Agreements with campus protesters: Remarkable or shameful?

Virginia Foxx, the chair of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce, has demanded that Northwestern University (NU) turn over to the committee all documents and communications referring to its agreement with pro-Palestinian protesters by noon on Friday 17 May.

She described the deal as “shameful”.

The agreement, struck on 29 April between NU and Students for Justice for Palestine (NU-SJP), saw protesters take down their encampment on the campus, located in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The NU-SJP’s central demand was that NU divest from companies that do business with Israel and that NU provide a place for continued daily protests.

Similar agreements – between Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) and the Brown Divest Coalition (BDC), Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey) and R-SJP and the University of Minnesota (UM, Minneapolis) and UM-SJP – have resulted in the peaceful dismantling of the encampments.

While no university has agreed to the protesters’ central demands – divestment from companies doing business with Israel and the cutting of academic ties with Israeli institutions – the SJPs and BDC have trumpeted the fact that by even agreeing to put the divestment question before the universities’ governing bodies and investment arms, they have won a major victory.

On Instagram, the NU-SJP wrote that the agreement with NU was “a landmark victory made in our struggle for Palestinian liberation” towards “our ultimate goal: divestment from Israel” (emphasis in the original).

Both Democrats and Republicans were critical of the agreement between Rutgers, New Jersey’s publicly owned state university, and its local SJP.

“Everyone has the right to protest,” Paul Kanitra, a Republican assembly member from Mew Jersey told CBS News. “But what they [the protesters] did was take over public space and block access to certain demographics of our population.”

That SJP-Rutgers was “rewarded by negotiations” was “totally unacceptable”, he said.

While New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, did not overrule Rutgers’ agreement with SJP-Rutger, he also criticised the agreement that requires Rutgers to use the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ in all future communications “related to Israeli aggression in Palestine” (as opposed to ‘Middle East’, ‘Gaza region’, etcetera) and to display the “flags of occupied peoples – including but not limited to Palestinians, Kurds and Kashmiris – in all areas displaying international flags across the Rutgers campuses” of which there are three.

Hobson’s choice

The encampments at these universities were among more than 200 established across the United States, many with support of local chapters of SJP, after the establishment of the first at Columbia University on 17 April.

As was the case at Columbia, protesters at institutions like the University of Texas (Austin), University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Minnesota (UM, Minneapolis), University of Utah (Salt Lake City) or smaller ones like Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) and Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania), demanded that their universities divest from companies doing business with Israel and that Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which Israel invaded on 27 October after Hamas invaded Israel killing 1,200 people and taking almost 250 hostages.

Gazan Health Authority’s figures say more than 35,000 Palestinians having been killed, leading protesters to accuse Israel of perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people.

NU’s agreement was announced on 30 April, a few hours before the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, called on the New York Police Department to clear protesters who had occupied Hamilton Hall and the encampment in the university’s quad.

Since then, police across the country have dismantled encampments at more than 50 universities and colleges and arrested almost 3,000 people. Encampments remain in more than half of America’s 50 states.

In its agreement with NU-SJP, NU committed to allowing daytime protests to continue on Deering Meadow. NU agreed to answer “questions from internal stakeholders about specific [investment] holdings, held currently or within the last quarter” and to establish a “conduit” for students, faculty and staff to engage with the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune on 9 May, NU’s president, Michael Schill, explained the Hobson’s choice he faced: “Risk the physical safety of our students, staff, faculty and police for a result [that is, clearing the campus] that is often unsustainable” (because, as happened elsewhere, protesters could come back) or “reach a mutually satisfactory agreement with the protesters” and be “accused of capitulating to ‘the mob’”.

Protests at NU, like others across the country, have involved blatantly antisemitic incidents. For example, one female Jewish student said she was “told to go back to Germany and get gassed”. Particularly difficult for Schill was the fact that organisations like Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League had called on him to resign for having “capitulated to hatred and bigotry”.

Accordingly, in the third paragraph of his article, Schill wrote: “Being Jewish is core to my identity, and I grew up with a love for Israel, which remains to this day”. He wrote that claims he had “collaborated” with antisemitic people “feel like personal affronts”.

