US student protests: Analysis and historical comparison | DW News

US student protests: Analysis and historical comparison | DW News

attention on us University campuses is rising after police arrested hundreds of pro Palestinian student demonstrators students at dozens of colleges in the US have been demonstrating against the war in Gaza they’ve been calling on administrators to divest from companies that allegedly profit from Israel’s war against Hamas there was violence overnight at the University of California in Los Angeles where pro Israel demonstrators attacked a camps set up by Pro Palestinian students they attempt Ed to pull down barricades protecting the camp and there were scuffles between the two sides police later moved in to separate the two groups and to stop the unrest the university canceled all classes on Wednesday because of the violence and in New York City Police cleared an occupied building and arrested 300 Pro Palestinian protesters on the campus of Colombia University overnight bringing a dayong standoff to a dramatic end fellow demonstrators have now taken their protest to outside New York Police Headquarters many criticized the way officer bro officers broke up what they said was a peaceful protest and saying police were rough with demonstrators New York mayor Eric Adams has defended the decision saying the protests were escalated by outside figures not affiliated with the university there were individuals on the campus should not have been there there were people who are professionals and we saw evidence of training we saw a shift in tactics that were being used and when you start using the intelligence that intel was able to supply we knew it was time to communicate directly with the school and say you have more than a peaceful protest on your hand let’s join our correspondent Benjamin Alvarez Gruber who’s in New York City near Columbia University Welcome uh Ben so what’s the the latest on this day after this police raid there were a group of protesters earlier today in front of this entrance that quite close to the hall that was occupied by the students and where NYPD New York police entered with a lot of Law Enforcement Officers late evening yesterday now the situation is calm the big question of course will be what will happen with the students more than 100 students were arrested that were colum University and also another University here in New York bringing the number of arrests to 282 the big question will be now if they will face expulsion as the university has said and what will continue to happen we only got one email from the presidency of Columbia University today saying that there’s no media access to campus it has made it quite difficult also to do this coverage and they also said that Hamilton Hall that he is here right behind me is an active crime team by NYPD so we’re still waiting for confirmation on that side and who was the New York mayor Eric Adams talking about when he blamed external actors and Professionals for the escalation on the Columbia campus that’s a good question that many also students here are asking themselves because NYPD has not released the information of how many of those who were arrested are part of the university community and how many are not part of the university community and also what they said that had a chain during a press conference saying that it shows how professional these protests are but at the end it turned out that there was just a a bike lock that was used and that was also promoted by University that many students have here so there is a lack of information there even the student journalists who have been covering this over the past couple of days as this has been involing have not been granted access Only Yesterday essential staff and those who are living inside of Campus have been able to enter and the only response that we got also to ask if we will get an official statement if we will be able to talk to a spokesperson of the University was not today will try again tomorrow and for more on that we’re now joined by Robert con he’s a professor of social studies education at New York University n uh NYU uh Professor you called this current wave of protest the biggest student movement of the 21st century in the US what sparked this uh concern about the uh escalation of the war in Gaza and the use of American Military uh aid for uh this for the war and the all the deaths of civilians I think uh particularly with social media students have found out about this very quickly and they’re very concerned about the use of American military aid uh for for bombing and killing of civilians you know the images of children that are dying and I think that’s the main reason why this this burst out and then the administration’s responses initially to nonviolent protests uh you know clamping down and and getting pressure from Congress and donors uh on administrations of colleges to shut these down that like the initial Colombia arrest before the building occupation that that was uh really helped to publicize this and to bring this to the further to the attention of students across the country and this has been spreading across the country like wildfire now there are Wars and injustices and civilian casualties in several places uh around the world some of these wars are being fought with us and other Western weapons and some of them are longlasting why is it that the current conflict in Gaza in such outrage Among Us students well I think it’s because of the you know the fact that so many civilians have been dying and has very been very much uh out there on uh in the news media and in social media I think that feeling of and by the way also remember there was a sort of a smaller Pro Palestinian Sol movement the students for justice for Palestine has been on college campus since since the 1990s it didn’t really get much traction Beyond a small group what really U um um really had it explode was this war and and the civilian deaths in a way you could say in a parallel way to the’ 60s where you know Bull Connor the racist police sheriff when he when he attacked MLK and the uh the anti the anti-racist protest in Birmingham you know with police dogs and fire hoses I Netanyahu is kind of that kind of figure in terms of people’s public perception and I think that uh the best organizer that these protests have had is Benjamin Netanyahu inadvertently so but that’s nonetheless now there also have been anti-semitic undertones and expressions of solidarity with extremist organizations uh should that be worrying oh yeah I think it’s worrying and I think people who engage in such bigoted Behavior should be held accountable but there has been a kind of a an attempt to to smear the entire movement that is to say that all these protests are are are hateful and U um anti-semitic and and that’s just not true I mean here in NYU are the protesters who are arrested non for non-violently occupying a Plaza in front of the uh the business school uh they had just had their Passover seder when the arrest were happening so to say that they’re you know anti-semitic and yet they have Jewish student activists and they in here they’re having a Seder is a bit you know it’s it just doesn’t add up that’s not to deny that there has been a problem with anti-Semitism but I think that’s more of a kind of Fringe piece of this that you know needs again any of those acts uh and slurs and Slanders and certainly physical assaults uh people should be held accountable and and you know with due process punished if they’re guilty of that but I think the attempt of people in Congress and the donors to say these protests all have to be even if they’re non-violent and non-disruptive have to be suppressed that’s a kind of authoritarian response and I think using the anti-Semitism issue in a way that’s that’s really not accurate and it’s just a way of sort of suppressing something that we don’t like and on a University campus where you’re supposed to have the free exchange of ideas that’s a really bad model and what in turn that’s happened is you know the speaker of the house I don’t know if you if you recall