The University of Chicago has used police to clear an encampment of students protesting on behalf of Palestinian civilians, as US institutions grow increasingly comfortable relying on armed forces to satisfy congressional demands that they silence political dissent.
Chicago acted one day after similar moves by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego, falling in line with numerous other prominent institutions – notably Columbia University, Emory University and the University of Southern California – that had initially showed tolerance for the mostly peaceful outbreak of nationwide student protests.
The Biden administration also gave new signals of its reluctance to challenge Republican arguments that US higher education – as it struggles to find its footing on student free-speech limits – has become consumed by unacceptably hateful speech that overwhelming involves antisemitism. At a ceremony to mark the annual Holocaust Days of Remembrance at the US Capitol, president Joe Biden condemned the US campus protests as involving “too many people denying, downplaying, rationalising, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and 7 October, including Hamas’ appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorise Jews”.
“It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop,” Mr Biden said.
At the same time and a short distance away in the Capitol complex, his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, fielded Republican complaints about the campus protests less by defending the fundamental free speech rights of students and more by arguing that his administration was aggressively investigating colleges and universities that might be failing to prevent public rhetoric that Jewish students could regard as offensive.
To that end, Dr Cardona said the Department of Education now has 145 ongoing investigations into alleged discriminatory behaviour on US campuses – most opened after the October attack by Palestinian militants on Israel – and he told Republicans that he could pursue penalties against such institutions more quickly if lawmakers better funded the work.
But during the hearing of the House education committee that stretched on for several hours, Mr Cardona did offer one pointed moment of pushback against the persistent Republican complaints about student protests, saying that he came to Capitol Hill to discuss his department’s annual budget request, “not to create a spectacle for the benefit of the media, or to provoke divisions that inflame culture wars and political sideshows but do nothing to help our young people succeed”.
Limited US campus demonstrations over Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians exploded in size and intensity after Columbia’s president was called before the same House committee last month and accused of tolerating antisemitic sentiment on her campus, and responded by authorising New York City police to arrest protesting students. That decision has now led to more than 2,500 arrests across more than 50 campuses.
The tensions and dangers surrounding the protests – and the chorus of calls from leading Republicans for ever-fiercer crackdowns against them – have been amplified by significant numbers of non-student participants, including some on the pro-Israel side with high-level ties to Donald Trump and his allies involved in the January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
In one of the most violent such examples, last week at the University of California, Los Angeles, police were observed standing by while pro-Israel activists attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The president of the University of California system, Michael Drake, has now ordered an outside investigation of the matter led by Charles Ramsey, an expert on police reform who previously headed the police departments in Philadelphia and Washington. UCLA investigators also are using advanced video technology to try to identify the attackers.
At the University of Chicago, campus and city police officers, some dressed in riot gear, made an overnight raid to clear out the campus’ pro-Palestinian encampment. Students were not arrested but were told they have been placed on emergency interim leave of absence from the university, meaning they are indefinitely barred from their campus and their housing. MIT and others have ordered similar repercussions.
“The university remains a place where dissenting voices have many avenues to express themselves,” Chicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos, said in a message to the campus community explaining his action. “But we cannot enable an environment where the expression of some dominates and disrupts the healthy functioning of the community for the rest.”