Schill avered that his decision to negotiate with the protesters was rooted in the Jewish “culture of rationality and tolerance” and said it “fits with the core value of universities to engage in dialogue and seek to bridge differences peacefully”.

While Schill says that NU gave a “flat no” to both the demand that NU divest from companies doing business with Israel and to end joint academic programmes with Israel, NU-SJP has put a different interpretation on the agreement.

According to NU-SJP, the agreement amounts to “unprecedented levels of investment transparency” as it binds NU to disclose both direct and indirect investments across all 100 of their money managers. The NU-SJP said it welcomed the salute its victory had received from the BDS movement.

“As the first private university in the nation to make such a commitment, this stride toward dismantling the financial support systems that underpin the injustices we seek to disassemble holds power to create precedent for other institutions … . Organisations such as the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and the Israeli Consulate in Chicago are furious about what we have achieved because it is an important step towards our ultimate goal: divestment from Israel,” the NU-SJP wrote on Instagram on 30 April.

Civil rights complaint

In addition to facing an investigation by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce, NU is the subject of a civil rights complaint filed by the Legal Insurrection Project (LIR), a right-wing legal advocacy group.

According to its 1 May filing with the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, NU violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by agreeing to support visiting Palestinian faculty and students, provide temporary space for the MENA-Muslim (Middle East and North Africa-Muslim) students and renovate a house as a permanent space for them.

The LIR argues that by restricting the scholarships to Palestinians, NU has illegally excluded and discriminated against non-Palestinian students “based on their ethnicity, national origin, and shared ancestry”.

The housing for MENA-Muslim students, LIR argues, “appears to be segregationist in nature”. LIR’s complaint, which has not yet been heard, turns on the fact that since NU receives federal funds (via direct grants and tuition support), it falls under Title VI, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded programmes”.

A balancing act at Minnesota

Under the terms of its agreement with U of M-SJP, UM has already begun making public its investments in companies that do business with Israel.

At a meeting of the university’s board of regents on 9 May, Jasper Nordin, a senior, said: “I don’t believe it’s very radical or idealistic or demanding to say it’s reprehensible to see our tuition money support arms manufacturers and weapons companies.

“I don’t believe that war, violence, apartheid, and turning innocent people into refugees is in line with the University of Minnesota’s stated values and mission, and that you don’t believe that either,” CBS reported him telling the board.

Donia Abu, another student, told the board: “My family members have been killed – not by accident – but by your support for companies complicit in genocide.”

Jewish students told the board a different story. A junior named Charlie Mahoney focused on their experiences on UM’s campus in the last few months. “Forces on campus, in the classroom, and online have been working to erase our voices and our history,” he said.

For her part, Lisa Mueller, who teaches political science at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio on 10 May that the agreement between UM and the protesters is “quite remarkable in the context of the very different ways that other college and university leaders have responded to protests on their campuses – namely and most infamously at Columbia – because it suggest that administrators are watching the blowback elsewhere and trying to avoid a similar PR nightmare”.

Mueller continued by explaining the importance of ‘optics’ to the delicate balancing act being performed by UM’s interim president Jeff Ettinger.

“When protesters face repression, regardless of whether the college administrators view their application of campus police as repression, this can blow back against the administration. Repression of protesters – even just perceived repression – tends to raise sympathy with protesters. And so that’s why I think that over time, as we’re seeing blowback on other campuses, administrators are feeling the pressure to respond differently,” she said.

Brown takes heat from a donor

Among the four universities that have reached agreements to end the encampments, Brown, a member of the Ivy League, is the most prestigious. It is also the university that has received the most high-profile criticism by one of its donors.

Billionaire Barry Sternlicht, chairman and chief executive of Starwood Capital Group, which has US$115 billion of assets under management, and has donated more than US$20 million to Brown, has paused his donations to his and his wife’s alma mater, where one of the university’s dormitories, Sternlicht Commons, is named for them.

In a letter to The New York Times (NYT) and to Brown’s president, Christina H Paxson, Sternlicht called the agreement that ended the encampment “unconscionable” and said it showed sympathy for Hamas.

