Campus Protests: After Day of Arrests, Demonstrations Appear More Muted (2024)

Pro-Palestinian student protests appeared more muted on Friday morning after authorities across the United States escalated efforts to dislodge the demonstrations, bringing campus encampments and building occupations to sometimes violent conclusions.

The wave of student activism, motivated in large part by concern for the scale of suffering in Gaza amid Israel’s military offensive, had grown since the April 18 arrest of 108 protesters at Columbia University in New York. This week, several schools called in law enforcement agencies, which sent officers in riot gear to clear protest grounds entirely, including at Columbia and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

More than 2,000 arrests have been made at protests on campuses nationwide, according to a New York Times tally. President Biden condemned the violence at some universities while affirming the right to protest peacefully in a speech on Thursday, his first public remarks on the campus unrest.

Here is what else to know:

• Protesters had not completely disappeared from U.C.L.A. after officers in riot gear raided a protest encampment there early Thursday, arresting more than 200 people. A man wearing a Palestinian flag passed through campus on Thursday night chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Another man blew a shofar and shouted in response, “From the river to the sea, Israel will prevail.”

• In Portland, the police said they had made 30 arrests on Thursday as they cleared the Portland State University library of protesters in a lengthy standoff. Protesters had occupied the building, stacking wood pallets and furniture around doors and entrances.

• A handful of universities have accepted some of the protesting students’ demands, bringing peaceful ends to demonstrations. Protesters at Rutgers University ended a three-day encampment after administrators agreed to meet many of their demands. Similar deals were struck at Brown University, Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota.

• The New York Police Department said on Thursday that an officer whose gun went off inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall this week fired it accidentally as police were clearing protesters from the building.

Jonathan Wolfe and Mike Baker contributed reporting.

Pro-Palestinian student protesters at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., began packing up a tent encampment Thursday afternoon that they had occupied for three nights after university administrators agreed to meet many of their demands.

The university’s president, Jonathan Holloway, had given the group a 4 p.m. deadline to evacuate after postponing two dozen final exams on Thursday morning because of the disruption. Those who refused to leave would be removed “with the assistance of law enforcement,” Dr. Holloway said in a statement.

But he also indicated that talks the administration had begun holding with student protesters on Wednesday had been fruitful.

A student protest organizer said on Thursday afternoon that the university had accepted eight of the protesters’ 10 demands, and had agreed to continue negotiating over their main request: divestment from companies supporting Israel.

The move at Rutgers follows similar deals that Brown University and Northwestern University struck earlier this week to end encampments there. Some Jewish groups voiced outrage about those agreements, calling them a capitulation to demonstrators who had created a hostile environment on campus.

Rutgers has the second-largest Jewish population of any U.S. public university, after the University of Florida, according to Hillel International, the world’s largest Jewish campus organization. It also has a large number of Muslim and Arab students.

University officials said that the peaceful resolution was the result of “constructive dialogue between the protesting students and our leadership teams.”

“This agreement opens the door for ongoing dialogue and better addresses the needs of our Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian student body, which numbers over 7,000,” the school said in a statement.

The university agreed to establish an Arab cultural center at the New Brunswick campus, conduct a feasibility study for the creation of a department of Middle East studies and “implement support” for 10 displaced Palestinian students to study at Rutgers, among other steps. It also promised not to retaliate against participants in the protest encampment.

Regarding the protesters’ demand that Rutgers end its partnership with Tel Aviv University, the university wrote, “Agreements with global partners are a matter of scholarly inquiry.”

Students draped in Palestinian flags and kaffiyehs hugged and congratulated each other as the tents on Voorhees Mall were dismantled. “No arrests today!” one shouted. At one edge of the lawn, a group of young men watched the encampment being taken down and chanted “U.S.A.” while waving an American flag; at another point, a few people stood on the opposite side waving an Israeli flag.

Hana Hassan, a 22-year-old undergraduate student at Rutgers, said she was celebrating the agreement as the furthest progress that she and fellow advocates for the Palestinian cause at the university had made. She noted that the deal had been reached without any arrests on campus, unlike at some other universities across the country where violence has erupted.

Ms. Hassan said she was disappointed that not all of the protesters’ demands were met, but was not discouraged. “We got 80 percent of what we wanted, and we’re going to happily take that,” she said.

Todd Wolfson, president of a union that represents about 5,000 professors and faculty members, said he was proud of the students. “It’s scary,” he said, “and they held firm for real material gains.”

Mr. Wolfson said that roughly 150 faculty members had volunteered to support the students as the size of the protest swelled on Thursday morning. The professors, who were not participating in the encampment, had formed a loose circle around the group; 100 indicated that they were willing to be arrested, Mr. Wolfson said.

