Hundreds of US students returning to college this fall will be focused on navigating academic suspensions and criminal charges instead of choosing their classes and decorating dorm rooms, following last semester’s Gaza solidarity encampment protests that swept campuses.
More than 3,000 students were arrested when tent protests and occupations from coast to coast, at public and private universities, were broken up by police. Many still face consequences from both their universities and the legal system.
Craig Birckhead-Morton, a recent Yale graduate and incoming Columbia graduate student, has been traveling between his new home in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, to face criminal proceedings in superior court.
“I was able to get through the whole disciplinary process all right, so there are no disciplinary charges left or anything in terms of academic [punishments]. It’s just the legal charges, which we’re still having an issue with,” Birckhead-Morton, 21, said of fellow students and himself.
Months of US protests, since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on southern Israel and Israel’s devastating and ongoing retaliation in Gaza, evolved into spring encampments when Columbia University students pitched tents on the Ivy League school’s main lawn in New York City and then occupied a building.
This action and many others were met with police crackdowns, some violent, against scenes of campus dissent not seen since the Vietnam war.
Meanwhile, some university administrations have taken additional steps to handle the volume of disciplinary cases, such as hiring outside consultants and implementing new policies in an attempt to prevent protests of the same scale.
Despite this, activists are planning a fresh wave of pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges this fall. Action is expected to be boosted by “summer school” online lessons over the break, created by student protest leaders to offer education and training on how to organize, with the aim of creating a more unified and better-prepared mass demonstration movement.
Birckhead-Morton said he remained determined to keep advocating for divestment.
“Obviously we want the charges to go away, but our movement, our organizing, our action around this issue isn’t going to go away, and we’re going to keep pushing against these institutions,” he said.
Columbia students who declined to share their names publicly, for fear of doxxing and retaliation, said that while their charges had been dropped by Manhattan prosecutors, they were still dealing with university administration disciplinary proceedings.
One student said she was being investigated by Grand River Solutions, a third-party higher education consultancy group based in Saratoga, California, brought in to conduct investigatory interviews via Zoom with protesters.
“We’re in limbo for the most part. The university has chosen to waste time and money this summer doubling down on their efforts to be a world-renowned ‘cop university’,” she said, referring to multiple instances of New York police being called on to campus and arresting students en masse. Grand River Solutions did not respond to a request for comment.
A list of punitive actions Columbia’s leadership took under Minouche Shafik, the recently departed president, against student protesters, shared by the university with the congressional education and workforce committee in the Republican-controlled House, has been made public.
It reveals that most student protesters are currently listed as being in good standing with their institutions, meaning they can continue their educations, even though they may have received disciplinary probations or suspensions. Many investigations are ongoing.
“In the interim, we’ve been told until our case is resolved, if we are caught doing anything else against the rules, it will result in worse sanctions,” the student said.
The House committee has complained that schools are not doing enough to punish protesters and prevent alleged “antisemitic harassment, disruption, and violence”.
In a statement, the committee said: “We have been concerned to see empty discipline and a lack of enforcement, signified by the fact that many who were arrested on July 24th in Washington, DC, and across college campuses during the academic year, were released and saw charges dismissed.” July 24 refers to protests against the speech by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Congress.
The committee predicted: “These disruptions are likely to return to campuses this fall and you must be prepared to act.”
At Princeton University, in New Jersey, 13 student protesters were arrested for occupying Clio Hall in late April.
Ariel, a Jewish graduate student and protester, who declined to share their last name publicly, said they were told to leave campus housing immediately, and lost access to the dining plan they had paid for.
“They gave me about five minutes to pack up my stuff,” they said.
Ariel and others were accused of violating student regulation 2.2.5, which is “disorderly and disrespectful conduct”.
Months later, he’s been allowed back on campus but remains on probation for four years.
While Ariel has been able to return to school conditionally, they remain anxious about separate proceedings in the criminal justice system. For those who have already graduated and face the same charges, it will be even more stressful, as many, like Birckhead-Morton, may have to travel back to their undergraduate college towns to appear before a judge.
Zia Mian, a Princeton faculty member who is also the school’s co-director of the program on science and global security, said: “It’s no surprise that institutions have become more repressive.
“When you look back at the last more than 100 years of broad-based, deep, fundamental social movements, whether it was the rights of women, whether it was to bring about equality for people of color or Indigenous peoples or LGBTQ people, all of them ended up with people being arrested. All of them ended up with people being beaten,” he added.
