Pro-Palestinian protests at three colleges in the past several days led to more than 100 arrests for trespassing or destruction of property. Several students were also suspended for violating their college’s policies and protest restrictions.
The mass arrests at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington may signal a shift in how college leaders are responding to protests, experts say. Since last spring’s widespread protests over the war in Gaza, college leaders have drawn fierce criticism for being too slow to dismantle disruptive encampments or call in police to arrest those violating the law. Now, they’re eager to show federal authorities that they’re serious about stopping antisemitism and unruly protests.
In these recent incidents, college leaders were quicker to call for law enforcement, said Will Pelfrey Jr., a professor of homeland security, emergency preparedness, and criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University. Pelfrey, who researches policing, thinks the swift responses stem from the Trump administration’s scrutiny of colleges for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students.
Katherine S. Cho, an assistant professor in higher education at Loyola University Chicago, said it’s too early to compare whether college leaders are summoning the police faster than last year. But she did observe that pro-Palestinian protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have attracted harsher scrutiny and swifter repercussions than protests on other topics.
The New York Police Department arrested 78 people Wednesday at a Columbia University library where about 100 protesters gathered, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported. All have reportedly been released from custody. Video footage posted on X shows protesters chanting “Free Palestine” and vandalizing library property. Campus security guards refused to let protesters, who wore masks and keffiyehs, exit the library unless they showed their identification, leading to an hours-long standoff. Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, went to the library to witness the events before she called in the city’s police force.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the federal government will review the visa statuses of the “trespassers and vandals” who protested at the library. “Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation,” he wrote on X.
At the University of Washington, in Seattle, protesters occupied an engineering building on Monday, demanding that the university divest from the aerospace and defense company Boeing. The protesters set fires in dumpsters and blocked entrances and exits to the building, and about 30 were arrested, according to a university statement. Damage in one equipment room amounted to $1 million, the Washington State Standard reported.
Three federal agencies announced the next day that they would begin a review of the university’s federal grants and contracts in response to the incident. “The university must do more to deter future violence and guarantee that Jewish students have a safe and productive learning environment,” the agencies wrote.
At Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, nine protesters, including a current and former student, were arrested and seven students suspended for refusing to leave and dismantle an encampment set up by the suspended chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Protesters called for the university to divest from all companies “that profit from the Zionist entity’s occupation of Historic Palestine.” Swarthmore’s president told her campus that she decided to call in local law enforcement when more people unaffiliated with Swarthmore arrived at the encampment and protesters seemed unwilling to negotiate. “I felt we had no choice but to seek outside assistance from local law enforcement,” she wrote.
The presence of protesters from outside the campus community may have also contributed to college leaders’ calling in police more quickly, as such situations often heighten their security concerns, Cho said.
Historically, college leaders have tried to deal peacefully with protesters, Pelfrey said. The goal is usually to get protest leaders and administrators to talk through their concerns, with force as the last resort. Now, Pelfrey said college leaders are less inclined to follow that strategy. “There’s a different playbook,” he said. He called their new strategy “get this gone as soon as possible.”
Cho has also observed a shift in how universities view and treat student protesters. “(At) universities that are under high surveillance, which is a university like Columbia, student protests are no longer viewed as a mechanism of learning, conversation, and civic engagement, but are viewed as problems that need to be shut down immediately to receive less scrutiny,” she said.
In statements about the protests, the presidents of Columbia, Swarthmore, and the University of Washington described the universities’ attempts to defuse the situations before protesters refused to comply. For Cho, the arrests that followed those attempts do not necessarily mean that protesters have become more disorderly or less willing to negotiate than they were last spring. Instead, it speaks to this generation of protesters’ skepticism of institutions. “Many students have a no-nonsense attitude regarding institutional performativity,” she said.
The statements also struck a firm tone — with all three presidents condemning antisemitism and other forms of harassment — and the arrests suggested a common posture to protests may be emerging. “No college administrator wants arrests to happen,” Pelfrey said. “But if that’s the hammer that will make a protest go away and obviate future protests, then they’re probably willing to wield it.”
