On October 12, Columbia University’s iconic South Lawn was divided in two. Student protestors with the student groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) stood to the East, while opposing protestors with Students Supporting Israel (SSI) stood to the West. A month later, Columbia banned SJP and JVP from holding protests on campus until the end of the semester, saying they had violated university policy. Students protested again and faculty staged a walkout.
“We’ve said it before, that our voices are louder and more powerful than the money that you receive, Columbia,” Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student and a Palestinian refugee, told The New York Times. “We won’t be silenced.”
As the war reaches its third month, U.S. college and university campuses continue to be rattled by the conflict. Not only have campuses been host to countless protests since the war began on October 7, but college presidents have angered students and alumni with statements and lack thereof. Both leaders who chose to stay quiet and those who put out statements faced backlash.
Meanwhile, groups of parents and teachers reacted with outrage to a string of memos released by New York City public schools. In late November, students at Hillcrest High School in Queens stormed the hallways in protest to a teacher’s attendance of a pro-Israel protest. While large scale responses are less prominent on the high school level, administrators are facing the same problems in their response as university leaders.
“Universities kind of backed themselves into a corner,” Tom Ginsburg, a law professor and faculty director of the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, told The Wall Street Journal. “Even if they want to move to a policy of neutrality, they are going to have a hard time doing it.”
Williams College’s president Maud S. Mandel chose not to send any emails regarding the conflict, aside from a statement explaining her silence. “Earlier in my presidency I sent out public statements about various world events,” she wrote in a letter to the community. “After conversations with members of our community and colleagues at other schools, I have become convinced that such communications do more harm than good.”
At Harvard, more than 30 student groups initially signed a letter that blamed Hamas’ attack on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the past decades. (At least five groups have since withdrawn their signatures, according to The Harvard Crimson.) President Claudine Gay’s initial email drew backlash from corporate leaders with connections to Harvard for not condemning the students and expressing enough outrage at Hamas’ attack. Even after a follow-up email and video message, some organizations still cut ties with the school, including a foundation that had funded Israeli students pursuing master’s degrees at Harvard for more than 30 years.
After establishing themselves as moral arbitrators on campus with responses to past news events, including the murder of George Floyd and gun violence in Texas, high school and university administrators alike are expected to publish statements, but saying the right thing has proved impossible.
A few days after Columbia banned SJP and JVP demonstrations, roughly 200 Columbia alumni gathered outside the campus to protest the ban in a protest organized by CUAlumni4Palestine, a group of alumni and affiliates of Columbia that formed in the wake of the SJP and JVP’s suspension.
“Whenever students have decided to protest, they’ve always taken a very reactionary stance,” Tanaquil Jones, a Columbia alumni and speaker at the demonstration, told the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Change only comes when people are willing to stand up for what they believe, and usually it’s a minority of students that do that.”
