I vividly remember last semester’s protests. I remember the encampment first appearing on the Academic Quad in early April just as I remember the messy aftermath of the Tufts Community Union Senate resolution votes. But most of all, I remember the chill in the air that came after Tufts’ administration first threatened to send in police to arrest the protestors — that icy April night on the eve of finals, being filled in my bones with the fear that many of my classmates would be leaving our campus in the back of cop cars.
This fear was actualized at colleges around the country, from protestors being swarmed by hundreds of police officers at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt to the blood left drying on the cobblestoned alley on Emerson College’s campus. I am not here to relitigate the ethics of each group’s position on the conflict, but I am here to condemn the response to what has been — despite notable exceptions — a largely peaceful protest movement, by politicians and college administrators who have sought to escalate conflict and attack innocent students under the guise of being the keepers of the peace.
While it is easy to see these atrocities as a series of individual struggles between students and their respective colleges, further analysis reveals the way that Columbia University’s decision to arrest their students gave other colleges implicit permission to follow suit, and how political actors helped to pressure certain colleges into arresting their own students.
The arrests began on April 18, when Minouche Shafik, then the President of Columbia who stepped down in the wake of the protests, made the fateful determination that the to-that-point peaceful protests were a “clear and present danger” and called in the New York Police Department to arrest students. These students were arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus and faced suspension for their actions.
Columbia’s actions sparked a two-fold response: a growth in the number of college encampments around the U.S. and a mushrooming in the number of arrests. Columbia had set a precedent — it was okay for colleges to arrest peaceful protestors. In this regard, Columbia’s status as an Ivy League school is not to be dismissed, especially given the perception of these schools as elite leaders.
For a few days following April 18, no arrests were made. That changed on April 22, when 180 people were arrested across Yale University and New York University, including about 20 faculty members at the latter. In response to the NYU arrests, New York City Mayor Eric Adams called the protestors inflammatory and began to sow conspiratorial narratives around the protests, saying, “Why is everybody’s tent the same? Was there a fire sale on those tents? There’s some organizing going on. There’s a well-concerted organizing effort, and what’s the goal of that organizing? That's what we need to be asking ourselves. … We can’t have outside agitators come in and be disruptive to our city. Someone wanted something to happen at that protest at NYU.” Adams’ fear mongering that “there’s some organizing going on” sounds ridiculous — hopefully there’s some organizing going on in any given protest — but it foreshadowed a much darker and vengeful attitude towards protestors that Adams would show in the coming days.
Over the course of the week and a half following the NYU and Yale arrests, more colleges followed Columbia’s lead, with almost 1,500 people being arrested by the end of April. At this point, the influence of the growing political consensus around arresting students was becoming clear. One of the main perpetrators of this narrative was Adams, who met with numerous university leaders in order to convince them to arrest students, spewing fear-mongering and hypocritical language. On the night of May 1 — which saw the peak number of arrests across the country, 489, Adams had finally convinced university leaders to send in police, who arrested 300 people across three college campuses in New York City. Protesters at the City College of New York that night alleged being pushed around by police and sandwiched between barricades. In the aftermath, Adams continued to push the narrative that any escalations were due to “outside agitators,” but when pressed to give breakdowns in the arrest numbers, Adams responded with a completely nonsensical analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50 bad professors speaking to 50 students.”
Adams was not the only politician to target students in New York City at the time. On April 29, 21 Democratic politicians signed an open letter to Columbia pressuring them to arrest student protestors on their campus, saying, “After nearly a week of negotiations, it is now abundantly clear that the students and activists entrenched on campus are unwilling to enter into a reasonable agreement to disband, which is necessary to bring the university into compliance with Title VI.” This statement gave the school explicit permission for their actions, while undermining the discussions that were going on between students and the university. We should be concerned that so many of our leaders are willing to call for the arrests of students, including Democratic leaders such as Senator-elect Adam Schiff.
