Following Columbia University’s lead, around 40 pro-Palestine demonstration camps have sprung up across various US educational campuses, according to a report by the New York Times. Although many of these protests have been contentious yet non-violent, with the participants advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza and their universities’ financial disinvestment from corporations linked with Israel, several intense confrontations with the law enforcement have occurred. Many hundreds of students, along with non-student protestors, have been apprehended.
Around a hundred additional students were taken into custody over the weekend, primarily from Emerson College in Boston, and about two dozen from Ohio State University. At Columbia University, a bid to reprimand University President Minouche Shafik did not prevail. However, a resolution seeking a probe into her leadership was approved with a 62-14 vote on Friday, as per the New York Times.
Shafik garnered criticism for her decision to call the New York police onto the campus the previous week which led to the dismantling of a protest camp and resulted in over a hundred students being arrested. Following a two-hour conference on Friday, the university’s senate, which is majorly made up of faculty, staff and a limited number of students, passed a resolution critiquing Shafik’s administration for violating the academic freedom, flouting students and faculty’s privacy, and overriding due process by involving the police and quelling the demonstration.
The senate’s statement highlight its concerns over the management’s lack of respect for cooperative governance and transparency. However, the statement did not specifically mention Shafik. In response to the resolution, the university’s spokesperson, Ben Chang, stated that the administration and the senate shared the same objective of restoring peace around the campus and are committed to a continuous conversation.
Although the students’ primary demand of financial divestment was not met by the university after meetings on Thursday and Friday, pro-Palestine protestor and doctoral student Jonathan Ben-Menachem claims that they had made progress in demanding transparency in financial disclosures. He emphasised that they wouldn’t back down until Columbia committed to divestment.
In a regrettable occurrence, Khymani James, a corrospondent from the Columbia group, expressed regret over the distasteful remarks they made in a January social media clip where they argued that “Zionists have no right to existence”. In a Friday declaration, James acknowledged his flawed statement and stressed the importance of everyone in our community feeling unconditionally secure. A senior representative of the university revealed that James, facing punitive measures, has been prohibited from entering the campus.
Simultaneously, the police are suspected to have deployed rubber bullets and tear gas on demonstrators at Emory University, situated in Atlanta, Georgia, resulting in the apprehension of the philosophy department’s chair, Noëlle McAfee. Previous to her arrest, a video depicting the Atlanta police force marching into the protest site was uploaded by her. She later reported to have witnessed police ferociously attacking a young individual. In response to her demands that they cease their act and her refusal to distance herself, she was detained.
Caroline Fohlin, an economics professor at the same institution, was also seized by the police. Cops decided to apprehend Professor Fohlin after ground handling her in response to her querying a different officer’s arrest efforts.
The situation in Columbus, Ohio was noticeably tense wherein videos depicted state troopers clashing with protestors gathering on the university campus on Thursday evening. Campus representatives directed protestors to withdraw. Those who defied orders were detained and indicted with criminal trespassing, university representative Benjamin Johnson informed, citing rules that forbid after-dark events.
The warning of possible arrests was issued by Students for Justice in Palestine at Ohio State University, a student-led organization, to the demonstrators, effectively bringing hundreds of students together. In their local student-run newspaper, the Lantern, it was reported that around 30 protestors were arrested during the night. “Shame on you OSU, you will not silence us”, said state representative Munira Yasin Abdullahi in an Instagram post.
Approximately 250 students were patrolling the protest site in a protective ring around 10pm on Thursday when the police advanced towards them with shields. Officials then escorted the protestors to the arrest vans, as reported by the Lantern, whilst the crowds carried on waving flags and chanting “let them pray”. There were also two unconnected protesting students of Ohio State who were arrested on Tuesday for participating in a separate campus protest, as stated by the Columbus Dispatch.
In a development reported by the Berkeley Beacon student newspaper, law enforcement officers forcibly dismantled a tented protest site set up at Boston’s Emerson College, leading to the arrest of 108 individuals. Footage displayed law enforcement officers resorting to violence, assaulting demonstrators and physically handling students.
The number of campus protest sites has surged past 40 nationwide, as announced by NBC’s Today on a Friday morning broadcast. Emerson College established a camp on Sunday as a show of solidarity towards the arrested students at Columbia University, which has been the epicentre of these student-led demonstrations. The protesters also called for an end to the conflict in Gaza.
The Berkeley Beacon reported that these demonstrators were captured for creating public disturbances, yet it remains unverified how many out of the 108 arrested attendees were actually students of Emerson College. Emerson and Ohio State were just a couple of many universities that experienced arrests on Thursday, part of a series of protests across America expressing solidarity with Palestine. These protests echoed the actions observed at New York City’s Columbia University, where the pitching of protesting tents in the campus’s heart initiated last week.
Turbulence followed when the university president involved the New York police department to dismantle the camp, leading to arrests and a new camp’s subsequent establishment. Columbia-inspired camps have sprung up at Northwestern University in Illinois, Cornell University in New York, George Washington University in DC, Princeton University in New Jersey, City College of New York, and Harvard University in Massachusetts.
Moreover, students at Georgia’s Morehouse College were similarly detained on Thursday. Universities of Southern California and Texas at Austin saw violent encounters, leading to further arrests a day before. The University of Southern California had to cancel its predominant commencement ceremony, deeply affecting students who pursued their degrees amidst the prolonged solitude imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. UC Berkeley and northern California’s Cal Poly Humboldt have also witnessed marches and protest camps.
University of California’s UCLA witnessed heightened tensions as pro-Israel counter-protesters clashed with pro-Palestinian groups at the college’s campsite. – Guardian