On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis in a terrorist attack, the likes of which the country had never seen. Since then, Israel has been determined to eradicate Hamas from Gaza while fending back attacks from Iran and its proxies. The aftermath of the attack has strained relations between the United States and Israel, while the Democratic Party at home threatens to be torn apart by anti-Israeli activists, as seen within Congress, and it is playing out on campuses across the country. This Washington Examiner series will take a closer look at all of these matters with far-reaching consequences. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Thousands of students across the country took to college campuses and city streets this week to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel, setting the stage for a major test of new restrictions on speech and protests following dozens of demonstrations that turned violent during the spring semester.
In New York, hundreds of Columbia University students joined a walkout on Monday. The university, which was the center of the country’s campus protests just months earlier, set up security barriers around its campus where access was limited. Some students and staff members set up memorials for Israelis kidnapped or killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack where a pro-Palestinian encampment once stood.
Hamas militants stormed Israel last year, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others. Israel responded, obliterating much of northern Gaza. The ensuing war has now claimed the lives of at least 41,900 Palestinians, wounded more than 97,300, and triggered a humanitarian crisis across the region.
Outrage quickly made its way onto college campuses across the country, which led to explosive confrontations and forced higher education institutions, such as the New York Ivy League, to reevaluate their policies on free speech and expression. Most universities were caught off guard and struggled to take a clear stand, something that has continued. Others have put in place a new roster of rules around demonstrations and gatherings.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, there have been protests at 525 colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and school district offices across 317 U.S. cities and towns, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a collaboration between the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s Nonviolent Action Lab and the University of Connecticut.
At Columbia, sit-ins, teach-ins, and walkouts at the university’s enclosed central campus gave way to counterdemonstrations by pro-Israel groups last spring.
Outside Columbia’s library, several Israeli students were physically attacked after they confronted another student tearing down posters of Israelis held hostage by Hamas. Some students wearing hijabs and kaffiyehs, a traditional scarf worn by men in the Middle East, reported being called “Jew killers” and terrorists.
“In the past, demonstrations were basically students protesting against the establishment, and that was, you know, unidirectional and fairly straightforward,” Minouche Shafik, the then-president of Columbia University, told the New York Times in late May. “In this crisis, students are opposed to other students, faculty opposed to other faculty. And those internal dynamics and tensions have made this much more difficult than past episodes.”
Shafik, who brought police to the campus twice last spring to clear out protest encampments, resigned in August.
Since then, interim President Katrina Armstrong has tried to get ahead of the problem. She has met with students on both sides of the issue, promising to balance their right to free expression with a safe learning environment for all.
Some have dismissed her efforts as an unrealistic approach, while others have been cautiously optimistic.
“We are hoping for the best, but we are all wagering how long before we go into total lockdown again,” Rebecca Kobrin, a history professor who served on the school’s antisemitism task force, told the Associated Press.
Lawsuit and new rules
One thing that could alter the outcome is the lawsuit the school was slapped with earlier this year.
Columbia was sued by Jewish students who said they did not feel safe on campus and felt pressured to switch to online learning.
The school settled with the plaintiffs in June, agreeing to increase safety measures. The settlement is one of the first the university has made, though it faces more allegations of discrimination.
One of the terms of the settlement was the appointment of a “safe passage liaison,” who will serve as the point of contact for students with protest-related concerns and will also be in charge of student requests for escorts through December.
The university also agreed to establish a new protocol for students to complete their coursework or exams if they cannot get to their classrooms because of protests.
In June, the school also removed three deans who exchanged private text messages that mocked students’ complaints of antisemitism during a panel discussion on Jewish life on campus. Pictures of the texts were taken by someone sitting behind one of the deans and leaked to a conservative website before being publicly released by a congressional committee investigating allegations of antisemitism at the school.
Since then, Columbia has bolstered its guidelines around protests, which require organizers to inform the university of any scheduled events, barring demonstrations that “substantially inhibit the primary purpose of a given university space.”
“The University may restrict expression that constitutes a genuine threat of harassment, that unjustifiably invades an individual’s privacy, or that defames a specific individual,” the regulations now state.
Still, some students told reporters this week that the school has done little to address the root of the problem.
“Columbia has a systemic Jew hate problem, and it’s rampant among the faculty. It’s rampant in the university Senate, the rule-making body for the university, and frankly, it’s rampant among the student body,” one student complained to MSNBC.
There was also an updated code of conduct at nearby New York University, which saw its fair share of protests last spring. Unlike Columbia, NYU’s guidelines warn students that speech critical of Zionism could be in direct conflict with its updated anti-discrimination policy. The move has gotten cheers from pro-Jewish groups but received brutal backlash from other student groups and some faculty.
University of Maryland’s mixed messages
It was a bit murkier at the University of Maryland at College Park.
