US faculty speak up and stand alongside student Gaza protesters

As student-led protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land continue to spread across US universities, some faculty members are increasingly joining the charge – speaking up and even standing alongside their students.

At Georgia’s Emory University, faculty members have been arrested at pro-Palestine demonstrations – including Emil’ Keme, a professor of English and Indigenous studies, and Noelle McAfee, the philosophy department chair.

McAfee was seen being roughly pinned down and escorted away by Atlanta police in a video shared widely on social media, asking the person recording: “Can you call the philosophy department office and tell them I’ve been arrested?”

Arrests continued on Saturday as at least 200 protesters were detained at three campuses across the US. The Indiana University police department in Bloomington said in an emailed statement that 23 protesters were arrested there after an encampment was not dismantled.

Northeastern University in Boston said in a statement on social media that it decided to call in police as “what began as a student demonstration two days ago was infiltrated by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern”. Massachusetts state police said in statement that they arrested 102 protesters who refused to leave.

At Arizona State University, campus police arrested 69 protesters early Saturday, the school said in a statement.

The university said “a group of people – most of whom were not ASU students, faculty or staff – created an encampment and demonstration” and were arrested and charged with criminal trespass after refusing to disperse.

In light of the protests sweeping campuses, formal graduation ceremonies have been cancelled at the University of Southern California, where the Muslim student Asna Tabassum was prevented from making her valedictory speech over her public support for Palestine.

“Rather than respond to faculty and student concerns about the cancelling of Asna Tabassum’s valedictorian speech and the arrest of peaceful protesters, USC has unfortunately doubled down on its authoritarian approach and simply cancelled an aspect of graduation that students earned and looked forward to,” said the USC assistant sociology professor Brittany Friedman.

“It is disheartening to see the current state of higher education in our country, the mass exposure of students to police violence, and the complete disregard for what USC claims to stand for.”

On Monday, many members of Columbia University faculty and staff rallied in support of students who were arrested, suspended, and in some cases, evicted from their dorm rooms. They demanded “an immediate apology and amnesty” for these students and for their disciplinary records to be cleared.

Classes will be held remotely until the end of the semester as a result of the tensions on campus.

At nearby Princeton, classes, such as the one run by Max Weiss, who is teaching a course on the history of Palestine and Israel, are even being held at some protests.

Earlier this week, Weiss joined dozens of other faculty members in New Jersey in writing an open letter in the school’s newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in support of Columbia faculty and student protesters.

“We, Princeton University faculty and staff, affirm our solidarity with and support for the Columbia University and Barnard College students who are continuing to demand that the university divest from Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ongoing occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and other Palestinian land,” the letter read.

“We fully support the rights of all university community members, including students, to engage in peaceful protest at Columbia, at Princeton, and on all university campuses.”

Weiss told the Guardian it was “clear” that “university students across the country are not going to stand idly by as university administrations collude with local and municipal police departments, alongside an orchestrated campaign within the halls of the United States government to quell speech”.

Professor and students were arrested at protests at other universities in New York, such as New York University and the City University of New York. While some NYU educators were arrested shortly after shielding Muslim students as they prayed, Cuny professors physically stood together in order to form a barricade between their students and police.

“To get to our students, you have to get through us,” they chanted in unison.

Since Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostage, Israel has launched an unrelenting military assault on Gaza, killing more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of whom are women and children.

The violence overseas has sparked campus protests that have spread around the country in the last few weeks. Major protests at Columbia kicked off earlier this month with a pro-Palestinian encampment at the school. Since then, at least 30 other universities, including Yale, Brown and the University of Texas – which on Wednesday saw riot police arrest nearly 60 protesters and one journalist – have followed in Columbia’s footsteps with their own encampments on campus grounds.

To quell the disturbances on campuses, especially as commencement nears, many university administrations have been actively working to shut down the demonstrations and, in some cases, punish participants – sparking a backlash from professors.

Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, called on the New York police department to clear the encampment at the university. Hundreds of students were arrested and suspended in a chaotic scene that drew international attention and criticism from faculty, students and the public.

Far-right Republicans have weighed in on recent events at Columbia. Just one day before the NYPD incident, Shafik testified before a committee in the Republican-led House about her alleged failure to prevent instances of antisemitism on campus. Her statements before the House attracted criticism from Columbia faculty, who faulted her for not mounting a robust enough defense of academic freedom.

“Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months,” Shafik said in her prepared remarks.

“We do not, and will not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations. We have enforced, and we will continue to enforce, our policies against such actions.”

Bassam Khawaja, a lecturer at Columbia’s law school who spoke to the Guardian after the faculty-led walkout, condemned Shafik’s decision to engage the NYPD and said the protest “was by all accounts non-violent”.

“It was a group of students camping out on a lawn in the middle of campus,” Khawaja said, pointing out that it was no different than a typical day on campus and that fellow lecturers and professors “felt outrage” at the presence of police on campus. He added that there was “no clear and present danger”.

Khawaja, who is also a supervising attorney at the school’s human rights clinic, said he had seen “people who have spoken out in support of Palestinian human rights immediately painted as Hamas sympathizers, as antisemites, as terrorists … that’s outrageous”.

“Students have to be able to express solidarity with people of Gaza without being painted as extremists or radicals,” he said. “And I think Columbia’s president has a duty to speak up for them.”

In contrast, Shafik is under pressure from others, including some prominent pro-Israel donors, to get tougher on protests amid accusations of intimidation of Jewish students and calls for her to resign, while some senior Republicans have urged Joe Biden to send troops onto campuses.

UT Austin faculty condemned the president, Jay Hartzell, in a statement over his decision “to invite city police as well as state troopers from across the state – on horses, motorcycles and bicycles, in riot gear and armed with batons, pepper spray, teargas and guns to our campus today in response to a planned peaceful protest”.

Text messages obtained by the local Austin American-Statesman newspaper confirmed Hartzell requested police backup.

Weiss, the Princeton professor, called the decision by Columbia’s president to deploy police to forcibly break up the protests “unjust and unjustified”.

He said: “It is the responsibility of the Columbia administration and every American university administration to come out publicly and unequivocally in support of the rights of students, faculty and other university affiliates to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to dissent, speech, and peaceable assembly.”

Zia Mian, a longtime Princeton faculty member who serves as the co-director of the college’s program in science and global security, also attended a Gaza solidarity encampment protest on campus.

Mian told the Guardian: “It’s no surprise that universities are the place – where struggles for equality of men and women, for the equality of people of color, of desegregation of education, of environmental movements, and of movements against war – [where] these debates are often the most charged and the most vivid.

“Young people are confronting the playing-out of existing systems that many of them are seeing for the first time.

“It is almost inevitable then that young people in university settings confronted with the world as it actually is, over and over again, end up being on the cutting edge of change.”

• Reuters contributed to this report