Students protesting the war are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.
Encampments and protests continued to spring up on Thursday. A tent encampment popped up at Indiana University Bloomington before police with shields and batons shoved into a line of protesters, arresting an unknown number.
At the City College of New York, hundreds of students who were gathered on the lawn beneath the Harlem campus’ famed gothic buildings erupted in cheers after a small contingent of police officers retreated from the scene. In one corner of the quad, a “security training” was held among students who said they expected to be arrested in the coming hours.
At Emerson College in Boston, 108 people were arrested overnight at an alleyway encampment. Video shows police first warning students there to leave. Students link arms to resist officers, who move forcefully through the crowd and throw some protesters to the ground.
Boston police said four officers suffered injuries that were not life-threatening during the confrontation.
“As the night progressed, it got tenser and tenser. There were just more cops on all sides. It felt like we were being slowly pushed in and crushed,” said Ocean Muir, a sophomore.
“For me, the scariest moment was holding these umbrellas out in case we were tear-gassed, and hearing them come, and hearing their boots on the ground, just pounding into the ground louder than we could chant, and not being able to see a single person,” she said.
Muir said police lifted her by her arms and legs and carried her away. Along with other students, Muir was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct on Thursday.
Emerson College leaders warned students that the alley was a public right-of-way and that city authorities had threatened to take action if the protesters didn’t leave. The school canceled classes on Thursday.
The University of Texas at Austin campus was much calmer Thursday after 57 people were jailed and charged with criminal trespass a day earlier. University officials pulled back barricades and allowed demonstrators onto the main square beneath the school’s iconic clock tower.
On Thursday, students and some faculty protested both the war and Wednesday’s arrests, when state troopers in riot gear and on horseback plowed into protesters, forcing hundreds of students off the school’s main lawn.
At Emory University in Atlanta, local and state police swept in to dismantle a camp, although the university said the protesters weren’t students but rather outside activists. Some officers carried semiautomatic weapons, and video shows officers using a stun gun on one protester who they had pinned to the ground.
Jail records showed 22 people arrested by university police were charged with disorderly conduct.
Protesters at Emory chanted slogans supporting Palestinians and opposing a public safety training center being built in Atlanta. The two movements are closely entwined in Atlanta, where activists have for years waged a “Stop Cop City” campaign against the facility.
Many colleges, including Harvard University, chose not to take immediate action against protesters who had set up tents, even though they were openly defying campus rules. And some colleges were making new rules, like Northwestern University, which hastily changed its student code of conduct on Thursday morning to bar tents on its suburban Chicago campus.
George Washington University said it would move its law school finals from a building next to the protest encampment to a new location because of the noise.
The current wave of protests was inspired by events at Columbia University in New York, where police cleared an encampment and arrested more than 100 people last week, only for students to defiantly put up tents again in an area where many are set to graduate in front of families in a few weeks.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the ability to embrace student voices and different perspectives was a hallmark of the nation’s growth but warned that authorities wouldn’t tolerate hate, discrimination or threats of violence.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began more than six months ago, the U.S. Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of universities and schools in response to complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Among those under investigation are many colleges facing protests, including Harvard and Columbia.
