The Journal. - Pro-Palestinian Protests and Arrests at U.S. Colleges

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

With a fresh round of pro-Palestinian protests sweeping campuses nationwide, university administrators are cracking down. WSJ’s Melissa Korn explains what students are demanding and what it could mean for campus life going forward. Further Reading: -At Columbia, Discontent Grows Over Shafik’s Handling of Crisis  -Pro-Palestinian Protests Force Colleges to Rethink Graduation Plans  Further Listening: -Big Donors Clash with Universities Over Antisemitism, Free Speech  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past several days, protesters have been gathering on college campuses across the country, expressing support for civilians in Gaza. Students setting up encampments from University of North Carolina to MIT. Harvard's yard closed until Friday. There were scuffles at the University of North Carolina to MIT. Harvard's Yard closed until Friday. There were scuffles at the University of Texas. Many of them have been camping out at Yale for days occupying Montague Plaza. Our colleague Melissa Korn has been following the situation.

These are politically active, motivated, engaged students. You're seeing students from a range of different advocacy backgrounds joining together under this umbrella of pro-Palestinian protests and calling for a ceasefire. College campuses are always a hotbed for protests. How would you say that these protests compare to things we've seen on college campuses in the past? protests compare to things we've seen on college campuses in the past? So the most direct comparison I think people are making is to what we saw in 1968 with anti-war protests in terms of the level of hostility and anger and kind of combustible nature of these, right? You just don't know where it's going to turn next or what might happen next. The protests have intensified since last week, after more than

a hundred students were arrested at Columbia University in New York, prompting students at other institutions to join in. There is this sense that we are going to protest and set up encampments in solidarity with our brethren at Columbia. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, April 25th. Coming up on the show, how the war in Gaza has campuses across the country in turmoil. to Los Angeles. Take to the fields of the USA for your next vacation. Ready to kick off? Discover exciting games and events. Plus, find amazing hidden gems

in cities full of adventures, delicious food, and diverse cultures. You'll love it so much you'll want to extend your stay beyond the matches. Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway.

Head to visittheusa.com. Pro-Palestinian protests have been simmering on college campuses for months. These protesters are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Many say Israel is committing genocide. Israel has strongly denied allegations of genocide and says its Gaza operations are justified after the Hamas attack on October 7th. Some Jewish students have criticized some of the protesters' rhetoric as anti-Semitic. They say it's made them feel unsafe on campus. And this whole situation has attracted attention from lawmakers. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce

took an interest in this and scheduled a hearing for early December where they invited some university presidents to answer for what was happening on their campuses. So that was the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT. Those hearings did not go very well for those presidents. They gave fairly lawyerly responses to some questions that seemed like to the public should have been easy yes-no answers. An embattled President Claudine Gay is set to resign imminently.

Gay was one of the Ivy League presidents whose muted response about calls for Israeli genocide at a congressional hearing led to demands for her ouster. The president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned. The president of Columbia University, Manoush Shafiq, was also supposed to testify at that hearing, but she couldn't make it. But she said, you know, she would be willing to come another time,

and that other time was last week. I see. So she came to a hearing last week alongside two trustees from Columbia and a law professor who is one of the leaders of the anti-Semitism task force on campus. During her testimony, Shafiq took a stronger stance. Columbia strives to be a community free of discrimination and hate in all its forms, and we condemn the anti-Semitism that is so pervasive today. Anti-Semitism has no place on our campus,

and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly. She said the school beefed up security, restricted outside visitors, and suspended or disciplined students and faculty who had violated its policies. Shafiq was not seen as bumbling her performance the way that the prior presidents did, but her responses were not exactly cheered by all corners. Why not? What kinds of things did she say that got criticism? Well, there was a sense that her responses, that her answers didn't give enough respect

to this core tenet of academic freedom that she indicated to the House committee that harsher actions perhaps should be taken against some people for what they've said. Faculty who make remarks that cross the line in terms of anti-Semitism, there will be consequences. As Shafiq was preparing to testify, some Columbia students decided to seize the moment and scale up their protests by setting up sleeping bags and tents on campus. The visual juxtaposition here is really interesting. They have kind of a main quad, a main lawn, and one half of it was being prepared for graduation, for commencement ceremony,

where they're putting a new turf on and they'll then put all the folding chairs out and it's pristine, exactly what you would expect of an Ivy League institution ahead of a major public event. Across a little brick walkway is the encampment with many tents and Palestinian flags and handwritten posters and signs. They're messy. They're lived in. You know, people are camping out on central lawns around campus.

One of the main things students are asking for has to do with Columbia's $13 billion endowment. The fund has invested in all kinds of things, everything from stocks and bonds to hedge funds and private equity. Students say they want the university to disclose its financial holdings and divest from companies that do business with Israel. So that includes tech companies, that includes weapons manufacturers. Depending on how comprehensive you want the divestment to go, it can go pretty far. For instance, the students are asking Columbia to sell its investments in Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google's parent company, which they say provide cloud services to the Israeli government and military. Columbia has divested from other things in the past,

like tobacco, private prisons, and South African companies during its apartheid. So the students say the university can divest from Israel as well. The university has said there isn't broad agreement on what to do about these particular investments. So at this point, they are not planning to divest. And a lot of them have said, it's not so easy. We're not going to walk away from the potential financial benefit of investing in these companies. Because ultimately, they're investing for their

endowments. And the goal of an endowment is to collect and maintain a fund to support the university in perpetuity. Is that even really possible to just divest very specifically out of businesses that have anything to do with Israel? Again, it depends how you're defining a business having something to do with Israel, right? Is it a consumer goods company that happens to sell deodorant in a convenience store in Israel? Is it a tech company that has a manufacturing plant?

