What Have We Learned From a Season of Campus Protests?

Colleges and universities are lurching toward summer; campus protests have ebbed since an incendiary climax earlier in late April, but encampments and tensions remain in place and unresolved on many campuses. 

As the spring semester draws to a close and institutions prepare for commencement, questions remain: Will protests flare up during graduation ceremonies? Will they resume in the fall? And what lessons can administrations glean from these past, tense months that can prepare them for the future?

The resolutions to these student protests against the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza have generally fallen into two camps: confrontation and negotiation.

Negotiations failed to resolve rising tensions at Columbia University before those tensions boiled over; on April 30 a group of protestors on the campus broke into a hall, barricaded themselves inside and occupied it throughout the day. 

“This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the university to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level,” Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement the following day. She added that such actions made many students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, particularly because of antisemetic comments made by some individuals. The protestors who stormed the hall were removed by riot police, and many were arrested. 

Similar clashes broke encampments on other campuses, but some protests were resolved through successful negotiations, including at Brown University, where the Brown Divest Coalition and the university reached an agreement. Students agreed to end their encampment in return for formal meetings between student leaders and members of the Corporation of Brown University and Brown’s president and a vote next fall on divestment at a corporation meeting. The agreement also stipulated that the students charged with disruptions that violated the conduct codes will not be subject to suspension or expulsion, provided they abide by the agreement.

The escalating activism prompted President Joe Biden to make a May 2 speech in which he said, “Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.”

Power Balances at Play

Addressing calls for divestment is tricky, Scott Willyerd, managing partner at strategic consulting firm RW Jones Agency, said. “In general, many folks don’t understand how endowments work. They think it’s a pot of money, which is essentially a slush fund, and it’s not true. We need to teach people about endowments, and they need to understand what it is, what it isn’t, how things are invested.”

Lara Schwartz, senior professional lecturer in the Department of Government and director of the Project on Civil Dialogue at American University, cautioned that institutions shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that students often engage in protests because their access to the levers of power is fundamentally different from that of faculty and administrators. 

“If you’re the president of the university and you want to communicate with everybody, you can do an all-everybody email. You have so much power to communicate,” she said. “If we’re trying to understand students, the first thing we should do when looking at the conduct they choose in deciding how to communicate their desires and demands is to consider what’s available to them. Walkouts, encampments and marches are all things that you don’t see faculty doing because they don’t have to.”

She added that encampments didn’t immediately spring up following the start of the war, but did so because of the tightening of speech by institutions like Barnard College, which announced in February it was banning personal dormitory door decorations. In explaining the move, Leslie Grinage, dean and vice president for campus life, said that the decorations “may have the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs.”

Peril for Presidents

Most institutions have gone through processes to ready themselves to handle disruptions like the ones that are ongoing, explained Mary Papazian, executive vice president at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and former president of San Jose State University and Southern Connecticut State University. Institutions should be looking at their policies on free speech, social media, student and faculty codes of conduct and use of force, as well as time, place and manner restrictions for protests, as they react to events on campus, she said. 

In responding to protests and strife, Willyerd advises presidents to remember that their institutions are built for these moments. 

“In a free society, we want an open debate. Universities are arenas for debate and discussion. Actively listen to what they have to say and be open to a conversation,” he said. 

Presidents should also be as transparent as possible, Papazian said. 

“It’s really on the president to be clear about what the decision is, but also why the decision was made in the way that it was,” she said, pointing to decisions institutions such as Columbia have made to have school-level ceremonies instead of a university-wide ceremony. “It’s on the president to be clear, to lead by the moral values that they hold, to lead by the values of the institution, to align their response with the mission of the institution, with their understanding of the culture of the institution and its own history and its own community.”

Willyerd also urges leaders to acknowledge that their actions will not make everyone happy but to endure. 

“They don’t want to get pushed around. Institutions want to project the fact that they have it under control, but that can backfire when institutions try to project more institutional control on things,” he said. “There are no fast actions on things unless there are safety concerns and the rule of law is being violated. We need to allow students, faculty and members of the community to have their voices heard.”

Based on her time as a president, Papazian agreed that there are no easy fixes. 

“This is a very complex issue. Presidents in particular have to take into account a great deal of complexity. They’re weighing very divergent points of view,” she said. “It’s important to recognize that it’s easy to judge, but it’s a really hard role to play and to navigate, particularly when so much has been politicized.”

Free Speech Concerns 

The American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have been urging institutions to protect free speech in the face of the ongoing events. In an April 26 statement, the ACLU said, “As you fashion responses to the activism of your students (and faculty and staff), it is essential that you not sacrifice principles of academic freedom and free speech that are core to the educational mission of your respected institution.” 

Kristen Shahvedrian, program director of campus free speech at PEN America, is encouraging institutions to approach protests through as much dialogue and de-escalation as possible instead of bringing in police when time, place and manner restrictions are violated during otherwise peaceful protests. 

“Engaging with the police to deal with peaceful protests really represents an escalation that not only can impede the safety of everyone but also impedes free expression and the role of higher ed as a learning environment,” said Shahvedrian. 

The protests have not been handled in line with the approach Schwartz expected from institutions interested in listening to their students.

“The reaction that several college administrators have done in calling armed riot police on students who are essentially encamped to request divestment resolutions or other changes to university governance is a more extreme and violent reaction than has been applied to gatherings of white supremacists who have marched on campuses,” she said. “This is not the way that higher ed or the American public is supposed to be treating protesters.”

Lessons for Higher Ed Leaders

As the spring semester concludes and students leave campus, Shahvedrian thinks more will come to light about why certain campuses have done a better job at negotiations and de-escalation than others. 

“I think one clear lesson is that the immediate use of force, as we saw at Columbia, often was really ineffective in stopping protests and, in fact, escalated the protests generally and broadly,” she said. 

She also hopes institutions will spend time training on the principles of freedom of expression, in addition to when it crosses over and becomes harassment like the antisemitic comments that Shafik detailed. 

“Our hope is that campuses can really learn from this moment to do proactive work moving forward,” she said. “It’s really a sustained effort to build free expression and civil discourse into the fabric of institutions.” 

As a result of the events, Papazian is encouraging governing boards to ask their presidents if they’ve updated their policies recently. 

“Are they aligned not with what was done 40 years ago, but what’s been done in the last three to five years?” she said. She pointed to the fact that the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia prompted the university she was president of at the time to revise its time, place and manner restrictions. 

“We can anticipate that in a very divided world and a very divided political season when we come back in the fall and campuses are fully populated, we’re going to be headed into a crisis,” she said. 

In a May 9 opinion piece that discussed how universities need to engage in serious soul-searching as a result of the protests, Shafik said, “Rather than tearing ourselves apart, universities must rebuild the bonds within ourselves and between society and the academy based on our shared values and on what we do best: education, research, service and public engagement.” To contribute to the common good in a crisis such as the one in the Middle East, she said institutions can teach students about the issues, arranging joint study visits and research programs and enabling conversations that cannot happen in the halls of power.