The Anatomy of a University’s Encampment Negotiation

Outside the chancellor’s office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, more than 100 protesters laid down side by side. Many had their palms up, painted red. Some wore graduation robes. Two of them, perched on a statue of Abraham Lincoln, held a banner listing Palestinian children who have died during the Israel-Hamas war.

“Disclose, divest. We will not stop, we will not rest,” they chanted. One shouted at the university’s dean of students, who was observing from a nearby sidewalk, with an expletive.

It was Thursday, the day before graduation weekend started. Negotiations between student protesters and administrators over demands to divest from companies associated with Israel had broken down. But just behind the demonstration, student protesters and administrators were trying again.

On Friday, they reached an agreement — hours before commencement ceremonies began.

UW-Madison is one of more than 90 campuses where students have set up encampments, refusing to leave until their institutions agree to cut all financial ties with companies that have aided Israel and its military. Most colleges have ignored student demands or responded with mass arrests and disciplinary proceedings. Others have taken a more diplomatic approach, entering tedious negotiations that have often stalled out.

Over a week of meetings, which started after university police arrested over 30 protesters during the first days of the demonstration, UW-Madison administrators argued that they lacked control over divestment given the structure of the university’s endowment. Students insisted that officials weren’t engaging with them in a frank manner.

In the eventual agreement, administrators made some concessions, saying they would provide more support for students from war-torn communities. They also said they’d set up meetings for students to discuss divestment with the UW Foundation, which controls institutional investments. In exchange, students said they would clear their encampment by the end of Friday, which they did.

What happened at UW-Madison reflects the precarious relations between campus leaders and student activists as they navigate charged conversations about Israel and Gaza that have no easy answers. The outcome also suggests that, in some cases, there could be a path forward.

On April 29, 12 days after Columbia University set up an encampment that led to the arrests of over 100 protesters, pro-Palestinian student groups at UW-Madison set up their own, complete with food, a medical station, a large bookshelf, and signs listing their demands for the university.

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A few hours after the encampment began, university leaders gave student protesters an ultimatum: They’d gladly meet with organizers — after the tents came down.

But the tents stayed up and the students stayed put. Dahlia Saba, a graduate student and spokesperson for the encampment, said the protesters thought the university’s offer was a “bad faith” move considering the group had been protesting for divestment for months.

“What we’ve seen here and other campuses is that the university does not give anything away for free,” Saba said. “It meets with us and tries to work with us when we have sufficient pressure on the university.”

Administrators spent several hours talking with students in the encampment during its first two days. They asked protesters to remove the tents and handed out fliers that outlined campus policies, according to The Badger Herald, a student newspaper. At 7 a.m. on day three, the university called in its police department to dismantle the tents. Assisted by local law enforcement, the police arrested 34 people, most of whom did not receive citations. Four individuals, including one affiliated with the university, were charged.

Shortly afterward, protesters set up a new encampment in the same spot. It grew in size from around 35 tents to 50 by the end of the first week.

The police involvement sparked backlash and national news coverage, and administrators appeared to drop their ultimatum about tent removal.

The day after the arrests, faculty and student representatives met with administrators for the first time. Over six days, a rotating cast of students, staff, and faculty supporting the encampment participated in hours-long meetings.

“I think they got enough pressure to start negotiating in a peaceful manner,” said MGR Govindarajan, a UW-Madison senior who is the city council member for the campus area and has helped with negotiations. “That’s kind of what led to that change in perspective there.”

The protesters wanted the university to agree to divestment from all entities engaged in arms manufacturing, operating in “occupied territories,” and involved with the management of private prisons. Students were also calling for the adoption of a process for ethical investments and routine disclosure of investments; amnesty for those cited and arrested at the encampment; a promise of no further “retaliatory actions” against student protesters; and a commitment to reduce investments in policing in exchange for bolstering services like affordable housing and tuition reimbursement for students of color.

The talks were tense at times, said Samer Alatout, an associate professor of community and environmental sociology at UW-Madison and the faculty adviser for the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The university characterized the students’ divestment demands as a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the chancellor’s abilities and role. UW-Madison’s endowment is managed by the University of Wisconsin Foundation, a private nonprofit that is governed by its own board.

“The chancellor’s pre-endorsement of any content on such questions — regardless of her personal or institutional views — would be an inappropriate end run around important shared governance internal processes which she, and her team, take very seriously,” Jennifer L. Mnookin, the UW-Madison chancellor, wrote in a statement in between meetings with protesters. “This is not something up for negotiation.”

In Saba’s view, the university had been putting up the roadblocks. “They are not forthright in telling us what they can do,” the graduate student said while the talks remained in flux. “They only tell us what they cannot do, and that’s why negotiations have been difficult.”

On Tuesday, administrators proposed a resolution, agreeing to facilitate a meeting between the students and the UW Foundation, without any commitment toward divestment. A day later, encampment representatives walked out of the meeting.

“For the moment, campus leaders remain open to further discussions, but are deeply disappointed at this outcome,” the university wrote in a short statement.

Later on Wednesday, administrators sent another statement emphasizing that they remained open to meeting with students and had no imminent plans to bring law enforcement back to campus.