Peaceful protestors at schools around the country saw hundreds of arrests in the days following, each with their own unique stories tied together by a common string of indignant administrations and police abuse. At Yale, on May 1, four people were arrested, one of whom was violently choked even as onlookers told the police that the arrestee could not breath, another of whom was arrested even after stating their intent to disperse. At the State University of New York, New Paltz, over 120 current and former faculty and staff signed a letter calling the police response a “brutal infringement of First Amendment freedoms” in the aftermath of 132 arrests on the night of May 2. The sheriff claimed officers had acted properly, despite the fact that they arrived after students had taken down their encampment ahead of the administration’s deadline, and despite a video showing police jabbing students with batons.
Police and universities telling lies and spinning false narratives is an ongoing theme. At the University of Virginia, university leaders called in state police to break up a small, peaceful protest; in the aftermath, the chief of police, described a scene of aggressive students chanting at him and threateningly wielding umbrellas that lead him to fear being surrounded — but videos of him visiting the protests shows that this was a gross misrepresentation. Similarly, one protester at the University of Michigan described being woken up to a police raid on the morning of May 21, saying, “They gave us a 10 minute dispersal warning. They started approaching us after about six minutes and immediately started pepper spraying us. I saw one person being pushed to the ground and being detained.” At the University of Notre Dame, 17 people were arrested, simply due to the fact that they did not register their protest with the school beforehand.
What did all of this mean for us here at Tufts? Thankfully, there was no police raid or arrests on our campus. But when examining the larger context, it is likely that our administration was nevertheless influenced by events around the country. Perhaps most telling is the night the university issued its trespass order: April 30 — amidst mass arrests country-wide and a political consensus circling around arresting students. The university followed the playbook to a tee: issuing a no trespass order and threatening to remove student protesters with a heavy hand. On May 3, the encampment at Tufts was taken down; over 1,000 arrests were made around the country between the time the university issued the no trespass order and the encampment breaking down. Understandably, the protestors issued a statement that, “Rather than take a bad faith deal that would forfeit our right to organize — and our values — we chose to walk away from this offer to maintain the integrity of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
This semester has proven to be a quieter one on Tufts campus — almost an eerie calm following a devastating storm. This has been due in part to a behind-the-scenes crackdown by the Tufts administration on the Students for Justice in Palestine, who have now been suspended as an organization until 2027. The university also required two 10-plus page essays to be submitted by the organization in order to get the hold lifted, including a section about “the particular tactics utilized on Nov. 17, 2023 at Ballou Hall … and the harms or potential harms these tactics caused,” a rich ask considering the documented abuses committed by university police at this protest.
Not only has the university targeted the protestors, but they have targeted the means of protest. On August 22, the school released a new set of time, place and manner guidelines, which was clearly crafted in reaction to last year’s protests; prohibiting protests in virtually any indoor location, banning protests and even the use of chalk during certain periods of the semester and threatening to arrest anyone involved in an overnight demonstration. If people are restricted even on where they can put posters, is it still a protest? Part of the point of protest is disobedience. To pull from an almost cliché example: If Rosa Parks had to state her intent to not give up her bus seat, would her actions have been as impactful? Civil disobedience is an essential part of creating change; sometimes this comes with breaking rules and disturbing the peace. These policy updates are not limited to Tufts. Emerson, for example, has banned protests on virtually every part of their campus and created a provision that allows them to designate any place an “inappropriate protest location” for any length of time. Instead, the school recommends demonstrations occur “on public property, such as the Boston Common.”
This information can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. If students can’t even stand up to their administrations without being arrested, how can they fight political consensuses and Ivy League-set precedence? For one, many students can keep doing exactly what they have been doing: peacefully protesting in the face of university scorn. But beyond this, we can keep our politicians accountable for their double standards and callous attitudes towards student protestors. We can vote figures like Adams and Schiff out of office, and email the offices of our representatives to tell them to support peaceful protests.
As for Tufts, we can all join together in demanding that the university revert their time, place and manner rules, stop targeting student organizations and change their attitudes towards protest. You may not agree with the current protests — you may even vehemently oppose them — and yet, it is important to recognize that everyone has a right to protest. When it comes your turn, you will want to be at a school where the administration listens to your issues and does not punish you for making your voice heard. Tufts talks a big game about being supportive of student activism; it’s time to hold them to their word.
