Edgy calm on college campuses follows arrests and deals to end student protests

An edgy calm held on many college campuses Friday after more than two weeks of chaotic protests, following police crackdowns on encampments of demonstrators and a growing number of deals between students and administrators to defuse tensions peacefully.

The scenes of clashes between police and pro-Palestinian protesters that had played out on campuses nationwide in recent days were far fewer, even as police launched fresh moves to clear tents and signs at a handful of schools, including New York University.

Whether the lull was temporary or signaled the beginning of a return to normalcy was unclear, but the concerted efforts of school officials and law enforcement to quell the protests seemed to be having an effect on one of the largest campus movements in decades.

Noam Emerson-Fleming, a 20-year-old sophomore at American University who has closely monitored events across the country, said he felt the action reached a crescendo when New York police forcefully removed protesters from Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, the epicenter of the protest movement, late Tuesday night. But he sees a possible end in sight, something protesters say is not in the offing.

“I think this ends after graduation,” Emerson-Fleming said. “Everyone’s gotta go home.”

[Police clear encampments as US campus arrests exceed 2,300 amid pro-Palestinian protests]

The Biden administration on Friday also pushed forward with efforts to address the campus unrest, one day after the president made his first substantive remarks on the protests amid criticism from political opponents, including Donald Trump, that he wasn’t doing enough.

In a letter to college leaders, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote that he is concerned about the rise of antisemitism on some campuses and warned that such discrimination is a violation of federal law. The message echoed a speech by President Biden on Thursday.

Cardona noted that Jewish students have reported being assaulted and harassed and that vandalism at colleges and universities has included swastikas on doors. He said his department has opened 100 investigations into anti-Jewish bias and other discrimination on campuses since the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

“These and other such incidents are abhorrent, period,” Cardona wrote. “They have no place on our college campuses.”

The department also shared a list of ideas for how campus leaders can create “safe and inclusive learning environments” for all.

Biden and top Democratic lawmakers in Washington increasingly distanced themselves this week from the pro-Palestinian protests engulfing college campuses public and private, large and small — many students’ response to the Gaza conflict. The Hamas attack last fall left about 1,200 people dead in Israel and some 200 as hostages, according to the Israeli government. The counterattack that it then launched has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

So far, the Democratic rebukes aimed at young protesters range from vague cautioning against violence to strongly worded calls for crackdowns on rule-breaking students to allegations of antisemitism.

Democrats appear to feel a sense of political urgency to dissociate themselves from the unrest as they seek to portray Republicans and Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, as agents of chaos. But in doing so, they also risk further alienating a key constituency in what are expected to be close contests for the White House and Congress in November.

On the other side of the political aisle, Republicans are working overtime to associate them with the turbulence at colleges.

Despite less drama Friday, tensions still flared on some campuses.

New York City police arrested several dozen more demonstrators Friday morning, according to department spokeswoman Floretta Chow.

At the New School, a private university in Manhattan, 43 demonstrators were taken into custody, while 13 more were detained by police at New York University. Chow noted that the situation in both locations remained unsettled and that those numbers were subject to change.

The police action at the New School came after demonstrators blocked an entrance to a hall that houses 600 students. Administrators offered a meeting between students and the university’s investment committee, but demonstrators declined, according to a statement from interim president Donna Shalala.

Police at SUNY New Paltz arrested 133 demonstrators between 10 p.m. Thursday and 2 a.m. Friday, according to school spokesman Andrew Bruso. The arrests came after a 9 p.m. deadline for protesters to disperse.

On the West Coast, police had arrested at least 30 people at Oregon’s Portland State University as they cleared a library — first on Thursday morning and again in the late evening after protesters, who had occupied the building for several days, scaled fences and returned.

Nearly 2,300 protesters nationwide have been arrested as of Friday, according to a count kept by The Washington Post. But increasingly, they and university officials are finding ways to resolve differences without such confrontations.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at some half-dozen universities were packing up their encampments after student activists and university leaders reached agreements to end protests. The parameters of those deals differ widely.

Rutgers University plans to build an Arab cultural center and create a department of Middle East studies. The University of Minnesota and University of Michigan promised to look into divestment in Israel, a key demand on many campuses. Other schools, like Pomona College in California, agreed to consider a divestment vote.

The four-day encampment at the main Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, N.J. — a tent city along the tree-lined square known as Voorhees Mall — ended peacefully despite the university announcing they would send in law enforcement if occupants did not clear out by 4 p.m. Thursday.

The Daily Targum, a student-run newspaper, reported that the Rutgers community “received three emails from Rutgers officials,” including one from New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway saying there would be “anticipated escalation” if protesters didn’t leave the Voorhees quad. The campus in New Brunswick has seen pro-Palestinian protests for decades.

After negotiating eight out of their 10 demands, protesters dismantled peacefully, taking down their banners and tarps after saying they’d concluded successful negotiations with university officials. Their demands, students detailed Friday, included Rutgers providing aid for 10 displaced Gazan students to finish their education at the state university; reviewing a relationship with Birzeit University in the Palestinian West Bank; and divesting from its Israeli business interests.

In a statement, Conway said that the “resolution was achieved through constructive dialogue between the protesting students and our leadership teams.” The university provided a list of what the protesters had wanted and the university’s response to each.

“This agreement opens the door for ongoing dialogue and better addresses the needs of our Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian student body, which numbers over 7,000,” she said.

The agreement followed other resolutions at a small group of schools that, like Northwestern University, agreed to discuss divesting from Israel or from military weapons companies with products being used in the war. Brown University agreed to consider a divestment vote, becoming one of the first of schools looking to end protests without arrests or potentially violent confrontations.

Some Israeli professors working on those campuses, as well as pro-Israel students, said Friday that they didn’t feel that the decisions were fair.

“It’s a terrible mistake. The administration made a joke out of itself,” Efraim Benmelech, an Israeli professor at Northwestern’s business school, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the deal with protesters.

Benmelech resigned as co-chair of the university’s antisemitism committee, along with six other Jewish members of the group. Their decision prompted the entire committee to announce that it was shutting down.

Pro-Palestinian student groups are promising to renew demonstrations next year if schools don’t keep their promises.

The student-led protest movement continues to spread beyond U.S. campuses. About 90 pro-Palestinian protesters held a sit-in Friday on the central campus of Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Demonstrators — many of them wearing kaffiyehs — locked arms as they chanted slogans including “Stop the genocide!” and “Viva, Viva, Palestine!” The chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — banned in Germany since November — was also heard.

Berlin police began to remove some protesters from the scene about two hours after the sit-in began.

Pro-Palestinian protesters staged a sit-in Thursday night at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and the prestigious French university’s campus in the capital was closed Friday. Parisian students outraged by Israel’s war in Gaza have held protests for days, including at France’s most well-known university, the Sorbonne.

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Liz Goodwin, Hannah Natanson, Clara Ence Morse, Kate Brady, Frances Vinall and Emily Francis contributed to this report.