Why Students Are Disrupting Career Fairs

Pro-Palestinian protest activity has declined on college campuses this semester, at least compared to the tumultuous events of last spring.

But several of the demonstrations that resulted in student sanctions this fall have taken place at university career fairs, where activists gathered to protest weapons manufacturers and other companies with ties to the Israeli government or military. Many are the same companies that pro-Palestinian student protesters have demanded their universities divest from over the past year, albeit with little success.

Student protesters gathered at a Tufts University career fair on Sept. 27, opposing the presence of organizations like nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labs, a research center funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. Prior to the protest, the university reported that spray-painted pro-Palestinian messages appeared on the doors of the campus’s Gantcher Center, where the fair was held. The campus Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which has since been suspended due to an Instagram post that university officials said encouraged violence, denied involvement in the Center’s graffiti to the campus’s student newspaper.

“Tufts’ complicity in genocide must end. As students attending an institution that has funded the destruction of every single university in Gaza, we have a moral and political imperative to disrupt business as usual,” a representative of Tufts University’s SJP explained in a written statement to the student newspaper, The Tufts Daily. “That is why we protested the career fair, and why we will not allow the people who fund and arm genocide to have another moment of peace.”

Patrick Collins, a university spokesman, told Inside Higher Ed that the “very small” group of protesters “had minimal impact on the fair itself,” which he said had the largest ever turnout for a career fair at Tufts.

“The university recognizes that because our student body is so diverse, our students’ professional interests will also be varied,” he wrote in an email. “As a result, the university aims to make available to students a broad array of internships, part-time jobs, and full-time opportunities. The presence of any particular employer does not mean the university endorses them. It is up to each individual student to make choices that are in keeping with their personal interests and values.”

The MIT Lincoln Labs did not respond to a request for comment, nor did any other of the protested companies referenced in this article.

A protest at a career fair at Harvey Mudd College, part of California’s Claremont Colleges, allegedly turned violent when protesters pushed a table into staff members who were registering students for the event and shoved past other employees, according to a statement by college president Harriet B. Nembhard and other administrators.

In the statement, the administrators said the protest could lead to sanctions for the participants.

“We are deeply concerned that protests on our campus have escalated resulting in physical harm and confrontation between protesters and members of our staff,” they wrote. “While we remain committed to respecting—and supporting—the right to protest, we must ensure the safety and wellbeing of our students, staff and faculty.”

Mudders Against Murder, the student organization behind the demonstration, later hosted its own careers event on Sunday, a panel featuring 11 alumni, which was advertised as an opportunity to “come learn about how to navigate the job market while maintaining ethical standards.”

Impacts on Campus

Protesting job fairs has a long history in U.S. higher education. Student activists have traditionally demonstrated against companies they consider environmentally unsound, as well as military recruiters, whose presence on campus they see as predatory; they have also targeted governmental agencies they find objectionable, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a similar vein, pro-Palestinian protesters have sought to disrupt career fairs as a way to express their opposition to their universities’ partnerships with companies that they see as complicit in committing violence against Palestinians.

Over the past month, career fair protests have occurred at Northeastern University, Case Western Reserve University, Temple University and MIT, according to student and local news outlets. At MIT, recruiters from Lockheed Martin left the event after a large banner reading “LOCKHEED KILLS CHILDREN IN GAZA” was unfurled over the space, according to an op-ed that two members of the MIT Coalition for Palestine wrote in the student newspaper, The Tech. At Cornell University, a career fair protest in September resulted in sanctions for 19 protesters; one international graduate student was almost disenrolled for his participation, which would have resulted in his deportation back to the U.K.

Since Oct. 7 of last year, career fair protests have impacted only a small minority of campuses, according to research by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which represents both college career centers and the employers who work with them; of the 40 percent of campuses that told NACE they’d had protests at their institution, only 21 percent said it impacted recruiting efforts on campus. Similarly, NACE found that only 14 percent of employers said they were very or extremely concerned about recruiting on campus.

Still, some campuses and employers have taken steps to prepare for potential unrest during recruitment events—job fairs as well as information sessions intended to give students an opportunity to ask deeper questions about a particular company.

On the university side, efforts have included deploying more security personnel for events—as Harvey Mudd College did when it caught wind of the planned protest, according to the administrators’ statement—or in extreme circumstances, switching from an in-person to a virtual job fair.

Meanwhile, employers are teaching recruiters how to react to criticism from student activists.

“It puts the representative from that company in a very difficult position … these aren’t necessarily folks that can speak for the entire company, they’re speaking for a particular function,” Shawn VanDerziel, NACE’s president and CEO, told Inside Higher Ed. “The recruiters will do the best they can to open up to questions and answer what it is they can so they can continue on and provide the opportunity to the students who are there to learn from them to continue to learn from them.”

An extremely small number of universities—about 1 percent—reported in the NACE survey that they have given in to student demands to bar certain companies from campus.

“When we’re advising colleges on these decisions when it comes to these controversies, they have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of these employers recruiting on campus,” VanDerziel said. “It’s especially difficult if the college has majors and a student body that’s naturally curious about and qualified for positions with companies in those particular industries.”