Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

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      Taking Cues From Students, U.C.L.A. Faculty Members Join the Protests

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      At U.C.L.A., a few professors helped negotiate with the university. At Columbia, they guarded the encampment. But not all faculty members are on board.Earlier this week, some faculty members at the University of California, Los Angeles, had an emergency call with students who were active in the pro-Palestinian protests.“We just got a really clear message from them: ‘We feel unsafe, and we’d like your help in fixing this,’” recalled Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science.In that moment, several dozen faculty activists volunteered to join the students in shifts around the clock at their encampment on campus.And in the dark hours of Thursday morning, as the police cracked down on the protests, those faculty members were linking arms with students, allowing themselves to be arrested.It was one of the clearest instances of a little-noted fact of the student demonstrations against the war in Gaza — that a small fraction of faculty members at U.C.L.A., Columbia and other universities have provided logistical and emotional support to the protesters.Some faculty members have formal ties to Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, the counterpart of Students for Justice in Palestine, a decentralized national network of pro-Palestinian groups.Others are not necessarily sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but see a moral obligation to protect the free speech and the welfare of their students, who are facing some of the biggest disruptions to their educational lives since the pandemic.“It’s a breach of trust that they would call the police on our students,” said Stephanie McCurry, a history professor at Columbia University, who watched over the perimeter of the encampment before the last police sweep on Wednesday.The issue has torn apart the faculties at these universities. More than a few say the activist professors are romanticizing the demonstrations, which have thrown campuses into chaos.“It’s a sad way to end the semester,” said James Applegate, an astronomy professor at Columbia University.At Columbia, some faculty members had shown their support for the students — if not necessarily for their message — by visiting the encampment before it was swept away by the police on Wednesday morning. They delivered food and water, incorporated the protests into their academic lessons, participated in panel discussions and stood guard outside the perimeter to make it harder for the authorities to evict the students.The faculty members did not necessarily agree with the views of the students on Gaza, said Camille Robcis, a history professor at Columbia. But, she said, “I believe in their right to protest more than anything.”Over the last few chaotic days, they had communicated with one another through Listservs and on the encrypted Signal app, signing up for time slots to appear on campus.In a counterweight, pro-Israel faculty members and students formed their own WhatsApp and email support groups.“Those have been really helpful,” said Carol Ewing Garber, a professor of applied physiology at Teachers College, an affiliate of Columbia. “They actually brought people together who had never met before. It was a silver lining.”Bruce Robbins, an English professor at Columbia, is among those who are more devoted to the Palestinian cause, a member of Columbia’s chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.He brought one of his classes to the tents as part of a course studying atrocities.“It was one of the things that faculty who supported the encampment did,” he said, “was take their classes inside the encampment.”Two of his students, who he believes were former members of the Israeli military, did not show up for that lesson.“I was planning on making it as comfortable as I could,” he said. “But I think the feeling in the class was not running in their favor, and that may be why they didn’t show up.”At one point, students asked the faculty members to help protect them, Dr. Robbins said. “We were described as ‘de-escalators.’”Several faculty members put on orange safety vests, he said, and got “a quick training on how not to get into a fight — if they push past us, let them push past us.”“I played football,” he said. “It was not my instinct to de-escalate. But that’s what I was there to do.”Dr. Applegate, the astronomy professor, thought the faculty’s participation in the campus protests was part of a romanticization of the Vietnam-era antiwar protests.“These guys are trying to relive 1968,” he said, referring to a violent confrontation with the police that shook Columbia back then. “I don’t think they have any intention of having a sensible conversation with anybody.”At U.C.L.A., members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine helped negotiate with the administration, Dr. Blair said.The faculty members even hired a professional to train them in de-escalating physical or verbal conflict, he said, “with the idea that the faculty could help play this role.”Dr. Blair also called on his sister, Susannah Blair, an adjunct lecturer in art history at Columbia, to share her experience with about 75 U.C.L.A. faculty members. On Zoom, she told them how most of her students were hungry to talk about what they were going through, even though they came from different backgrounds and experienced things differently.“Their libraries are closed right now,” she said in an interview. “It’s finals. They have had friends arrested. Some of them have been protesting against a genocide, and this has deeply disrupted all sorts of aspects of their lives.”The crisis at U.C.L.A. reached a climax on Thursday morning.Protesters learned that the administration was going to shut down their encampment, Dr. Blair said.“The faculty was there to try to be the first people arrested, to stand in front of the students to bear witness,” he said. “We watched from that vantage as the California Highway Patrol aimed weapons that were using nonlethal ammunition. We basically pleaded with them to not aim their weapons at our students, at what was an entirely peaceful protest.”Ultimately, about 200 protesters were arrested, along with about 10 faculty members, Dr. Blair said. Many were lecturers and assistant professors, without the protections of tenure, he said, adding, “It remains to be seen what the consequences will be.”Stephanie Saul More

