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The early months of summer on college campuses are usually bustling with proud parents ready to celebrate students\u2019 years-long efforts to obtain a college degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But this year, many college campuses look very different\u2014and some are eerily empty\u2014as thousands of students<\/a> and even faculty members<\/a> established tent encampments on the lawns of nearly 100 campuses<\/a> in protest of institutional investment in weapons, equipment, and technology that undergird and support the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Protesting students want their universities to sever partnerships and financial programs connected to the Israeli government and military.<\/p>\n Faced with student protestors\u2019 demands, educational institutions are finding themselves between a rock and a hard place. Divestment can be seen as taking sides when universities aim to stay apolitical, and more critically, it can reduce the financial returns that universities rely on to support their operations and activities. For student protestors, the view is that their university\u2014 a moral authority\u2014is profiting from a military campaign they vehemently disagree with. For universities, the view is not nearly as clear cut. The situation means many schools are navigating how to respond to students\u2019 demands and protests, along with the interests of their network of donors\u2014while also managing how their reputations will be affected by each move they make.\u00a0<\/p>\n Antisemitism is also a serious concern, given that the basis for the protests arose after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Some Jewish students have reported that Pro-Palestinian encampments make them feel less safe<\/a> on campus, pointing out that some of the chants protestors have adopted are antisemitic and have been co-opted by Hamas to call for the murder of Jews<\/a>. Although the chant is being used rampantly, for activists, it\u2019s taken on a different meaning,<\/a> but for some Jews it\u2019s a threat.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s an especially complex decision for schools that have large endowments or networks of donors who can influence the investments and financial decisions of an institution. And making it even more difficult, the aggressive crackdown many schools deployed to dismantle student encampments, including police equipped with riot gear<\/a> and military grade weapons<\/a>, has spurred national criticism<\/a> on the handling of protests on campus. The aftermath of these responses is both sizable and expensive: Thousands of people have been arrested<\/a> in relation to campus protests; hundreds of student activists have been suspended or expelled<\/a>; and several schools opted to cancel commencement<\/a> ceremonies<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Archon Fung, a professor who teaches political science and citizenship<\/a> at Harvard Kennedy School, told Fortune<\/em>, \u201ccivil disobedience is, by definition, breaking the rules,\u201d adding that such acts have \u201can important place in democracy.\u201d Fung cited Columbia University\u2019s student protests of 1968 in opposition to the Vietnam War and the school\u2019s expansion into Harlem.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fung explained that historically, student protest encampments have helped successfully end wars and global occupations that many experts now agree were injustices, like the war in Vietnam<\/a> and South African apartheid<\/a>. Fung also recalled how administration responded to student dissent over South African apartheid at his own undergraduate university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he attended in the late 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, he said, the main acts of civil disobedience were calls for \u201cdivestments from South Africa, and occupying buildings, as well as pitching tents, was one of the techniques.\u201d Police were sometimes called to clear those demonstrations, he recalled, but added that administration at the time was more open to dialogues with protestors and that the level of aggression against student demonstrators today is notably more intense.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to imagine any university president having an open debate with a representative of the pro-Palestinian cause, but I do miss that because I think the university should be a place of reason and the exchange of arguments back and forth.\u201d<\/p>\n In the past several months, hundreds of students have established \u201cGaza Solidarity Encampments\u201d at more than 60 college campuses<\/a>\u2014and while the protestors\u2019 demands<\/a> vary at each institution, they largely focus on divestment from Israel, financial transparency, and granting amnesty to students who face disciplinary action over campus activism.\u00a0<\/p>\n Colleges have been rife with student dissent since the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Southern Israel, which killed over 1,200 people<\/a>. Israel\u2019s response, a catastrophic military campaign<\/a> that killed more than 36,000 Palestinians<\/a>, is now entering its eighth month. The encampment students also aim to show solidarity with millions of Palestinian civilians enduring the highest civilian casualty rate of any war<\/a> in the 21st century. As Israel continues its military campaign, which is seen as the most destructive in recent history<\/a>, Palestinians are suffering calamitous levels of disaster, including famine<\/a> and disease outbreaks<\/a>, and a crisis, in which at least a thousand children have lost limbs<\/a> and over 19,000 children have been orphaned<\/a> because of indiscriminate bombing in the war<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The most aggressive campus responses to encampments include authorizing police to mass arrest students and suspending, expelling, and evicting student activists. More than 4,000 people have been arrested<\/a> so far on college campuses across the country, and incidents of disciplinary action are rampant, too. At least 53 students have been suspended and evicted<\/a> from Columbia University this year due to participation in \u201cGaza Solidarity Encampment<\/a>s,\u201d according to Columbia Spectator, <\/em>the university\u2019s publication. The University of Southern California barred a Muslim valedictorian<\/a>, who graduated with a minor in resistance to genocide<\/a>, from delivering the role\u2019s trademark commencement speech.