Is it an arms manufacturer? Like, yes, they could divest from individual companies, but at what point is every company somehow have connections to a particular country? And I also suspect that these endowments often have investments in mutual funds, which have lots of things in them, and you would have to pull out of the entire fund if there happened to be one company in that fund. Right.

If you have a broad-based S&P 500 fund, then yeah, you're going to touch on some of these companies. Divestment is not their only demand, though. They also want the university to call for a ceasefire. What has Columbia said about that? The question about demanding a ceasefire, administrators say, I'm not sure what that would do, right? I, as a university president, cannot actually dictate politics in the Middle East.

Soon after the encampment appeared, the university told all the students there that they were suspended and needed to leave immediately. Shafiq, Columbia's president, said the encampment raised safety concerns and disrupted life on campus. She then asked the New York City Police Department to remove the protesters, who she said were now trespassing. So the police had been there and kind of hovering for a while

and then finally got the go-ahead to clear through and they had the plastic zip ties and arrested a number of people. But the protesters say, you know, we were peaceful the whole time. There was no need to come and do this to us. How did students at Columbia and other schools react to these arrests? They were galvanized by them. I think if the police had not come onto campus

and had not conducted these arrests, we would not have seen the mobilization on other campuses at the pace we saw. That's next. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details.

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Move back! Move back! Move back! followed in some cases by police crackdowns. We've had people arrested at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. We've had people arrested at Yale. And throughout the fall and winter, we've had people arrested at Pomona and Brown and UMass. You know, the students are standing their ground when they feel they should be. And they are facing some consequences for it. Have we seen any violent confrontations break out among students?

There haven't been, you know, massive fistfights leading to medical need for dozens of people or anything like that. There have been some pretty specific incidents or allegations of attacks and violence. So when schools talk about safety concerns, what are they referring to then? So there's a difference between being beaten up and feeling like there is an imminent threat of being beaten up. And I think that's where some of this gets a little bit hard for the schools to explain, that an imminent threat of violence is a safety concern. And if somebody feels the threat of violence and doesn't feel comfortable on campus, then that is something that they as a university need to address and try to head off. And that's kind of the position we're in now where you've got a number of Jewish students saying they don't feel comfortable on campus,

they don't feel comfortable walking through these quads where there are call-and-response chants of from the river to the sea and go home Zionists and things like that. And there's just this sense of threat and hostility, and they don't know if or when it could escalate further. Chance that many Jewish people consider to be racist. Right, that they consider to be anti-Semitic, that from the river to the sea, the interpretation is that the goal is to wipe Israel off the map.

Have any pro-Palestinian students expressed similar concerns about feeling unsafe? Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things I've heard from some students who participated in some of these more recent demonstrations and set up camp on the lawn and said, for the first time in six months, I feel like I can speak my mind and be in this supportive, safe community of like-minded people. And I didn't feel that safety before. I didn't feel like my views were welcome on campus until now. So, yeah, the concern about feeling welcome goes both ways and has for a very long time. welcome goes both ways and has for a very long time.

At Columbia, students and members of the administration have been negotiating to bring an end to the encampments. A couple days ago, the students agreed to start taking the tents down, though many are still up. Have universities had to change anything about how they're operating right now while these protests are going on? A bit. So Harvard Yard is closed this week to the public, which is something that doesn't happen very often, but they're kind of

trying to minimize the chance of disruption. We've had some schools shut down for a day or two for safety concerns. And Columbia itself, Monday, they had classes virtually. And then they announced that for the rest of the semester, students can attend classes in person or online before the finals begin. So yeah, it's affecting the day-to-day of campus activity, of how students go about their days, how faculty go about their days. And as we get toward the end of the semester, administrators really have a close eye toward commencement and what might be in store for them there.

It sounds like universities are expecting these protests to last for a while if they're already thinking about commencement. They are not expecting everyone to smile and clap politely for the entire commencement, no matter what happens between now and then. They're giving warnings and kind of trying to remind participants this is the difference between a protest and a disruption. This is the difference between a legal protest and, you know, something that goes over the line to being inappropriate or violent or hostile or against our rules.

And we will allow the former and we will step in for the latter. So as schools get closer to graduation, to the commencement ceremonies in the next few weeks, we're seeing a lot of those types of stern reminders. You know, you're not going to be allowed to bring flags and banners into the commencement ceremony. We respect your right to hiss and boo, but if we can't proceed with the ceremony at some point, we will step in and ask you to leave, those sorts of things. Shafiq said in a campus update earlier this week that she wanted students to have a peaceful and in-person graduation, writing that she was, quote, deeply sensitive to the fact that graduating seniors spent their first year attending Columbia remotely.

And is there a chance in the meantime that any of these universities or Columbia will give in to some of these protesters' demands? It's hard to say. Some of these schools have been pretty explicit that they do not plan to divest or they do not plan to call for a ceasefire or it is not their role as an institutional leader to do so. Schools may very well rethink some of their disciplinary policies or how they handle the protesters, and that might look different at every school. But in terms of just fully capitulating to every demand by the protesters, I don't see that happening in part because of the precedent that would set for future protests on campuses. It feels just like a

very tough situation, especially with the temperature so high on all sides. Yeah, the temperature is very high. It is, I mean, I used that word combustible before, right? We don't know where this is going to go next. And oftentimes when you have a news story, you don't know where it's going to go next. And here we don't even know what campus it's going to be next. And just how heated things will get before they calm down again. And that's deeply unsettling to administrators and students and faculty and their families. That's all for today, Thursday, April 25th.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Matt Barnum, Doug Belkin, Juliet Chung, and Alan Rodriguez Espinosa. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.