By Brad Brooks
DENVER, Colo. (Reuters) – A dozen students arrested by police while staging a sit-in on a Denver college campus emerged from detention to the cheers of their fellow pro-Palestinian demonstrators, several among them waving yellow summons like tiny victory flags and imploring other demonstrators not to let their energy fade.
How long the student protests against the Gaza war that have erupted in Denver and at dozens of universities across the United States will last will be a key question for demonstrators, school administrators and police, along with graduation ceremonies and summer vacation. and prestigious camps dismantled.
Student protesters passionately say they will continue until administrators meet demands that include a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, divestment of universities from arms suppliers and other companies that profit from the war, and an amnesty for students and professors who were sanctioned or fired for protesting.
Scholars who study protest movements and the history of civil disobedience say it’s difficult to maintain the energy of people power on campus if most people are gone. But they also emphasize that the university protests are just one tactic in the broader pro-Palestinian movement that has existed for decades, and that this summer will provide plenty of opportunities for the energy that began on the campus migrates to the streets.
EVOLVE OR DISAPPEAR
Dana Fisher is a professor at American University in Washington, DC and the author of several books on activism and grassroots movements. She saw some of her own students among the protesters on her campus.
She noted that the campus movement spread organically across the country in response to the call of police to the Columbia University campus on April 18, when more than 100 people were arrested. Since those arrests, at least 2,600 protesters have been arrested at more than 100 demonstrations in 39 states and Washington, D.C., according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization.
“I don’t see enough organizational infrastructure to support a group of young people involved in a movement when they’re not on campus,” Fisher said. “Either the movement must evolve substantially, or it cannot continue.”
After the first arrests at Columbia, students occupied a classroom, an escalation of protest that led to even more arrests. Similarly, in Denver, on April 26, police arrested 45 people during a protest at an encampment on the Auraria campus – which serves the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University and the Community College of Denver. Denver.
Then, on May 8, Auraria protesters staged a short-lived sit-in inside the Aerospace Sciences and Engineering Building, developed in part with a $1 million donation. dollars from arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
Denver students say the spread of the coastal movement to the heartland and small universities shows it has endured. Student protests have also erupted outside the United States.
“We will continue our protests and encampment until our demands are met, however long it takes,” said Steph, a 21-year-old student at the Auraria campus who declined to give her full name. for fear of reprisals. “We will be here during the summer break and into next fall if necessary.”
Fisher, the academic, said the police response to the protests helped spark a sense of activism in a new generation of students. She believes the current campus protests foreshadow a “long, hot summer of protest” on many issues, and that the Republican National Convention in July and the Democratic National Convention in August will be ripe targets for massive protests.
“The stakes have become much higher, and a lot of that is due to the way the police have responded in a much more aggressive and repressive way than in the 1960s,” Fisher said, referring to the student-led protests. against Vietnam. War.
“And then you find yourself right in the middle of it all, the presidential election?” she says. “That’s a crazy recipe for a hell of a fall.”
AFTER GRADUATION, A GHOST TOWN
Michael Heaney, an American professor of politics at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, whose research and books have focused on protest movements in the United States, said campus protests are just one tactic among others as part of a broader movement in support of the Palestinians, an ongoing effort that dates back decades.
Heaney said the geographic spread of college encampments in places like Denver is an opportunity to take the message of the broader movement to places where it may not have been present before.
Heaney added that “protests against any movement are episodic” and pointed to the various protests of the African-American civil rights movement in the United States, dating back 200 years. It is not because a moment of protest ends that it presages its general end.
He said pro-Palestinian protests in American cities this summer could intensify if the Israeli offensive in Gaza continues, and that such demonstrations would have been fueled by widespread academic activism.
On Denver’s Auraria campus, while students have been evacuated from the classroom building, about 75 tents remain on a grassy field, where protesters say they serve 200 meals each day in a dining hall tent. One of the organizers of the student demonstration, Jacob, 22, said he was convinced that it was the facts on the ground in Gaza that would make it possible to maintain the encampment.
“After we graduate, this campus may be a ghost town, but we will still be here,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Denver; editing by Donna Bryson and Aurora Ellis)
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