American campuses have cooled off – but for how long?

What a difference a summer can make. In  May, Jodi Rudoren, editor of The Forward,  described how “it feels like a massive understatement to say that the pro-Palestine protests on Yale and other campuses nationwide spun out of control this week. Some 2,000 people have been arrested at dozens of schools across the country. Finals are being cancelled or postponed.”

Indeed, it is hard to forget the campus upheavals of the 2023-24 academic year, the exclusion and harassment of Jewish students, and the blatant and thinly-veiled antisemitic sloganeering.

Yet, as the new year opens in the US, Rudoren wrote of a campus tour of Brown University where “there was nary a sign of the encampment or hunger strike protesting Israel’s war in Gaza that had roiled the place last spring. No Palestinian flags, no graffiti about genocide.

“The only signs I saw on the main quad warned those gathered for orientation programs that photos were being taken to commemorate the proceedings. Oh, and a bunch of bulletin boards had fliers advertising Shabbat dinners.”

This change reflects not only the cooling-off period provided by summer break and 10-12 weeks away from campus, but also the nature of the process of university education itself.

Each summer, the oldest cohort graduates and leaves, removing the most mature, most competent, and often the most committed from campus activism. They are replaced by a crop of freshly minted high school graduates. Passions ebb and flow, issues that are compelling one year lose their lustre the next.

I recall a five-or six-year period, from the late 1980s when campus activism at the University of North Carolina, near my then-home, shifted from anti-apartheid to opposition to CIA recruitment on campus to protesting the Gulf War to protecting the rain forest.

Many will recall the international student climate strike, held five years ago this month, when an estimated 100,000 students in Melbourne alone forsook classes on a Friday afternoon to rally in support of the climate action movement spurred by Greta Thunberg. Sadly, we have not heard much from them lately.

The bellwether for sustained campus activism was during the Vietnam War, when campus protests continued for nearly a decade. However, the innate fluidity of changing student bodies was unified by the military draft, which conscripted over two million young Americans between 1965 and 1972.

None of which is to discount the continuation of concern over the Gaza War, the humanitarian catastrophe it entails, and the cause of Palestinian rights and statehood.

Contributing to a less volatile 2024-25 school year will be changes the universities have made in how they deal with protests. After flailing about in the face of the initial surge of protests, various universities have limited or prohibited encampments and clarified regulations around harassment and hate speech.

At Columbia, only those with valid IDs can enter campus. The University of California system has banned masking to conceal identity.

In sporadic and relatively small-scale incidents this month, university officials have been quick to act. As summarised by Rudoren, “Cornell condemned the anti-Israel vandalism to its Day Hall; MIT’s president denounced the distribution of fliers promoting the antisemitic ‘Mapping Project’; and administrators at the University of Michigan thwarted the student government’s refusal to fund clubs until the school divests from Israel by funding the clubs itself.”

Another factor, as described by Rudoren, is that “the dramatic changes in US politics have taken some of the wind out of a movement in which Gaza had become a proxy for a panoply of complaints from the American Left. You could see this clearly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, where pro-Palestinian protests fell far short of expectations and hardly distracted from the proceedings.”

Rudoren continued: the Gaza movement on campus last spring was, in many ways, a collective scream from the Left over all that is wrong with the world”. How else to explain the prevalence, for example, of “Queers for Palestine” banners in which people whose lives would be at risk in Hamas-controlled Gaza and many other Muslim countries find common cause with those who would readily slaughter them along with the Nova Festival attendees?

For Jewish students, the return to campus is not without trepidation. McGill University student Sophie Block wrote in The Forward that “for Jewish students like me, our return to campus is filled with dread.”

She describes poignantly her response to a fellow student asking how she spent her summer: “I panicked, then deflected. ‘A day camp counsellor in Toronto,’ I said. I couldn’t mention my Birthright trip, internship in Israel, or being a counsellor at my Jewish Zionist overnight summer camp in Nova Scotia. 

“I couldn’t mention my summer plans, because McGill was home to some of the most virulent pro-Palestinian protests and the first encampment in Canada. When I got dressed for my first day of classes this week, returning to McGill as a sophomore, I decided against wearing a Magen David necklace.”

She asks, “why must security guards be on watch in a community of people mostly my age, all there for education and the supposed free flow of ideas?”

Despite the new regulations, protests continue in the streets surrounding the Columbia campus although at a much smaller scale than last year, “simmering” rather than “boiling over” as The Guardian described it. And, while banners calling to “bring the war home” were raised outside the Baruch College Hillel, Arno Rosenfeld, reporting in The Forward, points out that there were fewer than 30 protesters out of a student body of 250,000 across the City University of New York system (of which Baruch is a part).

The big test for the new campus rules and the current campus climate will come on and around the anniversary of the October 7 attack. While Jewish groups will be, as a group in Montreal put it, organising vigils and memorials to “honour the resilience, heroism and unity of our people, while paying tribute and remembering the precious lives lost”, rest assured that the most fervent opponents of Israel and supporters of Hamas have plans in place to rekindle their movement.

Meanwhile, as reported in The New York Times, a recent vigil at Cornell honouring the six dead hostages proceeded without disruption. At the University of Pennsylvania, where a pro-Palestinian encampment ended with about 33 arrests, including nine students, last semester, there were no banners, posters or protesters greeting students on their return this month.

Certainly, there is plenty of cause for protest targeting both Israel and Hamas, on campus and in the community. But let us hope that such protests will be held according to Western liberal values of respect, dialogue, inclusion, and what Sophie Block called “the free flow of ideas”, values that Israel, at its best, can embody, and that Hamas seeks to destroy.

READ MORE

Universities are trying a new strategy on Israel and Gaza: Say nothing (JTA)
“Institutional neutrality” is now a popular tool for schools. But will it help Jews on campus?

Tensions simmer – but don’t boil over – as Columbia students return to campus (Guardian)
Smaller pro-Palestinian protests continue in new semester amid ramped-up security, but chaos of spring has faded

Columbia University term starts with protests and security (BBC)
Police said there were at least two arrests on the first day of term but characterised the gatherings as ‘peaceful’.