As American campuses face protests on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War, the media, politicians and some university administrators are mischaracterizing the nature of the demonstrations.
TV and radio coverage focuses on a small number of encampments that have turned violent, ignoring the vast majority that have remained peaceful.
Conservative politicians insist that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are inherently antisemitic and demand a crackdown on what they describe as lawlessness.
Too often university administrators are framing the issue as merely one of balancing free speech with the safety of Jewish students.
These portrayals grossly oversimplify what is happening.
The violence began, not when unruly demonstrators stormed buildings or disrupted campus life, but when the president of Columbia sent in NYPD officers in riot gear to break up a peaceful encampment.
The arrest of 108 students turned what had been a local effort into a national movement.
Encampments have sprung up on 80 campuses across the country.
Over the past few weeks, 2,300 people have been arrested on 39 campuses. However, at more than half of them, 20 or fewer students have been taken into custody. Arrests of more than 100 students have occurred at only five schools.
Rather than indicating campuses in chaos, these numbers suggest that most students are protesting peacefully.
There was violence at a few universities — most notably, Columbia, where students and outside agitators seized control of a campus building, and UCLA, where counter-protesters may have provoked violence.
On most campuses, though, demonstrators have behaved appropriately with the exception of a handful of unruly participants who deserved to be arrested.
Confrontations between groups have occurred, but these encounters should not be framed simply as pro-Palestinian vs. Jewish students.
Those who pan the encampments as antisemitic fail to recognize that many Jewish students have joined them, acting out of their religion’s commitment to social justice and respect for all human life.
For example, members of Jewish Voices for Peace, as well as unaffiliated Jewish students, have joined campus protests in support of Palestinians.
There have, of course, been antisemitic incidents. Some protestors have spewed inflammatory rhetoric, shouted slurs at Jewish students and posted signs with offensive slogans. Such acts must be stopped wherever they occur and those responsible held accountable.
One protest leader at Columbia was suspended after stating in a video, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
However, to characterize campus protests, including encampments, as intended to “make Jewish students feel unsafe,” as the local Anti-Defamation League said of the encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is grossly inaccurate.
All students have the right to live and learn in a safe and secure environment. On the other hand, higher education requires challenging them to reconsider their beliefs and assumptions.
As educators, we must help students distinguish between what genuinely threatens them and what makes them uncomfortable. If we allow expressions of discomfort to shut down legitimate discussion, education will suffer.
Unfortunately, our task has been made harder by outside actors seeking to make political capital out of the protests.
Instead of calming the situation at Columbia, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) inflamed it.
“If this is not contained quickly, and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped,” he declared amid a chorus of boos. “There is an appropriate time for the National Guard.”
“My message to the students inside the encampment is: Go back to class, stop wasting your parents’ money,” he condescendingly told them.
Ironically, some of the same politicians who condemn student encampments have defended the Jan. 6 insurrection as a legitimate protest.
“If you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from Jan. 6,” Andrew Clyde (R-Ga) said after the insurrection, “you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
But in response to student encampments, Clyde stated, “Pro-Hamas lunatics have taken over college campuses.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s remarks (D-Minn.) during her visit to Columbia were equally objectionable. She referred to Jewish supporters of Israel as “pro-genocide.”
By characterizing her statement as a “blood libel” (invoking a medieval antisemitic trope), Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblat poured oil on the fire.
In a 2022 speech criticizing Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, Greenblat stated that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Jewish critics of Israeli policy toward Palestinians have been denounced as “un-Jews,” and Gentile ones have been called antisemites.
In addition to quashing legitimate debate on Gaza, such inflammatory rhetoric may stoke student fear rather than dampen it.
The response of university administrators has been critical in determining whether or not violence occurs on campuses.
Those who have chosen engagement over confrontation have fared better.
Northwestern University is a case in point. Encampment representatives and the administration reached an agreement that allowed students to continue protests through June 1 but required them to remove tents.
The university will establish an advisory committee to review its investments and promised greater transparency. It will fund scholarships for Palestinian students and establish two visiting Palestinian professorships.
This compromise has angered some protestors, who see it as falling far short of their demands, and some Jewish groups and students, who condemn it as a capitulation to protesters, but it has restored calm to the Evanston campus.
Brown University has reached a similar agreement with its students.
The status quo on other campuses cannot be maintained indefinitely. As the school year comes to an end, students and administrators must reach a resolution, which will not be easy.
Some protestor demands are reasonable, others are not. Universities should not make political statements on current events but should be more transparent about their investments. Being more attentive to the needs of Muslim students in general and Palestinians in particular is a good thing.
Divestment from companies doing business in Israel is the most problematic and controversial demand. Asking the U.S. government not to supply the Netanyahu government with weapons to wage war in Gaza is one thing, but demonizing an entire country and its people for the behavior of its leadership at one point in time is quite another.
One can only hope that in tackling these difficult questions, universities will follow the example of Northwestern rather than Columbia.
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat .”
