Fireworks launched into a group of students. Mace. Vicious slurs and unabated assault. A pro-Israel mob enacted this and more upon the pro-Palestine encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles on Tuesday night, as the police stood by and let it happen.
The scenes inspired outrage across the country, and even California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the police for failing to respond to the attacks. Undeterred by the violence, the students stood their ground in the encampment, a show of solidarity with the people of Gaza. They were joined by university employees who raised a banner that read “We stand with our students.” The UCLA chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine called for a day of strike in solidarity with their students and in protest of the administration. By Wednesday night, the police finally responded: shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the pro-Palestine students who had just been assaulted the day before.
The faculty intervention at UCLA is just one of the latest examples of college professors putting their bodies and livelihoods on the line in defense of their students who are protesting their tax and tuition dollars contributing to a plausible genocide. At schools across the country, faculty have locked arms to form a protective barrier in front of their students and have been arrested and brutalized themselves.
“This moment has actually brought faculty together in a way I’ve never experienced in 20 years on campus. I’ve found myself working closely with colleagues I’d never met before,” Columbia University history professor Nara Milanich told The Intercept. “People have dropped everything to support students and respond to this moment.”
The groundswell of faculty support has come amid demonstrations at over 154 university campuses nationwide. The student protesters have called on their schools to cut financial ties with Israel, whose war on Gaza has so far killed more than 34,000 people. University administrations — propelled by Republicans, who have maintained carnal hunger for more war, as well as moderate Democrats — have in response sicced riot police armed with tear gas, stun grenades, and even snipers onto America’s students. The militarized response reached an apex on Tuesday night, when police, with a megatruck in tow, invaded Columbia’s campus and removed students occupying Hamilton Hall, an action inspired by past protests against the Vietnam War, racism, and apartheid South Africa.
Milanich described the raid as “authoritarian political theater” and said it sickened her that administrators had not only invited the “charade,” but were also defending it. Since Tuesday, she noted, the entire main campus has been closed to faculty, staff, and students other than those who live on it.
“The only folks on campus are the police. This feels like as good a representation as any of the administration’s handling of the situation. Our campus no longer belongs to faculty, staff, and students; it has become an occupied zone ceded to the NYPD.”
For the faculty at Columbia, President Nemat Minouche Shafik’s testimony in front of the GOP-led House Committee on Education and Workforce on April 17 was a turning point. During the hearing Shafik and her colleagues David Schizer, Claire Shipman, and David Greenwald seldom advocated for their students and faculty, failing to challenge the hearing’s unproven premise that Columbia was plagued by rampant antisemitism and accepting the idea that they needed to crack down harder on students. “President Shafik had an opportunity to defend the basic values of the university and instead she totally capitulated to a group of congress people with their own agendas,” Milanich wrote in a message.
The police raid the next day, during which more than 100 students were arrested, only intensified the faculty’s fury. Theater professor Shayoni Mitra said faculty came together across ranks, schools, disciplines, and ideologies in outrage and collectivity in a way she hadn’t seen before: faculty walkouts, dissent from permanent law school professors, condemnation from scientists around the world, and even mass global academic boycotts against the school. “We do not stand behind this militarization of campus,” Mitra said. “We stand behind our students.”
Faculty and students alike have been especially troubled by the perception that their administrators are not only refusing to affirmatively defend them from external attacks, but are also actively welcoming them. For example, after getting bludgeoned by Republicans for allegedly overseeing a campus rife with antisemitism — and then inviting the mass arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters — Shafik then allowed Republicans House Speaker Mike Johnson, Virginia Foxx, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito to deliver a press conference at the center of Columbia’s campus. While being met by boos, the Republicans used their platform to condemn Shafik, and the students she oversees, and to call for her resignation.
“We need to reclaim our campus from outside groups — congresspeople engaged in political theater; agitators on social media; the NYPD — so that faculty and students can get back to the critical business of the university: teaching and learning,” Milanich said.