\u00a0<\/p>\n The University of Southern California declined Fortune\u2019s<\/em> request for comment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Donald Saleh<\/a>, who has worked as an enrollment planning strategist and consultant for many universities for the past several decades, many institutions will need to consider how their reputations have been impacted by their response to student demonstrations\u2014especially in terms of retaining incoming prospective students.\u00a0<\/p>\n Saleh told Fortune<\/em>, \u201ca number of institutions that are in the headlines right now about these protests have large enrollments of international students.\u201d\u00a0 They often travel thousands of miles to attend schools and want \u201cto make sure they\u2019re going to be someplace safe.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the police are coming in on these campuses to break up the protests and take down the encampments, they don\u2019t do that without consultation with the leadership of the campus,\u201d Saleh said. \u201cThe reputational concern is that College X<\/a> or University Y could not manage this without having police come in, make arrests, and physically remove people from the campus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n These responses could be a cause of \u201cbig financial concern,\u201d he said, if incoming prospective students decide to attend school elsewhere, which he said could be a common scenario.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the very least, the protests have been affecting how schools engage with admitted students. <\/a>The University of California, San Diego canceled campus tours for at least two days in May after students established encampments<\/a>; student protestors at Washington University in St. Louis interrupted a packed admitted students event<\/a> in the university chapel, unfurling a banner that read \u2018Divest from Palestininan Genocide,\u2019 on April 13; and at New York University, tours were rerouted<\/a> to avoid student encampments.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI would be taking more students off the waitlist to protect against the possibility that some of those students who have already committed are going to leave,\u201d Saleh said, adding that dwindling enrollment numbers can have a financial impact on a university.<\/p>\n Many colleges across the country balance their budgets on a year-to-year basis, he explained, and use the operating plans to predict how many students to enroll and award financial aid packages. When those estimates are \u201cdisrupted in a negative way by events on your campus,\u201d he said, \u201cmissing your target by just 2% or 3% has budgetary implications that ripple through at least for one year, often for more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Another cause of reputational concern for institutions, he said, is how the donors of an institution may respond to how they handle student demonstrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf I\u2019m a donor and I have an affiliation with groups of students who now feel that the campus environment is threatening to them or unsafe for them,\u201d Saleh explained, \u201cmy inclination to donate to that campus is going to be significantly less than it might have been four months ago.\u201d Saleh told Fortune <\/em>he believes this reputational effect is something college administrators, fundraising staff, and alumni affairs employees will be \u201cvery concerned about,\u201d especially as it relates to donors.\u00a0<\/p>\n At Columbia University, for example, more than 200 students were arrested<\/a> during two police raids on April 18 and April 30, the latter of which, coincidentally, is the same day<\/a> 700 students were arrested<\/a> for protesting the divisive Vietnam War and Columbia\u2019s expansion into Harlem more than 50 years ago. As it turns out, Columbia restructured how its administration makes decisions, like police authorization, after those infamous protests\u2014and in authorizing the police on campus this spring, broke those rules explicitly.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n A Columbia University spokesperson told Fortune<\/em> a small group of academic leaders had been in dialogue with student organizers to find a path that would result in the dismantling of the encampment,\u201d but they were not able to come to an agreement.\u00a0<\/p>\n When asked specifically about violating the 1969 pact, a Columbia spokesperson did not respond to several of Fortune\u2019<\/em>s requests for comment.<\/p>\n Fung, the Harvard professor, told Fortune, \u201chaving been on campuses for 20 years and seeing a lot of different campaigns of civil disobedience, I don\u2019t recall anything nearly like this level of police response in the post-Vietnam era.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The level of aggression in school\u2019s responses is also made more egregious considering the student demonstrations have largely been nonviolent and peaceful in nature.<\/p>\n Roosevelt Mont\u00e1s<\/a>, a professor who specializes in American citizenship and has been teaching at Columbia for 30 years, told Fortune<\/em> that \u201creports of violence and intimidation,\u201d by the student protestors are \u201cisolated and very much a minority,\u201d and that many colleges are responding to concerns of safety subjectively, rather than through \u201cdocumentation of incidents.\u201d<\/p>\n All things considered, Fung insists that the right for students to peacefully\u2014which means nonviolently\u2014protest is important.\u00a0 \u201cCivil disobedience is saying, look, the ordinary democratic channels are blocked up. We can\u2019t get a hearing for this great injustice. So we\u2019re going to break the law,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes, it moves society forward.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s an opinion Mont\u00e1s<\/a> shares, too. \u201cStudents are often ahead of the curve on social and cultural issues,\u201d he said. \u201cThis might be one of those issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Several of the world\u2019s largest international organizations have been sounding alarms about the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel\u2019s military campaign in Gaza\u2014the secretary of United Nations<\/a> has been urging<\/a> a cease-fire, and the International Criminal Court<\/a>\u2019s prosecutor announced<\/a> on May 20 that he has requested arrest warrants<\/a> for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his defense chief and three Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many European countries, including France<\/a>, Belgium<\/a>, and Germany<\/a>, announced their governments would enforce the arrest warrants if it becomes issued by the international court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n