At that point, the protesters recognized that Mnookin couldn’t “wield the policy levers” of the UW Foundation, which the group views as “inherently flawed” and “unaccountable” to its constituents, Saba said. Yet, she added, students viewed the administration’s insistence that it lacked the power to incite change as “disingenuous” — both because of Mnookin’s role as UW-Madison’s leader and the university’s past decision to divest from companies associated with South Africa the 1980s during apartheid.

Alatout, the faculty adviser, who was among those arrested this month and had stepped back from participating in the negotiations, then pitched a Hail Mary. He pleaded with administrators to hold another meeting with students.

The chancellor agreed, and spoke with students again starting Thursday morning.

During that meeting, Saba said, “we were able to clarify the chancellor’s position vis-á-vis making material change on this campus for the people of Gaza.”

An Agreement Is Reached

As parents and soon-to-be graduates began to flood the streets of Madison ahead of commencement, there was a breakthrough.

With a more candid response from the chancellor, Alatout said, students felt more heard than they had for the past several months, especially with a clear idea of what the administration’s power looks like.

“[The] administration is listening to them more, and not only listening to them, but also appreciating the difficulties that they are going through themselves,” Alatout said. “How exceptional the circumstance that they are trying to deal with, which is the genocide and the suffering in the West Bank.”

The new agreement followed the same parameters of the original proposal — that administrators will only facilitate meetings between the foundation and students to discuss disclosing some of the university’s investment practices and divesting from companies associated with Israel.

According to the agreement, the university also committed to “enhancing its engagement with and support for scholars and students impacted by war, violence, occupation, and displacement, including in places such as Gaza and Ukraine”; requesting that the UW-Madison Police Department “use its discretion” in reviewing the May 1 removal of the encampment; and asking the student-conduct office to consider the agreement “a favorable mitigating factor in the resolution of student disciplinary processes.”

In return, students were required to remove their tents, refrain from disrupting any commencement activities, and respect UW-Madison’s policies in the future, including its ban on encampments.

“The Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association appreciates the thoughtful work by campus leadership on this topic and looks forward to conversations in the weeks ahead,” a spokesperson for the UW Foundation said in a statement to The Chronicle.

Around a dozen colleges across the country have struck similar deals with students, often outlining steps toward divestment, with the caveat that students must remove all traces of their demonstrations before commencement ceremonies.

Even after reaching agreements, though, administrators have continued to face criticism.

Some students at UW-Madison had opposed the university’s decision to negotiate with pro-Palestinian students. On May 5, the chancellor and her leadership team invited a group of Jewish students to meet with them and discuss their experiences on campus.

The students brought with them a nearly 26-page document, including a list of incidents where they said students in the encampment had harassed Jewish students or made them feel unwelcome. They also discussed a list of 12 requests, including ensuring that commencement remains “free of disruptions,” that students from the encampment will not be able to make up coursework or exams, and that all negotiations include a Jewish or Israeli voice.

The agreement that UW-Madison reached with student protesters feels “unjust,” said Ben Newman, one of the students who met with administrators. According to Newman, administrators shouldn’t have been meeting with or agreeing to any of the protesters’ demands, especially given that they repeatedly broke the university’s demonstration policies.

“I don’t understand why people who commit intentional acts of harassment or antisemitism just get the leniency here and the leniency generally that they’ve gotten for so many days,” Newman said.

Elsewhere, similar agreements also haven’t eliminated tensions.

Rutgers University at New Brunswick adopted all of students’ demands except two regarding divestment, including establishing an Arab Cultural Center and providing amnesty to students and faculty disciplined during the demonstration. At a state budget meeting the next week, lawmakers questioned Jonathan Holloway, the Rutgers president, about his agreements with protesters and whether he was adequately supporting Jewish students.

Northwestern University agreed to create an advisory committee that will make its investment plans more transparent, among other things. But the university then faced criticism from multiple Jewish advocacy groups; several have called on Michael Schill, Northwestern’s president, to resign. The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also opened an investigation into the university’s handling of alleged antisemitic incidents.

Holloway and Schill are scheduled to sit before the House education committee on May 23 during its third hearing on college administrators’ handling of alleged antisemitism on campus. The committee initially invited the presidents of Yale University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to the hearing, but changed course last week and summoned the leaders of Rutgers and Northwestern instead. They will join the chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, where counterprotesters violently accosted a pro-Palestinian encampment this month.

For now, at least, UW-Madison appears to have reached a détente.

In a statement on Friday, students from the encampment said that while the agreement does not achieve their ultimate goal of divestment from companies associated with Israel, it does reach “material gains” for Palestinians in the West Bank and on UW-Madison’s campus. In exchange, the statement said, students will dismantle the encampment “slowly and deliberately.” The students added that they would not disrupt commencement.

The main graduation ceremony proceeded as scheduled on Saturday; around 20 students turned their backs to Chancellor Mnookin while she was speaking, and later, a group of students carrying a Palestinian flag left the ceremony, escorted by police officers.

“Through the power and momentum we have built through this encampment,” the protesters’ Friday statement said, “we will continue the fight for divestment through the summer, fall, and beyond.”