As more pro-Palestine protests emerge on university campuses in the months since Israel first began its military assault on Gaza, university administration crackdowns against student organizers have also increased. On college campuses, pro-Palestine supporters have been subjected to threats of expulsion, silencing tactics, arrests, online harassment, and physical assault.
On Feb. 23, 18 student organizers were arrested at Stanford University during a demonstration. The students were affiliated with the Sit-in to Stop Genocide (SITSG), a grassroots student-led campaign that saw campus organizers occupy Stanford’s central plaza 24/7 for 120 days since Israel’s siege of Gaza intensified in October.
“[The sit-in] has always been about making sure that business cannot continue as usual,” said Farah Tantawy, a SITSG student organizer. “Making sure that on the most populated part of campus, everybody who stops by will be forced to be reminded of the genocide that is hurting Palestinians in Gaza.” Despite being the site of student dissent, the sit-in camp had largely transformed into a public community space through teach-in sessions, movie screenings, and communal dinners organized by students, Tantawy said.
Organizers ended SITSG’s overnight camps on Feb. 16 on the condition that President Richard Saller would bring the group’s demands in front of the Board of Trustees: investment transparency, divesting from weapons and military contractors, and adding student seats to the university’s Special Committee on Investment Responsibility. Weeks prior, the university had banned overnight encampments at the sit-in site, warning students who violated the policy would face “disciplinary referral to the Office of Community Standards” and be cited for trespassing. According to student organizers, prior to the ban, university officials had threatened students with disciplinary and legal action in an attempt to remove organizers from the plaza.
Despite the deal reached between organizers and the administration, Stanford officials did not provide students with a clear timeline as to when the president would meet with the board to bring forth the students’ demands, according to Tantawy. More than a dozen SITSG organizers were detained by officials from the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office after disrupting a forum event attended by parents and Stanford leadership. The students were charged with misdemeanors and given court appearance dates for April, the Stanford Daily reported.
“It’s very obvious that for pro-Palestinian student organizers, we have never been the priority,” said Tantawy of Stanford’s handling of student protests on campus. “And quite honestly, I feel ashamed to attend this university.”
Hamza El Boudali, a Stanford graduate student and an organizer of the Sit-in to Stop Islamophobia campaign—a separate entity from the Sit-in to Stop Genocide—gave the administration some credit but largely echoed Tantawy’s sentiments.
“The one good thing is that [Stanford has] done a better job of protecting free speech than other schools like Columbia and Harvard. No students have been punished for saying intifada, from the river to the sea, etc.,” El Boudali wrote in an email to Prism. “But they’ve still been more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine in their public statements.” When asked about the administration’s dealings with SITSG organizers, a Stanford spokesperson referred Prism to the university affairs updates on its website.
Crackdowns at Stanford are a small sampling of punitive actions commonly deployed against pro-Palestine organizers on college campuses across the U.S. Protesters at institutions such as Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Texas Austin, Brown University, Dartmouth College, and others continue to face disciplinary sanctions, silencing, harassment, legal charges, as well as police intimidation and violence for their advocacy and support of Palestinian liberation.
“All they have done is allow us to build a coalition of people … willing to step up and take the reins and create change because the institutions they are part of refuse to let that change happen,” Tantawy said.
Whispers of University of Michigan students facing felony charges
On the other side of the country, student organizers at the University of Michigan (UM) have also clashed with university administrators, resulting in student arrests. During a Nov. 17 on-campus protest, about 40 students were arrested after hundreds of demonstrators marched to the office of UM President Santa Ono located inside the school’s Ruthven administration building. The student protesters were advocating for the university to divest its nearly $18 billion endowment from financial holdings with Israeli companies and weapons manufacturers.
When students refused to leave the office unless they were granted a meeting with the president, university administrators requested security enforcement from 10 nearby agencies. The students are now banned from the building for one year. One student who was arrested told Prism that her group recently learned that felony charges had been requested, though none have officially been filed.
A press release published on the Graduate Employees’ Organization AFT Local 3550 website stated that police officers present during the protest, which morphed into an hours-long sit-in, denied students water and access to bathroom facilities. At least one student suffered injuries after she was bodyslammed by officers, resulting in her hijab being ripped off her head, and another student fainted due to dehydration, according to the press release. Forty students were arrested that night with at least two other student protesters arrested in the weeks after, according to Tarana Sharma, a student organizer with Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), UM’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. She added that her group discovered arrest warrant requests for dozens of other students involved in the protest were made after the night of the protest.
“Any sort of student organizing that calls out the university’s financial investments especially is met with violent repression, usually at the hands of the police,” said Sharma, who also serves as advocacy chair of the student-led United Asian American Organizations (UAAO). “The university is opting to try and scare students away from organizing and from calling out investments in a settler-colonial state.”
SAFE and UAAO are both part of the TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led movement representing more than 80 organizations at UM. The coalition is currently advocating for the school’s divestment from Israel and the U.S. military-industrial complex and reinvesting funds back into the university’s community. In late November, a few weeks after the campus arrests, university officials canceled a campus-wide vote where students were expected to vote on two separate resolutions related to Israel’s war on Gaza. The administration accused TAHRIR organizers of illegally influencing the campus vote via a mass email that had advocated for students to vote in line with the coalition’s positions on each of the resolutions (the coalition officially supported one resolution but not the other).
“That communication irreparably tainted the voting process on the two resolutions,” Vice President and General Counsel Timothy G. Lynch wrote in a Nov. 30 email.
Mass emails to the student body can only be sent out upon approval from multiple university offices, which meant the allegedly violating email could not have been sent without the university’s knowledge, Sharma told Prism. A spokesperson later told UM’s student newspaper that the vote was canceled after a UM staff member had approved the mass email “without proper authorization.”
Two Muslim female students associated with TAHRIR were accused of sending out the mass email and of illegally accessing students’ email information to do so. The students received targeted harassment, including by a pro-Israel website that shared the students’ names and suggested that they be expelled on social media (the post has since been deleted). It was later revealed that Jewish allies with the university’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, a member of the TAHRIR Coalition, had authored the mass email to garner wider support. After the harassment of the two Muslim students was reported, Sharma said the university’s response was slow and inadequate.
A spokesperson for the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office, which is reviewing the UM student arrests, said that no charging decisions have been made and declined to comment further on the pending cases. University officials said student protesters on Nov. 17 were arrested for trespassing and confirmed two additional arrests were made later, with both students released pending warrant authorization.
Regarding calls for divestment, the university responded: “Our longstanding policy is to shield the endowment from political pressures and to base our investment decisions solely on financial factors such as risk and return. Much of the money invested through the university’s endowment is donor funding given to provide long-term financial support for designated purposes.”
