Youssef Hasweh is expected to receive his degree from the University of Chicago on Saturday.
What he received instead was an email from the associate dean of students informing him that because he was under investigation for his participation in a protest camp on the campus block, “your degree will not be awarded until this matter is resolved.”
Like many other student protesters across the country, Mr. Hasweh has been drawn into a kind of disciplinary vacuum. Although he was allowed to attend the graduation, the university is withholding his degree until it determines whether and how to punish him for violating its code of conduct by refusing to vacate an encampment, which police cleared on May 7.
He has already been formally reprimanded by the university for being part of a group that occupied an administration building last year in a protest against the Israel-Hamas war.
The question of how harshly these students should be disciplined cuts deep in academia, where many universities boast a history of student activism on issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid and income inequality. Some faculty members celebrate such activism and encourage students to get involved politically — and have also faced arrest and discipline for it.
Today, however, some students have made a demand from their colleges that is troubling administrators and veterans of past social movements: They want all charges against them, both academic and legal, dropped. Many students have been charged with criminal offenses such as trespassing. Others have faced discipline from their universities, which can range from a warning on their records to suspensions and expulsions.
“Nothing,” he said. As someone who is part Palestinian, he added: “I think it’s hypocritical for them to say we’re subversive when they’re actively investing in a genocide that’s very upsetting to my family.” At Chicago’s graduation on Saturday, dozens of students walked out to express their disapproval of the university’s handling of cases like Mr. Hasweh’s.
When the encampments first sprung up this spring, universities struggled to respond — many tolerated them at first but then sent in the police after students refused repeated orders to disperse. Since Columbia first arrested protesters on April 18, more than 3,000 arrests have been made on campuses across the country, at institutions including Cal State Polytechnic, Humboldt and Emory University.
Now university administrators face a similar conundrum over disciplinary action now that most of the camps have left.
Be too lenient and colleges risk encouraging more camps when students return in the fall. Cracking down too hard—by denying degrees or leaving students with permanent arrest records—may seem too punitive in response to mostly nonviolent protests, and could jeopardize the future of the students universities are supposed to transform into productive citizens.
Some institutions agreed to a lighter approach, with conditions. At Johns Hopkins University, for example, the administration said it would end disciplinary proceedings for students who had set up an encampment if they agreed not to set up another or otherwise disrupt campus life.
Others, like Brown, have flatly refused requests for clemency. Activists and their allies had called on the university to demand that local law enforcement officials drop criminal charges against 41 students arrested in December during a sit-in.
In response, Brown President Christina Paxson wrote to the student body that those arrested had made an “informed choice” and added that asking to be exonerated is inconsistent with how politics is supposed to work. disobedience. “The practice of civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of decisions on matters of conscience,” he said.
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 that during workshops on nonviolent protest, he would ask participants, “Can you stand the test of prison?”
“One who breaks an unjust law,” declared Dr. King, “must do so openly, lovingly, and willingly accepting the penalty.”
Paying a personal cost to pursue a cause has historically helped social movements build popular support, according to scholars.
“You’re doing this to stir the conscience of the nation or that institutional power — to square it with what you think is a larger moral imperative,” said Tony Banout, executive director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. of the University of Chicago. .
“I think the tradition is laudable and society has measurably improved because of the activists who are willing to participate in it,” he said.
Civil rights protesters made that cost seem real as they occupied lunch counters and marched peacefully through the streets in costume, often facing brutal police crackdowns in turn.
Few of today’s protesters have faced anything approaching that kind of brutality or punishment. But they say they worry about being identified and harassed — or glorified — and wear masks or coffees to hide their identities. Some refuse to give their names even when sitting across from administrators to negotiate.
Anonymity and the rejection of sanctions could weaken their movement, Dr. Banut said.
“My fear,” he said, “is it actually alienates people and ultimately doesn’t advance the relief of suffering in Gaza.”
The Reverend Al Sharpton, the veteran civil rights activist, said he believes this generation of student protesters is not monolithic, with some willing to accept more responsibility for civil disobedience than others – as in any other generation. But he added that among some protesters, he had detected a sense of entitlement in wanting to avoid consequences.
“When you express the right, then you cannot fight for the disenfranchised,” he said.
As someone who has been arrested multiple times and spent nearly three months in jail for protesting military bombing exercises in Vieques, Mr. Sharpton said he understood why activists would fight the charges against them.
No student is likely to spend months in jail. But, he added, “you have to be prepared to say that the cause is more important than my freedom.”
A genetic change in attitudes toward law enforcement personnel also appears to be a factor in why these students are unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the charges against them. Many experienced their political awakening in the mass uprising after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, when he was in high school. These protests were fueled by a dislike of – and in many cases a desire to abolish – the police.
At George Washington University’s graduation, Nam Lam, an international affairs student, noted with dismay the fences and security checkpoints the school had set up around the school. That, combined with the use of police force to clear a campus encampment, made him feel comfortable.
“It was hard to process, just the heavy police presence and the students pepper-spraying,” Mr Lam said.
Students and their faculty supporters say the disciplinary action against the protesters is really about suppressing free speech — something their university leaders, as self-proclaimed hotbeds of heated debate, should know is wrong.
And some faculty members also see university overreach. Harvard denied degrees to 13 seniors while their disciplinary cases moved forward, prompting hundreds of students to walk out of their graduation ceremony last month.
Ryan Enos, a Harvard government professor who has advised some of the students facing discipline, said the university’s response has been tougher than it has been with camps for other causes, such as Occupy Wall Street, divestment from fossil fuels and supporting a salary proposal. .
“This seems like an over-imposition, a break with precedent,” he said. “And it raises a concern that they are more concerned about the content of the speech than an equal imposition of punishment.”
But Mr. Enos had a reservation. Environmental protests and wage increases are not going to make someone of a particular religion or identity feel uncomfortable.
“There certainly weren’t people on campus who felt threatened by it,” he said, adding that it was reasonable to consider whether any of the protest activities made Jewish students feel threatened.
Any protest movement risks losing public support if its methods are seen as too repugnant or extreme. Rob Wheeler, a sociology professor at Stanford University and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab there, said he believed the student protests had not reached that point.
But even isolated incidents of violent behavior or extreme rhetoric can do damage, he said. “Casual excesses do a lot of damage, drive away natural constituencies and are wrong,” Dr Wheeler said. A study he co-authored concluded that some forms of protest — inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic and vandalism — are effective in helping a movement gain publicity but that these tactics ultimately turn people away.
There has been little consistency across universities in how punishments are administered and how long that process takes. Northwestern University’s president said during a congressional hearing recently that no students had been suspended, but that “multiple” investigations were underway. At the same hearing, Rutgers’ president said the university suspended four. In some more liberal jurisdictions—Chicago and Austin, for example—prosecutors, not university administrators, have dropped trespass charges.
At Yale, Craig Birckhead-Morton learned shortly before graduation that he would receive his degree, even though he had been arrested twice during protests. (If a disciplinary case is still pending at the time of a senior’s graduation, the student’s degree is withheld until the case is resolved.)
“It’s been something I’ve been anxious about, but I feel like there’s no going back on this,” he said. He received an official reprimand.
During Yale’s commencement ceremonies, some students expressed their support for their peers facing charges. One, Lex Schultz, held a banner that read: “Drop all charges.”
JoAnna Daemmrich contributed reporting from Washington and Gaya Gupta from New Haven, Conn.
