Wearing riot helmets and zip ties, Boston police officers moved in one day this week and surrounded a group of pro-Palestinian protesters on a lawn on the Northeastern University campus. Six police vans were idling nearby and one officer had issued a terse warning. Mass arrests seemed imminent.
Then, without explanation, the riot police packed up and left.
The sudden end to the standoff sparked cheers from protesters and confusion from those bracing for chaos. In recent days, police have rushed to disperse student encampments at the University of Southern California, Emerson College in Boston and Ohio State University. At Emory University in Atlanta, police used pepper balls and pinned protesters to the ground, ultimately arresting 28 people.
On fields and lawns from coast to coast, universities are grappling with a wave of student activism in the face of the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Administrators must make controversial decisions about whether to call in the police and are often criticized regardless of which route they take.
“They don’t seem to have a clear strategy,” said Jennie Stephens, a professor at Northeastern who attended the protest in support of the students. “I think there’s this tendency to sort of control what happens on campus, but then that’s counterbalanced by the optics — or the violence, or the actual harm — to students, to faculty, to personnel or other persons in the event of arrests.”
On Thursday at Northeastern, where about 100 protesters had locked arms in a circle around a half-dozen tents on a lawn known as Centennial Common, it was unclear who was directing the police response.
The dean of students and university police had warned the protesters that they would be considered trespassers if they did not produce student IDs. The dean then went around the circle to ask the students for the cards; some showed them, but many did not.
A university spokeswoman, Renata Nyul, said in an email that Boston police ultimately made the decision to let their officers leave without making arrests.
Then, around dawn Saturday morning, Massachusetts State Police officers arrived and eventually began arresting protesters. Ms Nyul said the protest had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and that someone at the protest had said “kill the Jews” the night before, which protesters denied.
Another university official, Michael Armini, said at the scene that the school made the decision to arrest the protesters and that the university police force requested assistance from the state police. As the sun rose Saturday, police handcuffed protesters and dismantled several tents.
It was the second early morning arrest of protesters on a Boston campus in less than a week. Early Thursday, city police stormed a student encampment in an alley at Emerson, a small private college downtown, tearing down tents and throwing out students — who had formed a barricade and refused to leave – ashore.
Police arrested 118 people there, angering some students who said the university had failed to protect them. But city officials defended the operation, saying it was necessary to clear the alley, which includes a public right of way.
“The issue was just about the fire hazards created by the tents, and the public health and safety hazards that also occurred there,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said. told WCVB-TV.
Pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses have grown rapidly since Columbia University students launched theirs this month. They have sometimes aroused the anger of students and professors who complain about what they consider to be anti-Semitic chants and the lack of security for Jewish students, and, off campus, supporters of the Israeli military operation in Gaza.
So far, more than 34,000 Palestinians have died in Israeli bombings and the invasion of Gaza, in response to an attack by Hamas on October 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 250 people taken hostage.
In Columbia, where the president was already under fire From Republicans in Congress, the administration initially took an aggressive approach, calling in the New York police, who arrested more than 100 people and removed tents. But the students quickly returned, pitching new tents and vowing to stay.
This time, rather than calling the police again, the Colombian authorities are negotiating with the demonstrators.
“We once asked the NYPD to clear an encampment, but we all share the view, based on discussions within our community and with outside experts, that bringing the NYPD back at this time would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus and bringing thousands of people to our door who would threaten our community,” Columbia leaders said in a campus message Friday evening. “That said, we must also continue to. enforce our own rules and ensure that those who violate our community standards face consequences.”
But at Emory, where police arrested students and faculty Thursday, the university’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, said categorically afterward that the institution “would not tolerate vandalism, violence or any attempt to disrupt our campus by building camps. »
Harvard tried a different approach. The university restricted access to its historic Harvard Yard, allowing entry only to those who presented a university ID, and suspended a pro-Palestinian group, saying that he had held an unauthorized demonstration.
But the group and its supporters nevertheless set up camp in the courtyard. Wednesday evening, the atmosphere was calm, with a few campus police officers sitting in cars near the courtyard and students passing through. Still, the university has faced criticism from some prominent alumni, including its former president, Lawrence H. Summers, who said allowing the tents to remain standing was a “profound failure.”
Like Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin sought to prevent the students’ planned encampment, warning that it was unauthorized, and students gathered anyway. Unlike Harvard, administrators responded forcefully. Dozens of police officers, many in riot gear or on horseback, rode through crowds of protesters Wednesday to block the campus’s main lawn, ultimately incarcerating 57 people in the county jail.
But by evening, almost all the national and local police had disappeared. The students quickly returned and gathered with picnic blankets before heading out for the night.
Jay Hartzell, the university’s president, said in a statement that administrators prevented the planned protest out of fear that students would try to “follow a pattern” and “severely disrupt a campus for an extended period of time.” In messages obtained through a public information request, Mr. Hartzell told a lawmaker that he sought help from the state police because the school police “could not not do it alone.”
By Friday evening, around 300 of the university’s 3,000 professors had signed an agreement open letter of censorship at Mr. Hartzell’s. “President Hartzell has needlessly put students, staff, and faculty at risk. Dozens of students were arrested for peacefully gathering on their own campus,” the statement said.
Another protest was planned at the university on Thursday, but the scene was much calmer, with university administrators handing out flyers with protest rules. An administrator told students that police assured her they would not arrest students unless they tried to set up tents or stayed after 10 p.m.
Kathy Zoner, who was police chief at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., for nearly a decade until 2019, said university administrators often hoped to avoid liability in police response to protests, but that they themselves often made the final decision about what happened. TO DO.
She said protesters coming from outside the university can be difficult to deal with because they cannot be threatened with academic consequences and may be more geared toward agitation than dialogue. Recent tent encampments can pose a particular problem for administrators focused on school optics, Ms. Zoner said.
“That’s the big concern, isn’t it? That these encampments will be there forever, whatever that means, and that it will become a reason for people not to choose your university or college to attend,” she said. “And be realistic: Colleges are businesses. Nonprofit or for-profit, it’s a business. They have a bottom line and need to pay attention to it.
This is just one of the problems administrators face in a crisis. Daniel W. Jones, former chancellor of the University of Mississippi, said students, faculty members, elected officials, parents and donors all offer often very different advice on how the university should respond .
“I think the biggest tension is, am I going to act in the best interest of the students on my campus, or in the best interest of my board of trustees, politically interested people and alumni in general? he said.
Nicholas B. Dirks, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, said there are few decisions more difficult for a university leader than whether to summon the police, in part because outside agents Law enforcement officers may use very different tactics than a campus police force.
“University presidents are supposed to have total power and control, so by bringing in an external police force, you know the first thing that’s going to happen is you lose control of the situation,” said Dr. Dirks, who was a senior administrator at Columbia. before taking charge of Berkeley in 2013.
At Berkeley, he said, he had been extremely reluctant to call police officers off campus, except when there appeared to be credible threats of violence.
“You’re in a kind of crisis situation, so you’re balancing partial, still incomplete information with a kind of temporal emergency where you really feel like you have to make very, very quick decisions, and it’s not the best time to take. clear calls,” said Dr. Dirks.
“These are decisions that have been criticized,” he added.
The report was provided by Karla Marie Sanford And Eryn Davis from New York, Matthew Eadie from Boston and Sean Keenan from Atlanta.
