U.S. colleges and universities currently face proliferating pro-Palestine student protests on their campuses, resulting in encampments and hundreds of arrests nationwide.
Dr. Omar WasowBerkeley Center for Race and Gender
It’s a tactic that’s become more prominent following the 59-day Occupy Wall Street protests against economic inequality and corporate greed in Fall 2011, said Dr. Omar Wasow, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, whose research focuses on Civil Rights-era protests during the 1960s.
“I think what we're seeing here is a kind of combination of past protest techniques and this newer style of encampment,” he said. “A strength and a weakness of the encampment technique is that it puts a lot of pressure on administrators to respond to this daily presence that might be peaceful but a lot [in violation of] some campus rules.”
Harvard, MIT, and George Washington University on the East Coast. UCLA on the West. University of Chicago and Indiana in the Midwest. These are but some of the schools at which students are setting up encampments to protest the deadly Israel military operations in Gaza and make demands, such as for a ceasefire and for their schools to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Residents at these various encampments nationally have been observed holding teach-ins, movie nights, and prayers and sharing food as they continue holding their ground.
Many of the schools, where these encampments of varying sizes are located, have viewed them as violations of campus policy, opposing them and asking for them to be dismantled.
The ongoing encampment at Columbia – one of the first in recent memory and one which has inspired and spawned multiple others nationwide – began April 17. Its students are now facing more threats of suspension from their university, which would prevent them from participating in classes, academic events, and extracurriculars.
