May 3, 2024

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin erred when she authorized a police raid Wednesday on a well-organized encampment by student advocates for peace and justice in Gaza on Library Mall.

The raid, which led to 34 arrests and several injuries of protesters and officers, was ill-conceived and unnecessary, as have been similar raids on a number of campuses across the country. It was also pointless, as the encampment was reestablished within minutes of the departure of the officers.

But Mnookin got things right Thursday when she met with students and faculty members who are associated with the protest. By most accounts, the meeting was productive — resulting in an agreement to meet again within 24 hours. According to participants in the session, there will be no further police action for the time being.

That should be the goal going forward.

Mnookin and the UW-Madison community should strive for a result similar to the one achieved Thursday at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, where university officials and protest organizers agreed to disband an encampment while allowing ongoing protests that do not disrupt final exams and graduation ceremonies.

The Star-Tribune reported: “University of Minnesota Interim President Jeff Ettinger told students and faculty Thursday that a deal has been reached to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment that had set up on the Twin Cities campus for three days. The announcement came after Ettinger and others held a series of meetings with the leaders of student groups who had been calling on the U to divest from companies with ties to Israel, provide amnesty for people arrested during protests and meet other demands.”

Those are similar demands to the ones made by students who have been active in the Madison encampment, including those associated with groups such as University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Young Democratic Socialists of America. The Wisconsinites support a cease-fire in Gaza as an immediate response to the crisis that has resulted from the Israeli assault on the enclave, which has left roughly 35,000 Palestinians dead. At the same time, they are also seeking divestment by the university system from companies selling war-related products to Israel.

No one says that achieving these goals will be easy. But there should be an agreement that honest discussions about sincerely advanced demands are preferable to an ever-escalating cycle of police raids and arrests.

Deescalating conflict around protests was possible, but many colleges turned to law enforcement instead.

By Abdallah Fayyad | abdallah.fayyad@vox.com  , Vox, May 3, 2024

Abdallah Fayyad is a correspondent at Vox, where he covers the impacts of social and economic policies. He previously served on the Boston Globe editorial board.

For weeks, police have been arriving on college campuses from New York to California at the behest of university officials, sweeping pro-Palestinian protests and arresting more than 2,100 people. They’ve come in riot gear, zip-tied students and hauled them off, and in some high-profile instances, acted violently.

The aggressive crackdown started when Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, summoned New York Police Department officers to campus in mid-April to bring an end to the student encampment there, one day after she promised Congress she would quash unauthorized protests and discipline students for antisemitism. 

That police intervention temporarily dismantled the encampment, and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 protesters on trespassing charges. 

But it was also a strategic failure on the part of the university administration. If the university was trying to avoid disruption, it has ended up inviting it instead. 

In the days since, as support for the protesters has swelled both at Columbia and at hundreds of colleges across the country, students have set up encampments, organized rallies, and in a few cases escalated their protests by occupying university buildings. Similar protests even cropped up in other countries. 

In response, other universities have taken Columbia’s lead and cracked down on these protests, which seek to end colleges’ investments in firms supporting Israel’s occupation and its ongoing assault on Gaza. Nearly 50 universities have called the authorities to intervene, and students and faculty have been beaten, tear gassed, and shot at with rubber bullets by police. 

This week, when Columbia escalated its police response, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that “officers threw a protester down the stairs … and slammed protesters with barricades.” A police officer also fired a gun in a campus building, and others threatened to arrest student journalists.

This can only be described as a major overreaction to student protests. But it also didn’t happen in a vacuum. The police response falls squarely in a long pattern of colleges suppressing pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel speech — one that dates back many decades. Currently, universities aren’t applying their rules equally, singling out only some student advocacy as unacceptable campus speech and, in some cases, even changing rules to specifically target these protests. (The Department of Education is now reportedly investigating Columbia for anti-Palestinian discrimination.)

While schools including Columbia were quick to call in law enforcement, however, a few other schools have taken an alternative approach — with vastly different outcomes. Administrators at Brown, Northwestern, and several others negotiated with students, allowed them to continue protesting, or even reached deals to end the encampments by meeting some of the protesters’ demands. As a result, they’ve avoided the kind of disruption and chaos unfolding at universities that called the police. 

These divergent outcomes among schools that relied on police and those that didn’t offer an important lesson on how universities should manage campus activism, while ensuring students’ safety and protecting speech.

BY SCOTT GORDON ● POLITICS ● MAY 1, 2024 

Wednesday morning’s crackdown included brutal attacks on protestors, arrests without charges, and a dubious narrative.

Perhaps it was an example of progressive policing or Madison-centric policing or the “Madison Model.” In any case, a pro-Palestine encampment protest on UW-Madison’s Library Mall got through two overwhelmingly peaceful days and nights—full of speeches, chants, praying, reading, sharing food, card games, and studying—before police violently attempted to break it up on Wednesday morning. 

A bit before 7 a.m., officers began ordering protestors to remove their tents, then began moving to tear down tents themselves, and arresting some of the protestors who refused to leave. Over the next two hours, dozens of officers from the UW-Madison Police Department, Madison Police Department, Dane County Sheriff’s Office, and Wisconsin State Patrol—many equipped with riot shields and some with tear-gas launchers—pressed in on the holdouts. At times the cops had groups of protestors more or less fully surrounded, essentially trapping the very people they were ordering to disperse. 

What I witnessed on Wednesday morning was pretty unambiguous: Police manhandling community members (including UW-Madison faculty and students) who peacefully stood their ground, refusing to voluntarily break up an encampment that UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin could have allowed but chose not to. Some of those arrested had locked arms to form a protective circle around the remaining tents, a group that included faculty members who wanted to protect students from arrest and police violence. 

MAY 1, 2024 BY CHALI PITTMAN AND FAYE PARKS

UW Madison Professor Samer Alatout asked police to leave students at the encampment alone this morning. This is what the police did to him.

Professor pinned on the ground being arrested at @UWMadison, asking police to leave students alone pic.twitter.com/pr72TA6eQW

— Tyler Katzenberger (@TylerKatzen) May 1, 2024