradition and not allow valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a South Asian-American first-generation Muslim, would give a speech at the conference. the start on May 10.
The decision sparked outrage and several days of protests on campus, which led days later to another unexpected uproar: the cancellation of a keynote speaker for the first time since 1942.
The events at USC have raised concerns that other schools will bow to pressure and erode free speech, said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“I worry that schools might refuse to select a qualified, visibly Muslim student who advocates for Palestine to avoid what happened at USC,” he said. “Schools will do more harm than good if they try to censor and silence commencement speakers, especially students who have been given the honor of speaking at their graduation ceremonies.”
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Gecker reported from San Francisco.
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