By Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, The Washington PostPolice encircle a sit-in by Fordham University protesters on Wednesday.
“Students were suspended and expelled in the ‘60s and the ‘80s, but more recently we’ve seen universities be much more lenient with student protesters,” said Thai Jones, a Columbia University lecturer who studies the history of radical social movements. “What we’re seeing now … represents something very different.”
Overall, it is clear that campus leaders across the country have decided they will no longer tolerate the protests, which often consist of dozens of tents set up on a prominent green space on campus. In a few cases, colleges have negotiated agreements with students to end them, but in most places, there either were no negotiations or they broke down, and administrators are now using discipline.
Vanderbilt, meanwhile, expelled three students in early April who helped lead a 21-hour sit-in in a main campus building calling for divestment from Israel. Vanderbilt’s provost wrote in a statement that “student choices and decisions can lead to serious and costly consequences.” Katie Rueff, a first-year student at Cornell University, with the pro-Palestinian art installation she helped organize.
“I’m losing the second semester of my college career for this,” she said. “It does suck when it’s your second semester of college and, for practicing your rights of freedom of expression, you are losing $40,000 of tuition. It sucks, but I think it’s worth it. Our demands are very, very important. We need Cornell to stop investing in genocide.”
“Suspension and loss of money and loss of time was really upsetting, but losing my daughter would be worse,” he said in an interview.Michael Lee-Chang, a sophomore who has been involved in protests at California State University at Sacramento, said he has not been threatened with suspension but worries he might be. He’s already on probation for something unrelated to the protests, and he cannot afford to be expelled.
Since then, almost no schools had pursued these kinds of tactics until now, said Jones, the Columbia lecturer. Instead, he said, administrators were “highly tolerant” of student movements calling for ethnic-studies programs or urging schools to divest from private prison companies or fossil fuels, even making high-profile concessions to students’ demands in some cases.
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