President Darryll Pines sent a message in late August stating, “Freedom of thought and expression are the lifeblood of our academic community, and we believe there is no better place to exchange ideas than on a university campus.”
In a follow-up a couple of weeks later, he said that “out of an abundance of caution,” he would ban all demonstrations on Oct. 7 other than the university’s own events that “promote reflection on this day.”
Unsatisfied with the university’s reversal, Students for Justice in Palestine, along with Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, sued the school, arguing that it had violated the student group’s First Amendment rights.
They said the university censored them after pro-Israel groups complained and that Pines justified the decision by citing a vague safety concern.
U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte sided with the students, and the event, which the school sought to cancel, drew in hundreds of people on Monday.
Messitte added in his ruling that the university had other options besides canceling the event, including employing extra security, installing metal detectors, and checking student IDs.
Campus crackdowns
Campuses across the country have also been uneven in how to address demonstrations, with varying degrees of success and pushback.
Rutgers University in New Jersey issued a one-year suspension for the New Brunswick chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. This is the second time the university has put its chapter on suspension. This time, the suspension will last for the entire academic year. It will not be lifted until next summer, July 2025.
Students for Justice in Palestine cannot hold meetings, protests, or marches on campus, the university said. Rutgers said it did this because the Palestinian solidarity group violated the terms of its probation, but it has yet to state what the violation was publicly. The organization said it is being unfairly targeted and that it would not abide by the suspension.
The university also announced a series of policies, including a ban on encampments, such as the one that popped up on its campus for four days in the spring. Students will also need to obtain a permit from the school if they want to protest in the future.
At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, students must also receive approval from the administration before they can protest. It’s a little more hardcore at Indiana University, where students are forbidden from engaging in “expressive activity” between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
At Northwestern University, about 100 students staged a walkout on Monday, violating several of the school’s new policies on organizing, which include gathering at the “Rock,” a boulder on campus that has been the focal point for student activism for years. New school rules prohibit gathering at the Rock before 3 p.m., as well as using “amplified sound” before 5 p.m.
“Northwestern has already begun an investigation to determine the identities of those who violated policies,” university spokesman Jon Yates told the Daily. “As the individuals are identified, they will receive disciplinary notification from the university.”
Newsom signs a law, but students still stage walkouts
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed a law late last month that would require public universities to update their codes of conduct and train students on how to “protest with civility.”
Universities will also have to add mandatory anti-discrimination training for students.
“We know that tensions are high following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas,” the bill’s author, Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer, told reporters earlier this year. “Even in these difficult circumstances, all students should be able to freely express themselves without threat or intimidation, especially on college campuses.”
Newsom’s law didn’t prevent protesters from showing up to campuses across the state to have their voices heard.
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters were seen marching on the campus of UCLA Monday evening, beating on drums and chanting, “Free Palestine.”
State of campus protests in the future
It doesn’t seem as though there is a huge consensus in the future, but some in the education industry have thoughts on how to do that.
Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, told Inside Higher Ed that universities need “liberation in this facetious moment.”
“We need liberation from the political pressures to ‘crack down’ on student protests. We need liberation from the fear that someone will say or do something offensive; the offensive word or act will surely occur, more than once, and that is where true teaching and learning begins. Whether the topics be genocide or antisemitism, terrorism, the oppression of Palestinians, or the disgraceful history of racial injustice in the United States, universities must be unafraid and unapologetic in teaching the truth, undaunted by any politicians or pundits or donors who want to suppress the right and freedom of the university to teach what it chooses, as it must.”
Benjamin Ginsberg, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, was more brutal on the universities.
“The events of the past year shed a harsh light on university governance and revealed to the general public something college faculty have long known: Some of America’s great universities are not led by the best and brightest,” he said. “The testimony presented to Congress by the three stooges (the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT) who could not decide whether calls for the genocide of the Jews violated their institutions’ speech codes was shocking to most Americans. The nation expects some measure of moral leadership and intellectual clarity from the presidents of elite universities. We saw, instead, cowardice and witlessness. The way forward is a larger role in college governance for other campus stakeholders, including faculty, alumni and trustees.”
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Brett Sokolow, chairman of the board of the Association of Title IX Administrators, believes the campus clashes “raise important questions about competing values and the balance between free speech and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that are yet to be reconciled.”
“If colleges are faced with an existential choice about whether to be forums for public debate or forums for academic exploration, they have to choose academic exploration. Otherwise, they cease to be colleges. Many colleges have now recentered their positions and missions to encourage speech and protest, but only to the extent that it does not threaten the educational mission. The threshold for what is acceptable has been recalibrated. As we head into 2025 and beyond, there will be tolerance for free speech and protest — but not of foment, unrest, vandalism and violence. Protests must fit within, not supplant, those mission-centric functions, and many campuses learned this lesson the hard way,” he said.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