this went to col Columbia University with a delegation of congressmen saying Congress Congressional Representatives saying the president of Columbia should resign because as if she hadn’t been tough enough and and so even though they arrested over 100 demonstrators and so what you get here is a a cycle of escalation and that’s how you got what I think was a really unwise and really tragic uh takeover administration building of the damage University property that wasn’t happening initially and I think the other thing I want to say universities one of the problems is they’re not governed democratically uh we may not the universities may not probably won’t want to devest their Holdings uh their connections to Israel but you could have a democratic process where even though on private University students are not on the Board of Trustees they get to make their case they get to be heard even if the trustees are going to say no they at least get a hearing and at Brown University that method was used and the protest ended in other words the university didn’t say we’re the bestest they just said okay you know do a presentation of it we’ll listen to you and we’ll decide so there is a way to deescalate this and unfortunately that didn’t happen to Colombia because I think a very inexperienced uh president who didn’t really know how to handle these protests well let’s take a look at the potential National significance of these protests we’re joined by David Faber who’s a professor of modern US history at the University of campus thank you so much for joining us on the day Professor let’s start with the comparisons being made between uh these Pro tests and those against the Vietnam War back in the 60s do you think those comparisons are valid well there’s certainly a a degree of similarity uh deja vu all over again I think there’s one major difference that I’ve been really struck by you can think about the anti-war protest in the 1960s as being incremental when on for several years started very peacefully non-violently and then over several years time escalated to more militancy these protests have have happened so fast in such a compressed manner have moved from a kind of peaceful protest to some very militant actions in days not years so in that sense I don’t know if it’s social media or just the rapidity of modern life but there’s a kind of urgency and quickness to these protests that’s quite different than the long incremental protests of students in the 1960s and and what do you think that today’s students universities and indeed the the federal government might learn from those 60s protests yeah that’s a question that I’ve been thinking a lot about and and been talking to a lot of people about what one thing that’s pretty obvious is that if you as a university administrator move very quickly to bring police or even worst case to bring violent police actions against demonstr ators you tend to make a difficult situation worse so administrators have to be very cautious about escalating matters because often there’s a backlash students who were not interested or were disinterested suddenly become angry that their fellow students their peers are being treated in such a harsh way so that’s the lesson for administrators be careful be cautious don’t do things you don’t have to do for fear that you might escalate things worse for students I I think the other issue is to be very mindful of what’s their goals I think this happened with the anti-war protest certainly in the United States in the 1960s and early 70s where students sometimes forgot that the point of the exercise was to convince others that US policy was wrong that there had to be changes and how the United States handled its International responsibilities here too I sometimes worry that students in their passions are forgetting their goal which I I gather would be to get their universities to divest from supporting Israel in any manner whatso ever and perhaps even more importantly to change the opinions of Americans and certainly American policy makers so become be considerate of what your tactics are and what your long-term goals are I’m looking I was looking at at a map of the campus protest today and they they do seem to have very much bypassed much of the middle of the country including your own state of of Kansas why do you think that is um I think there’s a couple fascinating reasons for it one uh typically maybe this is true in Germany and other countries uh with disperate populations the coasts tend to have more liberal orientations more progressives live in those States those are the kids parents or the students themselves so blue States we call them the US Democratic leaning Progressive States California New York Massachusetts Etc Washington State Portland Oregon maybe those are the natural first responders to this kind of trouble just before this interview though I went outside and saw that my own campus for the first time has a mass protest and there’s a kind of encampment growing so it’s it’s yeah several days later here in the state of Kansas a traditionally conservative state but uh here too it’s happening so we’ll see whether this spreads or if the commencements that begin May 10th or 15th or so in most us universities tends to dissipate students and the energy of these protests so what do is it about this issue do you think Israel Gaza that seems to have lit a fire under students do do you recall similar proest for instance um about the uh the two Gulf Wars certainly not though do remember that there were eventually very large mass protests against us intervention in particular in Iraq uh millions of people both in Europe and the United States taking to the streets but those were not Campus based they were not University based protests here I think students are trying to understand as was true way back in the Vietnam War era are their own communities are their own universities complicit in what many of these student protesters see as an ill-advised or immoral even policy toward Israel and Palestine so here in this particular struggle there’s a campus-based reasoning going on and I don’t think that was true with the Gulf War Wars per se or or some of the other perhaps Misadventures of US foreign policy in recent years you you mentioned the the care needed when thinking about inviting police onto campus uh back in 1968 the Colombia president Grayson Kirk actually resigned a year after calling in a thousand police officers to quell student protests against the the Vietnam War amongst other things do you think that the current Colombia president minu shafik will end up stepping down right now I would say no the scale of the protest despite the international media attention to it is relatively SC small in scale and I don’t think that the political environment is similar today obviously most Americans still very much support Israel they support the United States’s position on supporting Israel so I I don’t think that presidents of at leite univ I ities are fearing Progressive impulses that would cause them to resign it seems politically it’s the other direction we’ve recently had the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned because of conservative pressure against them so I I think the political contexts are quite different in the United States today we’re in a more conservative place maybe than we were in 1968 fascinating analysis and we thank you for it professor professor David Farber from Kansas University thank thank you

Tension on US university campuses is rising after police arrested hundreds of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators. Students at dozens of colleges in the US have been demonstrating against the war in Gaza. They’ve been calling on administrators to divest from companies that allegedly profit from Israel’s war against Hamas.

Chapters:
0:00 Background on the arrests on campuses
1:45 Benjamin Alvarez Gruber, DW Correspondent
4:01 Robert Cohen, Professor of Social Studies Education, NYU
9:13 David Farber, Professor of modern US history, University of Kansas

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