The protests against the war in Gaza that have been taking place in many US universities for weeks are probably the most widespread and significant since those of 1968 against the war in Vietnam, and are having serious consequences on the academic world and politico throughout the United States. Faced with the spread of protests, which have grown in various forms on dozens of campuses, university administrations have adopted very different approaches: some harsher and others more permissive, but very often unsuccessful.
The problems in managing the protests show the difficulties of large institutions such as American universities, which must keep together the rights of students (the right to express themselves and demonstrate freely, but also the right to study without suffering inconveniences and impediments) but must also guarantee the interests of various stakeholders, not all linked to the academic world.
Some university administrations have taken a more permissive approach. This is the case of the University of California in Los Angeles, better known as UCLA, which until a couple of days ago, as he said il New York Times, had decided not to interfere with the protests that had begun on his campus. The administration was convinced that a tolerant approach would contribute to dialogue and keep student activities peaceful and calm.
But on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, violent clashes between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protesters began on the UCLA campus, in which many people who are not part of the student body participated. The administration called the police and disrupted classes, and she became the subject of big controversies on managing the situation.
The clashes on May 1st at UCLA (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)
Different approaches have been used at Columbia University in New York, another of the great American universities, where on more than one occasion the rector — Nemat Shafik, musulmana di origini egyptiane — asked for the police to intervene to clear out the camps of the demonstrators, who were arrested by the dozens. The latest eviction, a particularly large one, occurred after some students had occupied a university building. Every time, however, the protesters returned.
Various universities have adopted this approach of repeated evictions: just recently, at the City College of New York, at Tulane University in New Orleans, at the University of Wisconsin, at the University of Utah, and so on. According to an estimate of New York Timessince mid-April in protests at universities have been arrested around 1,600 people (and almost all released shortly after).
In any case, the evictions have not quelled the protests, and indeed have often damaged the administrations.
For example, Nemat Shafik, the rector of Columbia, who is by far the most exposed university leader in this period, was criticized both from the left, for having called the police on the students who were protesting in an otherwise peaceful manner (up to the occupations this week), and from the right, for having supported demonstrations that in some cases took on anti-Semitic tones and for having allowed a minority group of students to cause problems for everyone else: the Columbia campus is currently closed to all except the students who live there.
Various other universities temporarily halted classes, changed their academic calendars, or closed libraries and other administrative buildings following the protests.
This shows how complex it is for university administrations to juggle between two different student rights: on the one hand that of protesting, demonstrating and freely expressing their thoughts; on the other, the desire of the entire student body to be able to attend university without interruptions or problems.
The universities that have managed to find a synthesis are those that have negotiated with the representatives of the demonstrators, and in some cases even made concessions: this is the case of Brown University, in the state of Rhode Island, where the demonstrators demobilized their camp following an agreement with the administration, which agreed to discuss their requests.
It’s not always easy, however. More or less all university administrations are talking and negotiating with their protesters: at Columbia, negotiations have been going on for about ten days, but so far it has been impossible to reach an agreement.
One of the students’ main demands is for their universities to stop making investments related to Israel, and to stop academic collaborations with Israeli institutions. At Columbia, for example, students are calling on the university to block all its for-profit investments in Israel, as well as academic exchanges with Tel Aviv University.
For the university administration, many of these requests are inadmissible, both for reasons of principle (the administration has made it known that it is not willing to interrupt relations with another university just because it is Israeli) and for economic reasons: American universities are in fact large and rich companies, which manage complex financial investment strategies, and for many, blocking investments in Israel would be complicated and ethically questionable.
Also for this reason, the economic issue ends up further complicating the management of the protests: universities must not only respond to students and professors, but also to investors, financial advisors and donors. They also suffer great political pressure, as seen in recent months when the rector of Harvard was forced to resign because she was initially accused of not having sufficiently combated anti-Semitism on her campus.