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      The Protests Help Trump

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      These days, I think a lot about Donald Trump. When the monthly economic reports come out, I think: Will this help elect Donald Trump? And, I confess, I’ve started to ask myself the same question when I look at the current unrest on American college campuses over Israel and Gaza.Now, I should say that I assume that most of the protesters are operating with the best of intentions — to ease the suffering being endured by the Palestinian people.But protests have unexpected political consequences. In the 1960s, for example, millions of young people were moved to protest the war in Vietnam, and history has vindicated their position. But Republicans were quick to use the excesses of the student protest movement to their advantage. In 1966, Ronald Reagan vowed “to clean up the mess at Berkeley” and was elected governor of California. In 1968, Richard Nixon celebrated the “forgotten Americans — the nonshouters; the nondemonstrators” and was elected to the presidency. Far from leading to a new progressive era, the uprisings of the era were followed by what was arguably the most conservative period in American history.This kind of popular backlash is not uncommon. For his latest book, “If We Burn,” the progressive journalist Vincent Bevins investigated 10 protest movements that occurred between 2010 and 2020 in places like Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine and Hong Kong. He concluded that in seven of those cases, the results were “worse than failure. Things went backward.”In Egypt in 2011, for example, about a million protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, thrilling the world with their calls for reforms and freedom. President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, but democracy did not replace his autocratic rule; the Muslim Brotherhood did.In June 2013, millions of Brazilians took to the streets demanding better schools, cheaper public transportation and political reform. But, Bevins laments, “just a few years later, the country would be ruled by the most radically right-wing elected leader in the world, a man who openly called for a return to dictatorship and mass violence” — the über-Trumpian figure Jair Bolsonaro.Why do these popular uprisings so often backfire? In his book, Bevins points to flaws in the way the protesters organize themselves. He notes that there are a few ways you can structure movements. The first is the Leninist way, in which power is concentrated in the supreme leader and his apparatus. Or there is the method used by the American civil rights movement, in which a network of hierarchically organized institutions work together for common ends, with clear leaders and clear followers.Then there’s the kind of movement we have in the age of the internet. Many of these protesters across the globe are suspicious of vertical lines of authority; they don’t want to be told what to do by self-appointed leaders. They prefer leaderless, decentralized, digitally coordinated crowds, in which participants get to improvise their own thing.This horizontal, anarchic method enables masses of people to mobilize quickly, even if they don’t know one another. It is, however, built on the shaky assumption that if lots of people turn out, then somehow the movement will magically meet its goals.Unfortunately, an unorganized, decentralized movement is going to be good at disruption but not good at building a new reality. As Bevins puts it, “A diffuse group of individuals who come out to the streets for very different reasons cannot simply take power themselves.” Instead groups that have traditional organizational structures, like the strongman populists, rise up vowing to end the anarchy and restore order.Today’s campus protesters share this weakness. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t control the message. The most outlandish comments — “Zionists don’t deserve to live” — get attention. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t be clear on basic positions. Does the movement, for example, believe in a two-state solution, or does it want to eliminate Israel and ethnically cleanse the region?Worse, the protests reinforce the class dynamics that have undermined the Democratic Party’s prospects over the past few decades. As is well known, the Democrats have become the party of the educated and cultural elite, and the Republicans have become the party of the less educated masses. Students who attend places like Columbia and the University of Southern California are in the top echelons of cultural privilege.If you operate in highly educated circles, it’s easy to get the impression that young people are passionately engaged in the Gaza issue. But a recent Harvard Youth Poll asked Americans ages 18 to 29 which issues mattered to them most. “Israel/Palestine” ranked 15th out of 16 issues listed. Other issues like inflation, jobs, housing, health care and gun violence were much more pressing to most young Americans.Especially since 2016, it’s become clear that if you live in a university town or in one of the many cities along the coasts where highly educated people tend to congregate, you can’t use your own experience to generalize about American politics. In fact, if you are guided by instincts and values honed in such places, you may not be sensitive to the ways your movement is alienating voters in the working-class areas of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. You may come across to them as privileged kids breaking the rules and getting away with it.Over the past few decades, many universities have become more ideologically homogeneous and detached from the rest of the country. As my colleague Ross Douthat noted recently, Columbia students who study 20th-century thought in the “core curriculum” are fed a steady diet of writers like Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault from one ideological perspective.Writing in The Atlantic, George Packer quoted a letter that one Columbia student wrote to one of his professors: “I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in ‘decolonization’ or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief.”These circles have become so insular that today’s progressive fights tend to take place within progressive spaces, with progressive young protesters attempting to topple slightly less progressive university presidents or organization heads. These fights invariably divide the left and unify the right.Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learned that when you’re covering a rally, pay attention not just to protesters; pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving. If you were covering the protests of the late 1960s, for example, you would have learned a lot more about the coming decades by interviewing George W. Bush than you would have by interviewing one of the era’s protest celebrities like Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was more photogenic in the moment, but Bush, and all those turned off by the protests, would turn out to be more consequential.Over the past few days, the White House and Senator Chuck Schumer have become more critical of lawbreaking protests. They probably need to do a lot more of that if we’re going to avoid “Trump: The Sequel.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More