Tensions had been running high even before the encampment was established.

In December, the university suspended the New Brunswick campus’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. That same month, the U.S. Education Department added Rutgers to the list of dozens of institutions under investigation because of reports of incidents of harassment tied to national origin.

Then, in April, a vandal caused an estimated $40,000 in damage after breaking into the university’s Center for Islamic Life at the end of Ramadan. A 24-year-old New Jersey man with no known connection to the school was arrested and charged with the break-in.

— Gaya Gupta and Tracey Tully Gaya Gupta reported from the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J.

An officer whose gun went off inside a Columbia University building this week fired it accidentally as the police were removing pro-Palestinian protesters from the campus, the New York Police Department said on Thursday.

No one was injured during the shooting on Tuesday, and the bullet ended up in the frame of a wall a few feet away, the N.Y.P.D. said in a statement. The police will hold a news conference about the episode on Friday at 11:30 a.m.

The officer, who was not identified, was approaching a barricade on the first floor of Hamilton Hall when he fired his gun, which had a flashlight on it, the police said. The shooting was captured on the officer’s body camera, which was handed over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The episode did not come to light until Thursday, when The City, a local news organization, published a story that said a shot had been fired inside Hamilton Hall on Tuesday as police cleared the Columbia campus of protesters. It was the second time in two weeks that Columbia officials asked the police to enter the Manhattan campus to remove demonstrators. The requests have divided the university community and earned officials both praise and criticism.

More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests on campuses across the country. University officials have argued that they are trying to balance free speech protections and security on campus. The protests at dozens of schools have been mostly peaceful.

Columbia has said that it had no choice but to call the police in on Tuesday, ending a fraught 24 hours on campus after talks between university officials and protesters fell apart. Soon after, some demonstrators left the encampment and took control of Hamilton Hall, a building that has been the site of student protests since the 1960s. Police arrested more than 100 people that night on the campus and outside the gates of the school.

Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

The largest employee union in the University of California system said on Thursday that it was preparing to ask some or all of its members to authorize a strike over the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The announcement by United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents some 48,000 graduate student teaching assistants, researchers and other student workers across the state, came hours after police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators at U.C.L.A. for failing to leave.

U.A.W. 4811 intends to file unfair labor practices charges that, in essence, accuse U.C.L.A. of discriminating against pro-Palestinian speech and unilaterally changing policies protecting employees’ free speech without bargaining, said Rafael Jaime, the union’s co-president and a Ph.D. candidate in the university’s English department.

The group said the university failed to protect union members who were among the pro-Palestinian student protesters when counterprotesters attacked an encampment that had stood since April 25.

Mr. Jaime said he was at the encampment Tuesday night as counterprotesters tore down barricades and shot fireworks at pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and that he was hit by pepper spray. Campus police on site did not intervene, and reinforcements from the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol did not arrive for hours. No arrests were made.

The lack of response was quickly denounced by local leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom, as well as by students and faculty members.

“The university was nowhere to be seen for hours and hours,” Mr. Jaime said. “They just stood there and allowed our co-workers to be brutalized.”

On Wednesday night, dozens of police officers in riot gear arrived to disperse protesters who remained at the pro-Palestinian encampment. Mr. Jaime said officers shot projectiles into the crowd of protesters and forcefully arrested students. He said he did not know how many union members had been arrested.

and forcefully arrested students, including union members.

Arresting some 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators while not arresting any counterprotesters who assaulted them, he said, amounted to prioritizing anti-Palestinian speech over pro-Palestinian speech, which violated the rights of university employees to free speech.

Mr. Jaime said that the union could call a strike authorization vote as early as next week, but he emphasized that it was too early to say whether a strike would include union members across the University of California system or just at U.C.L.A.

Officials at the University of California Office of the President said in a statement that the union could not legally engage in a work stoppage and expressed frustration that the union would “exploit” the situation.

The statement said that “the University of California is deeply alarmed, concerned and disappointed that our UAW-represented academic employees would choose this moment of crisis to take a vote to engage in an unlawful work stoppage.” Officials added that the university “values these employees and asks them to join it in supporting our communities at this time.”

The union’s members do much of the day-to-day work across the vast University of California system, which serves nearly 300,000 students, has some of the nation’s top researchers and is often referred to as the “crown jewel” of the state. The academic workers grade papers, lead discussion sessions and conduct research.

But the university employees often struggle with the cost of living in some of the nation’s most expensive housing markets. In 2022, the union’s members — then split into two locals — walked off the job for six weeks in one of the largest strikes by university-based workers in national history.

The union called for a cease-fire in Gaza in October, making it part of an early wave of unions declaring support for Palestinians.