This week, after Shafik announced the end of negotiations between the school and students over their divestment demands, faculty locked arms to defend their students from being evicted from their protest encampment. Later that night, students took over Hamilton Hall. Columbia once again escalated, inviting hordes of police onto campus to sweep the building and the campus encampments. In the process, the school cleared out the campus, blocking faculty from stepping in to defend their students and journalists from capturing the events as they unfolded.
“The university has chosen to escalate at every turn here,” said Bassam Khawaja, a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “These measures seem much more disruptive to campus life than the original encampment.”
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
What started at Columbia quickly spread across the country — both the protest encampments, and the disproportionate, haphazard violent police response. At Northeastern University, officers arrested 100 students on the pretense of antisemitic hate speech that was actually espoused by a pro-Israel agitator. At Virginia Commonwealth University, swarms of officers were deployed to barrage and tear gas students under the auspices of restoring order during “finals week.” At Emory University, officers were seen brutalizing protesters, including by tasing an already restrained Black student. At Indiana University Bloomington and Ohio State, officers were posted on roofs with long-range rifles trained upon the students below.
At almost every turn, college professors flocked to protest sites to protect their students. At Emory, a professor who saw police pinning a student to the ground asked officers what they were doing, all to be thrown down and arrested herself. At Washington University in St. Louis, a professor who was filming police was brutally beaten, slammed, and dragged across campus — reportedly suffering broken ribs and a broken hand. At Dartmouth University, officers threw to the ground and arrested 65-year-old labor historian and former head of Jewish Studies Annelise Orleck.
“Those cops were brutal to me. I promise I did absolutely nothing wrong. I was standing with a line of women faculty in … their 60s to 80s trying to protect our students. I have now been banned from the campus where I have taught for 34 years,” Orleck said.
At Northwestern University, as police began pursuing arrests for students conducting an encampment last week, a group of professors linked arms to defend the protest. “You will not touch our students,” insisted Steven Thrasher, Daniel Renberg chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.
Thrasher told The Intercept that he was moved to action partially in response to the politicians who were fanning the flames against student protesters. He said he was “appalled” by President Joe Biden’s knee-jerk condemnation of antisemitism on campus in response to the Columbia encampment, which Thrasher had visited. He also blamed Johnson, the House speaker, for stoking “all this fear and anxiety into a moral panic” during his press conference at Columbia.
“Young people are overwhelmingly for the end of the genocide in Gaza,” Thrasher said. “And President Biden is campaigning as if he’s the only thing between fascism that will come with Donald Trump — but he’s enacting the fascism. He’s the one that’s trying to whip up hysteria and make people frightened.”
On Monday, over 500 faculty at the University of Texas at Austin expressed no confidence in President Jay Hartzell, following the arrests of 57 students on campus last week. That same day, police once again returned to campus, this time using pepper spray and flash-bang grenades on students, dragging them across their own campus in the scorching heat as student medics donning pink shirts rushed to aid their classmates.
Amid the chaos, and beyond simply standing for their students’ right to protest, the school’s faculty hosted a silent demonstration calling directly for an end to the war in Gaza and to commemorate professors who have been killed there.
“It was powerful, it was absolutely powerful,” Roger Reeves, a professor of English and creative writing at UT Austin, told The Intercept. “Coaches came out and stood silently with us. And I don’t know if you know, Texas, but it’s hot right now. They stood in the sun. They stood with us. There were students out there, and everybody was just silent for 45 minutes and we sweated, but we stood.”
During the demonstration, Reeves held a sign in honor of Rizq Arruq, a professor from the Islamic University of Gaza who was killed. He continued holding the sign for several hours after the protest, he said. “It felt as if I was in some ways holding his body. I think the silence was just as powerful as the shouting in some ways.”
Reeves noted the faculty faced toward the direction of the Texas Capitol. “There’s this term in African American literature that I teach called ‘oppositional gazing.’ It’s from bell hooks. It comes out of slavery: when you couldn’t always speak back to the master, but you can look at him defiantly. So this subversion — we were gazing back at this power that is just repressing our students, this power that we’re exporting to all parts of the globe. So it was a powerful silence. It was an important silence. It was a humble silence.”