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      How the UCLA Protest Standoff Unfolded

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      Follow our live coverage of the college protests at U.C.L.A. and other universities.As protesters chanted and sprayed fire extinguishers at them, police officers moved in on the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early hours of Thursday, tearing down its barricades, arresting dozens of people and clearing out the tents that had dominated the center of campus for days.The chaotic scenes were part of a tense, hourslong back-and-forth between protesters and police that had been building after violent clashes a day earlier — involving counterprotesters who attacked the encampment — prompted administrators to call in law enforcement. On Wednesday night, the authorities issued a warning to pro-Palestinian demonstrators: Leave the encampment outside Royce Hall or face arrest.As the night wore on, officers in riot gear tried to approach the encampment through one of its entrances but were turned back several times.Demonstrators appeared to try several tactics to fend them off. At one point, they blocked an entrance with wooden pallets and homemade shields. They surrounded police officers, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and “Peaceful protest!” At another point, they opened umbrellas and began flashing lights and taking photos of the police officers. Then, at around 3 a.m. Thursday, officers breached one of the barricades at the encampment and began to pull apart plywood and other materials that demonstrators had used to build a wall. Some demonstrators sprayed fire extinguishers in response, briefly forcing some officers to fall back.But an hour into the raid, the encampment’s main barricade had been dismantled. A line of students linking arms took its place.Officers gave another dispersal warning to protesters. They corralled those who refused to leave and began arresting them, zip-tying their wrists and leading them away from the encampment.Police pulled up tents — one removed a Palestinian flag and tossed it aside — and at several points fired devices at demonstrators. It was not clear what the officers were using, but Erik Larsen, an officer for the California Highway Patrol, said in a telephone interview that its officers were equipped with a variety of “nonlethal” tools, including flash-bang devices.By dawn, the camp had been cleared of all but a final group of demonstrators, some of whom chanted, “We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger — you cannot ignore us any longer.” Some were detained and marched away with their hands zip-tied behind their back.The C.H.P. — which, in addition to patrolling state highways is responsible for the safekeeping of state property, including public universities like U.C.L.A. — said that 132 demonstrators had been arrested and would be handed over to the university’s police department. At least 250 C.H.P. officers were involved in clearing the encampment, Mr. Larsen said.Other law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the U.C.L.A. university police, were also on the scene, he said. More

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      Trump Is Greeted by a Single Fan as Manhattan Trial Resumes

