Youssef Hasweh expected to receive his degree from the University of Chicago on Saturday.
What he got instead was an email from the associate dean of students informing him that because he was under investigation for his participation in a protest encampment on the campus quad, “your degree will not be conferred until this matter is resolved.” is solved.”
Like dozens of other student protesters across the country, Mr. Hasweh has been dragged into a kind of disciplinary limbo. Although he was allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony, his university is withholding his diploma until they determine whether and how to punish him for violating its code of conduct by refusing to leave a camp, which police cleared on May 7.
He has already been formally reprimanded by the university for being part of a group that busy an administration building last year in a protest against the war between Israel and Hamas.
The question of how rigorously these students should be disciplined cuts deep into academia, where many universities pride themselves on their history of student activism on issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid and income inequality. Some faculty members themselves celebrate this activism and encourage students to become politically involved — and have also been arrested and punished for doing so.
But today, some students have made a demand of their colleges that irritates administrators and veterans of earlier 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 disciplinary action from their universities, ranging from a warning on their records to suspensions and expulsions.
“Nothing,” he said. As someone who is part Palestinian, he added: “I find it hypocritical that they say we are disruptive, while they are actively investing in a genocide that is deeply disruptive to my family.” During the graduation ceremony in Chicago on Saturday, tens students walked out to express their disapproval of the way the university had handled cases like Mr. Hasweh’s.
When the encampments first emerged this spring, universities struggled with how to respond. Many tolerated them at first, then sent in police when students repeatedly refused to leave. Since Columbia first arrested protesters on April 18, more than 3,000 arrests have been made on campuses across the country, at institutions including California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt and Emory University.
Now that most of the encampments have disappeared, university administrators face a similar conundrum over disciplinary action.
Being too lenient risks colleges encouraging more encampments when students return in the fall. Crackdowns — by denying degrees or leaving students with permanent arrest warrants — can seem like too punitive a response to mostly nonviolent protests and could jeopardize the future of the students that universities are supposed to transform into productive citizens.
Some institutions have agreed to a lighter approach, with conditions. At Johns Hopkins University, for example, the administration said It would end disciplinary procedures for students who set up an encampment if they agreed not to set up a new encampment or otherwise disrupt campus life.
Others, like Brown, have flatly rejected requests for leniency. Activists and their allies do summoned the university is demanding that local police drop criminal charges against 41 students arrested during a sit-in in December.
In response, Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, wrote to students that those arrested had made an “informed choice,” adding that asking to be excused from responsibility was inconsistent with how civil disobedience is supposed to work. “The practice of civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of decisions on matters of conscience,” she said.
In his “Letter from Birmingham JailDr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 that during workshops on nonviolent protest he would ask participants, “Are you able to endure the ordeal of prison?”
“Someone who breaks an unjust law,” Dr. King, “it must be openly, lovingly and willingly to accept the punishment.”
According to scholars, paying personal fees to pursue a cause has historically helped build popular support.
“You do that to awaken the conscience of the nation or the institutional power in question — to get it to reckon with what you believe is a larger moral imperative,” said Tony Banout, executive director of the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.
“I think that tradition is commendable and that society has measurably improved because of activists who are willing to engage in this,” he said.
Civil rights activists made those costs seem real as they occupied lunch counters and peacefully marched through the streets in suits, often facing brutal police repression in turn.
Few of today’s protesters have ever faced anything approaching that kind of brutality or punishment. But they say they worry about identification and harassment—or doxxing—and wear masks or kaffiyehs to hide their identities. Some refuse to give their names, even as they sit across from administrators to negotiate.
The anonymity and rejection of punishment could weaken their movement, Dr. Banout said.
“My fear,” he said, “is that it actually alienates people and ultimately does not promote the alleviation of suffering in Gaza.”
The Rev. 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 he has detected a sense of entitlement among some protesters in a desire to avoid consequences.
“If you claim rights, you cannot stand up for the disadvantaged,” he said.
Mr. Sharpton has been arrested several times and spent nearly three months in jail for protesting military bombing of Vieques. He understood why activists opposed 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 generational shift in attitudes toward law enforcement 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 during the mass uprising following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by police officers, when they were still in high school. Those protests were fueled by an antipathy toward—and in many cases, a desire to abolish—police.
At George Washington University’s graduation ceremony, Nam Lam, an international relations student, noted with dismay the fences and security checkpoints the school had erected around it. That, combined with the use of police force to clear a camp on campus, made him uneasy.
“It’s hard to deal with, just the heavy police presence and the pepper spraying of students,” Mr Lam said.
Students and their faculty say disciplinary actions against protesters are actually intended to stifle free speech. The leaders of their universities, who consider themselves breeding grounds for robust debate, should know that this is not true.
And some faculty members also see the university as overreaching. Harvard refused Thirteen seniors received their diplomas while their disciplinary cases proceeded, causing hundreds of students to walk out of last month’s graduation ceremony.
Ryan Enos, a government professor at Harvard, who advised Some students who faced discipline said the university’s response was harsher than encampments for other causes, such as Occupy Wall Street, fossil fuel divestment and support for a living wage proposal.
“This looks like over-enforcement, a break with precedent,” he said. “And it raises the concern that they are more concerned about the content of the speech than about the equal application of punishment.”
But Mr. Enos did have a caveat. Protests about the environment and raising wages are not going to make anyone of any particular religion or identity uncomfortable.
“There were certainly no people on campus who felt threatened by that,” he said, adding that it was reasonable to consider whether Jewish students had felt threatened by certain protest activities.
Any protest movement risks losing public support if its methods are seen as too unpleasant or extreme. Robb Willer, a professor of sociology at Stanford University and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab there, said he didn’t think the student protests had reached that point yet.
But even isolated incidents of violent behavior or extreme rhetoric can cause harm, he said. “Occasional excesses really do disproportionate damage, drive away natural voter groups and are wrong,” said Dr. Willer. An investigation which he co-authored, concluded that certain forms of protest—inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and vandalism—are effective in getting a movement publicity, but that those tactics ultimately turn people off.
There is little consistency across universities in how punishments are imposed and how long the process takes. The president of Northwestern University recently told a congressional hearing that no students had been suspended, but that there were “many” investigations underway. At the same hearing, the president of Rutgers said the university had suspended four. In some more liberal jurisdictions — Chicago And AustinFor example, it was not the university administrators, but the prosecutors who dropped the trespassing charges.
At Yale, Craig Birckhead-Morton was told just before graduation that he would receive his degree, despite having been arrested twice during protests. (If a disciplinary case is still pending, busy (Upon the graduation of a senior student, the student’s degree will be revoked until the matter is resolved.)
“It was something I was anxious about, but I feel like there’s no going back on this issue,” he said, and was given a formal reprimand.
At Yale’s graduation ceremonies, some students expressed support for their fellow students facing charges. One of them, Lex Schultz, held up a banner that read: “Drop all charges.”
Joanna Daemmrich contributed reporting from washington and Gaya Gupta from New Haven, Connecticut.
