Police Repression Is the Problem, Not the Solution

In recent days, students at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States, Europe and Australia have erected Gaza-solidarity encampments on campus grounds in support of Palestinian self-determination and liberation. The encampments follow months of protests and campaigns organized by chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and other student organizations working in coalition to demand institutional transparency and divestment from the Israeli apartheid regime.

From the first-person perspectives offered on official social media accounts by involved student organizations, the encampments serve as “liberated zones” in which community care, political education, radical intercommunalism and other peaceful exercises of solidarity take place. They have also served as sites of possibility to imagine new worlds and modes of higher education as a life-affirming institution. Most importantly, however, the encampments are intended to be a critical reminder to remain focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and U.S. higher education’s financial relationship to war profiteering, including weapons manufacturing.

In response, many of these institutions have mobilized armed university and municipal police to repress students’ activism, resulting in massive arrests of students and faculty and reports of brutalization of protesters. At Indiana University, for example, police snipers were reportedly spotted on top of campus buildings at various times over the last several days. In some instances, the decision to call in police was made unilaterally by senior administrators and without respect to important processes of shared governance. Institutions have made these moves while also affirming, albeit hypocritically, their “unwavering commitment” to academic freedom, freedom of speech and protest in official university communications. To be sure, freedom for Palestine (and Palestinians) is the ever-apparent exception.

Hidden behind the rhetoric of campus safety and security in the United States, the surveillance and detention of those speaking out for Palestinian rights and lives on campuses is representative of a much deeper investment in policing by universities across the country. As scholars who examine campus policing, higher education law and institutional repression of student activism, we find the aforementioned actions by colleges and universities deeply concerning and reprehensible abuses of power. In no uncertain terms, these escalations by college and university leaders present potentially fatal consequences for otherwise peaceful acts of civil disobedience, lest we forget the events at North Carolina A&T University in 1969 or Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970 that collectively led to the killing of seven students and injuries to many more engaged in political activism.

As faculty who teach many of the students engaged in these demonstrations and protests, we are also deeply invested in their learning and development so they can impact the world around them in positive ways. To that end, these liberated zones represent students applying what many have learned as a consequence of their enrollment in classes that brought them into conversation with leading anti-colonial thinkers like Charisse Burden-Stelly, Geo Maher, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Noura Erakat and others. And yet, institutions are moving to violently punish them for exercising political agency in accordance with the often espoused (and seldom realized) institutional values of equity, inclusion and justice.

Karma Nabulsi, an emeritus fellow in politics and international relations at the University of Oxford, coined the term “scholasticide” to name the systemic obliteration of education in Palestine by Israel through the arrest, detention and killing of educators, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure. Since October 2023, 12 of the existing universities in Gaza have been destroyed by Israeli military action, leaving about 90,000 students without access to postsecondary learning. Additionally, numerous Palestinian scholars have been killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza, including the internationally renowned writer Refaat Alareer, who appears to have been deliberately targeted. Earlier this month, the feminist Palestinian academic and Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested by Israeli police for alleged incitements to violence. As pro-Palestine organizers have repeatedly pointed out, U.S. universities are far from politically neutral and often maintain investments and financial-management strategies that actively fund companies that profit from death and destruction in Gaza.

We are witnessing the other side of scholasticide in Palestine in the targeted violence against pro-Palestine supporters on U.S. colleges and universities. These deliberate acts of institutional aggression demonstrate an ongoing willingness of the U.S. (and other Western allies) to assault, batter, and subject to various elements of state violence its own residents and citizens on behalf of a foreign nation. In many ways, these actions represent the deployment of repressive military tactics commonly enacted by Western governments to control colonized territories, what philosophers have described as an imperial boomerang.

We find it important to remind higher education stakeholders that university policies, including those related to time, place and manner of protests, are not laws. And though violations of such policies may be subject to due process and adjudication in campus conduct proceedings, they are in no way justifiable reasons for mobilizing police and weaponizing state power to enforce compliance and campus order. To do so, as many institutions have done, is not only a blatant disregard of their commitments to preparing students to engage in a diverse and participatory democracy, but a dangerous demonstration of fascist authoritarianism. This is especially true given many of these very institutions’ purported efforts to rethink campus safety in the wake of widespread police violence amplified by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

While not unthinkable, it is unconscionable for colleges and universities to meet peaceful demonstration with riot gear and armed police. This is why we implore university leaders to stop unleashing police on students and encampments immediately. Their authorization to use force resulting in serious bodily injury—and possibly death—only increases the likelihood that members of the campus community will be irreparably harmed. Furthermore, we urge university governing boards and others responsible for university finances to immediately divest from companies furthering death and destruction in Palestine, which should be accompanied by resolutions that affirm the call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Given the significant resources at their disposal, university leadership should also provide protection and material support to Palestinian scholars and students currently subject to harassment, on campus and beyond. Finally, we demand college and university provosts reaffirm and vigorously protect students’ and scholars’ academic freedom through defending their rights to speak out against imperialism, genocide, and settler occupation in Palestine.