Mian had himself protested in support of Palestinians and held a vigil for “victims of Israeli aggression” back when he was a postdoctoral researcher at the school during troubles in 2000.
Now, he advocates for schools to de-escalate protests and have negotiations with student protesters to reach compromise agreements, such as those struck by Brown University or Rutgers University.
“It doesn’t have to be like this. And this is the key thing, that we saw universities with leaderships that said: ‘We can talk to our students about this. We can try and find a way to have these issues work through collectively.’”
Rutgers, Brown and the University of Minnesota are among the few schools that reached agreements with students in May to peacefully dismantle their Gaza solidarity encampment protests and potentially hold conversations about divestment.
But while the Corporation of Brown University agreed to hold a vote on a divestment measure in October, Princeton’s board of trustees have yet to sit down with student protesters to discuss divestment.
Meanwhile, as the new academic year begins at the University of California, Los Angeles, “students are also getting organized to spread education about divestment”, said Marie Salem, a PhD student and media liaison for a pro-Palestinian student protest coalition there.
But student efforts to protest against the war in Gaza may be hamstrung by legal and academic disciplinary charges still hanging over more than 200 students arrested when police cleared UCLA’s encampment in May. The majority of those arrests were on misdemeanor charges, which the Los Angeles city attorney’s office handles. A spokesperson for the office said that it had received five referrals on those cases. There is a one-year period in which charges can be filed.
The county district attorney’s office, which handles felony charges, did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but told the Los Angeles Times in August that all UCLA cases “are currently under review”. At least 55 students who were arrested in May also received letters from the university threatening to place a hold on their academic records or withhold their degrees.
“These legal efforts of repression of specifically our movement set really dangerous precedents for the future,” said Agnes, a recent UCLA graduate and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, who preferred to use only her first name.
Members of UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine spent the summer connecting students with legal aid and supporting them as they made their first appearances in court, said Graeme Blair, a UCLA political science professor and member of the group.
Last spring, in spite of faculty and legal observers confirming the encampment protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, many more colleges across the US – including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia – entered the national spotlight when university deans called university, local and state law enforcement on their own students, resulting in violent clashes and the arrests of students and faculty as encampments were torn down.
The student encampment protest at the main campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, for example, was disassembled within two hours of it starting on 29 April. UGA police and the Georgia state patrol descended and forcefully removed or arrested protesters.
Some protesters spent just over a day in Athens-Clarke county jail, and despite being on the main lawn of a public university, they were criminally charged with trespassing.
But for the nine students arrested, a deal was eventually made with a local prosecutor to drop charges in lieu of 40 hours of community service and a small fine, pending no further arrests. However, the arrested students have been suspended by UGA until January 2025 and barred from campus.
Students said some of those arrested at UGA had scholarships and summer fellowships rescinded as a result.
Zeena Mohamed, 22, was supposed to graduate this December, but owing to her suspension she was prohibited from taking any classes during the summer or this fall, and must postpone finishing her degree. As for last year’s classes, she was given the assessment “incomplete” in all of her classes with just weeks left in the semester.
She said she doesn’t know if she’ll get credit for those classes and whether or not the tuition fees she paid have been wasted.
When asked whether protesting was worth it, Mohamed said: “Yes, definitely”, adding that being suspended “sucks”.
“But what we did on April 29 that yielded all of this suffering for me obviously is not even a fraction of what people in Gaza are going through,” she said. “My parents have raised me to question these narratives and know that a lot of the times, America has not been very gracious to people like us, and that it is up to people who are not in these high positions to speak up on their behalf.”
Austin Kral, 24, who was arrested alongside Mohamed, was “basically evicted” from his on-campus housing after getting arrested at the UGA encampment protest. Since he isn’t allowed on campus, he also cannot take a class he needs for his mathematics degree since it is only offered in the fall, so he is no longer pursuing that major.
Still, Kral insisted that protest was a catalyst for change.
“I think that this conversation we have that voting is the way to express your voice, and every other means is inappropriate, is just kind of superficial and morally shallow,” Kral said. “I think if you’re disrupting with the goal of halting a genocide, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to act as if disruption is a moral wrong.”
Kral added: “I think the university has had some success in chilling student organizing, but I also think that there are people who see the need, this semester in particular, to determine whether or not the university feels like repression is going to be successful long term. I think it’s kind of on the students now, to show them that their bullshit doesn’t work.”
Cecilia Nowell contributed reporting
