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At Northeastern, a university spokesperson said the protest was “infiltrated by professional organizers.”
Northeastern University police escort a pro-Palestinian protester from the encampment on the school’s campus. Sophie Park/The New York Times
Amid a dizzying series of standoffs involving pro-Palestinian protests and encampments at colleges, schools that cracked down on protesters over the weekend gave varying justifications for their actions, while others sent mixed signals through their inaction.
Behind it all was a central question facing university leaders across the country: When does a protest cross the line?
Universities cited property damage, outside provocateurs, anti-Semitic expressions or simply disregarding warnings as reasons to evacuate encampments and arrest students. Student groups have strongly denied or questioned many of these claims.
Northeastern University in Boston, Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana University in Bloomington and Arizona State University forced police to intervene in protests Saturday, which led to more than 200 arrests. At other schools — including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Cornell University — chilly tension persisted Sunday as leaders warned of possible consequences for protesters, but had not yet been implemented.
Counter-protests also took place on Sunday, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn and UCLA, where physical altercations broke out between protesters, but no major violence was reported.
The University of Washington was quiet Sunday, a day after campus police officers made 100 arrests. Administrators said a group violated university policy by beginning to set up camp on the east end of campus. Officers arrested people who refused to leave “after being questioned multiple times,” administrators wrote.
“No one has the right to disrupt the ability of our community members to learn and work,” they said.
More than 800 people have been arrested since April 18, when New York police cleared an encampment in Columbia.
At Northeastern, where 102 protesters were arrested earlier Saturday, a university spokesperson said the protest was “infiltrated by professional organizers” and that someone used “virulent anti-Semitic slurs.” The protesters denied both claims.
Many school leaders insisted that people outside their universities were fueling the clashes, despite the limited amount of evidence supporting their claims. In many cases, the groups of protesters were comprised primarily of university students and employees, with the notable exception of the University of Washington on Saturday. Of the 100 arrests made, only 23 were students and four were employees, the university said in a statement Sunday.
Arizona State officials said 15 students were among the 72 protesters arrested Friday, although it was unclear how many were staff or faculty.
But at other colleges, the influence of outsiders was not evident.
About 200 people attended a pro-Israel demonstration in Penn on Sunday, a few hundred meters from a pro-Palestinian encampment. Noah Rubin, a student who spoke at the pro-Israel rally, said not all pro-Palestinian protesters are Penn students.
“We have a few documented people who have a history of violence in Philadelphia,” he said, although he did not provide further details. A spokesperson for the camp did not respond to a request for comment on Rubin’s allegations.
Some schools have tried to curb the influence of outsiders. For example, Harvard sought to restrict access only to those who presented a university ID card. At Northeastern, authorities had asked protesters for their student IDs earlier in the week before the arrests on campus Saturday. Some protesters showed them, while others refused. At Columbia, which closed its doors, protesters on the other side added to the sense of chaos, many of them shouting anti-Semitic chants and threatening students.
Protesters set up an encampment at Mary Washington University in Fredricksburg, Virginia, on Friday, but after the demonstration opened to the public, university officials, citing security concerns, asked organizers to dismantle their tents, which they did early in the night. A peaceful protest continued Saturday, when “outside influences” caused the encampment to expand again, Troy Paino, the university’s president, said in a statement Sunday.
When the tents were put up Saturday afternoon, the university said, organizers were asked to leave. Twelve protesters who remained, including nine students, were subsequently arrested.
But while administrators at some schools have tried to point the finger at protesters from outside the community, it has often been their own students who have been arrested. At Emory University in Atlanta, 20 of the 28 people arrested Thursday had ties to the school, despite authorities’ insistence that no one involved in the encampment was affiliated with the university.
Emory President Gregory Fenves said in a statement Sunday that a peaceful protest Saturday was disrupted by some people spray-painting “hateful messages” on the exterior walls of a building and vandalizing other structures.
“Emory crosses a divide between individuals who wish to express themselves peacefully and those who seek to use our campus as a platform to promote discord,” Fenves said, adding that such incidents “must be rejected and condemned.”
The high-profile conflicts fueled more protests, particularly on campuses where demonstrations had been dismantled earlier in the year.
At Stanford University, where a previous encampment was demolished in February, protesters set up a second encampment on Thursday. Administrators said in a statement Friday that they sent letters to about 60 students warning them that “failure to cease their conduct in violation of university policy” could result in disciplinary action or even arrest. .
But on at least one campus with an encampment nearby, at the University of Pittsburgh, graduation took place without a draw on Sunday, as planned.
Then, protesters marched near campus. As they attempted to access the lawn of the university’s Cathedral of Learning building, they were stopped by a line of police officers. More than 100 protesters remained on site for hours and two were arrested by campus police, according to a university official.
This article was originally published in the New York Times.
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