The past week has seen a growing wave of protests and other demonstrations on college campuses across the United States, many of which have been met with arrests. mass arrests and other forced police actions, as well as intense media scrutiny. And the protests continue to spread.
However, campus protests abroad have been sporadic and smaller in scale, and none have sparked a broader student movement.
For example, in the UK, small groups of students temporarily occupied university buildings on the campuses of the University of Manchester and the University of Glasgow. But they never made national news or sparked a widespread wave of protests.
The wave of protests may also spread to foreign universities. There have been some early signs of that this week. On Wednesday, students set up a protest camp on the campus of the University of Sydney in Australia. On Friday, classes at Sciences Po, an elite university in Paris, were canceled because of student protests there.
But that still leaves the question of why this particular protest movement broke out and widespread in American universities Firstly. Experts say the answer has more to do with the partisan political landscape in Washington than with events in Gaza.
The 'cheers' effect: Why the protest wave started in Columbia
Protests, like many forms of group behavior, can be contagious.
Omar Wasow, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies how protest movements can influence politics, said one way to understand how protest movements spread is “welcome model”.
For theater audiences, “if some people in the front stand up, then other people start standing up, and it's a cascade that flows throughout the auditorium,” he said.
In this case, he said, it was no surprise that the “welcome” began last week at Columbia University. The university's proximity to the national media in New York and its status as an Ivy-League institution have given it a prominent position, he said, that is similar to a people sitting in the front row of the auditorium. As a result, pro-Palestinian protests there have attracted wider attention than elsewhere. Additionally, the campus was home to a large concentration of Jewish students, many of whom said they felt fearful of Jewish opposition. harassment or assault from protesters. This expression of fear has prompted more media coverage and political scrutiny.
More than 100 protesters was arrested on April 18 after Columbia called in police to clear the camp of pro-Palestinian protesters, fulfilling a promise to Congress by Nemat Shafik, the school's president, that she was willing to punish the protesters illegal sex on campus.
But as the arrests occurred, they sparked further acts of solidarity with the protesters – and pushback from those who saw the protests as anti-Semitic or wanted to show support for Israel , in a wave that quickly spread across the country.
“The conflict there contributed to this massive cascade, which got other schools involved and other media outlets around the country and around the world paying attention,” Wasow said.
Daniel Schlozman, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies US social movements and partisan politics, said the events would not have been so prominent without the arrests. .
But the arrest was more than a single decision by a university president. They are the result of the specific political and legal context in the United States that makes Columbia the most likely place to initiate a “standing ovation.”
The unique politics of US campus protests
“Politics is basically finding the issues that unite your side and divide the other side,” Schlozman said. And the war in Gaza turned out to be a particularly compelling example of that for Republicans.
The Republican Party is broadly united in support of Israel. Republicans have also long viewed universities as bastions of leftist ideology, seeking to portray them as incubators of radicalism on issues of race and gender, and as environments hostility towards anyone who does not adhere to those ideologies.
Democrats, by contrast, are more divided over Israel, the war in Gaza, and when and whether anti-Israel protests will spill over into anti-Semitism.
So for Republican lawmakers, criticizing college presidents for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism is a useful political issue that has the potential to deepen division among Democrats — something that, unsurprisingly, they have aggressively pursued.
In many ways, Schlozman said, university presidents are soft targets.
“Inside universities, administrators are trying to appease multiple constituencies: donors, protesters, faculty,” he said. “But those connections are out of step with national politics.” Actions that might defuse tensions in campus communities can attract political scrutiny from outside — and the reverse is also true, as the arrests on campuses across the country during This week showed.
Last December, Republican lawmakers grilled university principal about their handling of protests against the war in Gaza, in hearings that contributed to the eventual resignation of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Shafik, Columbia's president, had reason to fear for her job when she was called before Congress last week, where she vowed to punish student protesters if necessary. That evening, she called the police to the school.
It's unclear exactly what role the congressional questioning played in her decision. But her real motives are less relevant than the impression it gives people on all sides of the issue that Republican pressure led to mass arrests. That would act like a “bat signal” to people on different sides of the issue, Schlozman said.
For Republican politicians, who have turned criticism of campus protests and anti-Semitism into a cause, the arrests sent a message to Look, we're winning. We can split our opponents' alliances,” he said.
For students and others who may sympathize with the protesters without joining them, the shock of the arrests may encourage action rather than passive support. And for lecturers and others at the political center, anger over the arrests, rather than the underlying political dispute over the war in Gaza, has prompted many to join the protests.
In other countries, less drama means less attention
In contrast, in other countries, campus protests and anti-Semitism have not been political flashpoints to date. (Though of course there were massive protests in cities around the world against war and anti-Semitism.) In February, students at University of Glasgow occupied the campus building for 15 days, but left after negotiations with a senior university official. The story barely made local news.
In France, there was a brief outbreak of political anger last month after a Jewish student claimed she had been banned from a university event because of her religion, but things quickly blew up when other students, some of them Jewish Jews, give another version of events.
And although several university presidents were summoned before the French National Assembly to discuss anti-Semitism on campuses, the resulting discussion received virtually no media attention – a far cry from the closely watched hearings in the United States.
Ultimately, nonviolent protests are most effective when they create some kind of “drama,” Wasow, the professor, said. In other countries, a lack of drama can leave universities relatively quiet.
But now that the acclaim has begun, that could change.
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