On the protesters’ main demand, divestment, Paxson has agreedto invite five students to meet with five members of the Corporation of Brown University (Brown’s governing body) to present their arguments for divesting from “companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory”, as the university press release put it.

She further agreed that whatever recommendation the advisory committee on university resources management makes about divestment will be brought to the 24 October meeting of the board to be voted on.

Sternlicht took aim at what he saw as a double standard when it comes to Israel by asking: “Where are the protests?” – for Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, reports The New York Times. Sternlicht also dismissed protesters who feel “Hamas is noble” and invited them to leave Brown.

Praise from a rabbi

Rabbi Josh Bolton, executive director of Brown’s Hillel (the international Jewish campus organisation), told University World News that “there isn’t any doubt that the resolution of this crisis, the removal of the encampment and the non-intervention of the police force is good”.

“Did President Paxson kick the can down the road [risking] a renewed confrontation and crisis in September or October? Maybe. But does the agreement with the protesters amount to any kind of capitulation? I don’t think so,” the rabbi said.

There are two reasons for this, said Bolton. First, Paxson did not give the protesters anything that is not already available to every Brown student – who can make proposals to the advisory committee.

Secondly, Bolton explained, the president “would not have taken this move if there had been any doubt in her mind as to whether or not the corporation will roundly reject this”, that is, a proposal to divest.

“Yes, the protesters get to say they got some of what they were looking for. But it’s not clear to me that they had a way out. I think they needed an adult in the room to help them get out of the situation they were in,” Bolton told University World News.

Still, the rabbi added: “It’s a bitter pill for the Jewish community. But it was good for the [Brown] community, for graduation,” which could not take place as planned.

“It’s also good for the Jewish community” which he described as having suffered a “generational […] trauma” on 7 October, the date of Hamas’ invasion of Israel, and in the ensuing months of war which has fragmented the Jewish community.

“We’ve really been operating in a different ecosystem than prior to October 7, much more fraught and fragmented, much more reactive,” he said.

A polarised core

At the end of our interview, I asked Bolton if he had seen the Generation Lab poll of 1,250 university students, “College Students, Israel, Gaza, and the American campus climate”, published by the website Axios the day before we spoke?

Generation Lab found that while 45% of students supported the protesters, 24% did not and 30% were neutral. Even more telling, only 13% said that the conflict in the Middle East was important to them while 40% cited health care reform as being the most important issue for them, followed by education at 38% and economic fairness at 37%. Racial justice and civil rights were cited by 36% as being their most important issue. (Respondents were allowed to name three areas in this question.)

An almost equal percentage, 28% and 29%, thought students should spend more time or less time (respectively) protesting while 43% were not sure.

As for the slogans, the largest group of students, 44%, 62% and 37%, respectively, said they neither agreed nor disagreed with the slogans: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution” and “Free, free Palestine”. Fully 81% of students believed that protesters who destroyed property, vandalised or illegally occupied buildings should be held accountable by their universities. And 83% supported Israel’s right to exist.

Only 8% had engaged in protests: 1% in pro-Israeli protests and 7% in pro-Palestinian protests. Hamas’ leaders were blamed for the current situation in Gaza by 34% of students while 19% blamed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 12% the Israeli people and only 1% Jews outside Israel.

“I think the poll puts its finger on something very, very real,” said Bolton. “And that is this is a polarising issue that pits two groups of activists against one another. It has an impact, intellectually, emotionally, socially on a large middle. But, in fact, this is not the cause of the broad swath of the middle, and I include the Jewish middle as well.”

Courtney Brown, vice-president for impact and planning at the Lumina foundation, an NGO based in Indianapolis, Indiana, that works to increase opportunities for access and success in tertiary education for all Americans, agreed with Bolton that the Generation Lab poll gives a more accurate picture of what American college and university students actually think than do the raucous campuses.

“Amid juggling academic pressures, rising costs, and familial responsibilities, today’s students have a lot on their plate and must prioritise immediate concerns like housing costs and health care reform along with geopolitical issues. This highlights the complex realities shaping campus life and underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of student priorities,” she wrote in an e-mail to University World News.