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      On a day off from court, Donald J. Trump on Wednesday flew to Michigan and Wisconsin for campaign rallies in front of thousands of supporters. On Thursday, he returned to a Lower Manhattan courthouse, where a single supporter stood outside waving a Trump 2024 flag.“I don’t feel lonely because my heart is with Trump,” said the flag-holder, Lily Qi, 62, of Wilmington, Del., as she stood in the park across from the New York City Criminal Court.She had ridden a train to New York City and is staying with friends, saying that she could not afford a hotel room on her office-cleaner salary. Born and raised in China, Ms. Qi said she had attended a dozen Trump rallies.At around 9 a.m. on Thursday, she stood alone at Collect Pond Park but was soon joined by two demonstrators in T-shirts featuring a cartoon of Mr. Trump in jail. They are “troublemakers,” she said.One of the protesters, Barrett Cobb, carried a sign that read “Jail Trump.”“I’m extremely upset they haven’t put him in jail yet,” said Ms. Cobb, a classical musician who lives in Manhattan.Since the start of the hush-money trial, Mr. Trump has complained that his supporters have not been allowed closer to the steps of the courthouse. The police have erected barricades around the courthouse for security.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump arrived there with his son Eric Trump, the first family member to attend the trial in person. More

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      Eric Adams Seizes Role as Face of the Crackdown on Student Protests

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      Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday defended the overnight arrests of nearly 300 campus protesters in New York City, praising the police for using restraint and arguing that protesters were antisemitic and led by outsiders who were part of a global effort to “radicalize young people.”Mr. Adams said at a news conference at the police headquarters that he had advised Columbia University’s leaders that the police had seen a shift in tactics at the protests led by “outside agitators” and that “you have more than a peaceful protest on your hands.”“They are attempting to disrupt our city and we are not going to permit it to happen,” Mr. Adams said.The police arrested 119 protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday and 173 people at the City College of New York after leaders at both schools requested assistance from the New York Police Department, the police said.For much of the weekslong protest at Columbia, university leaders have remained in the background, making much of their public pronouncements through campuswide advisories.In their absence, Mr. Adams, a Democrat and former police officer, has forcefully stepped in, embracing a role that adheres to his law enforcement background, his reputation as a mayor focused on reducing disorder and strong support for Israel over many years.As pro-Palestinian protests have erupted on campuses across New York City, Mr. Adams has gone beyond calling for order, calling protesters “despicable” and encouraging university leaders to quickly remove encampments.Mr. Adams said on Wednesday that he was proud of the police officers who removed a Palestinian flag that was hung from a flagpole at Columbia University and replaced it with an American flag — an image the police promoted widely.“Blame me for being proud to be an American,” Mr. Adams said. “We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.”City officials and the police said that the use of large chains to block doors and other tactics showed that “professional” activists were influencing student protesters. They have not named the outsiders who were involved in the protests and declined on Wednesday to say how many of the protesters who were arrested were not affiliated with the colleges.Left-leaning Democrats have criticized the mayor’s approach. Ana María Archila, a director of the New York Working Families Party, said that the police response on Tuesday was “reckless, escalatory and put the entire university community in harm’s way.”“This is a shameful day in our city’s history, and one that will not be forgotten,” she said.Jeffery C. Mays More

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      14 Protesters Are Arrested at Tulane After Police Clear Encampment

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      An encampment of protesters at Tulane University in New Orleans was cleared and at least 14 people were arrested early on Wednesday, the university said, after officers from three law enforcement agencies ordered the group to disperse. The campus police, the Louisiana State Police and the New Orleans Police forcibly removed the demonstrators. It was not immediately clear how many protesters were present, but two of the demonstrators who were arrested were students, the university said in a statement, adding that the encampment was an “unlawful demonstration.” Tulane is also investigating reports that faculty members participated in the protest.The university said the encampment was formed on Monday, and campus police officers also made arrests that evening. Six people, including one student, were taken into custody that night under charges that included trespassing, battery on an officer and resisting arrest, according to the university, which also issued seven suspensions.According to the student newspaper, The Tulane Hullabaloo, the campus police cordoned off the encampment on Tuesday, but did not try to disband it until early Wednesday. More

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      Palestinians in Gaza Express Gratitude for U.S. Campus Protests

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      Thousands of miles away from the campus protests that have divided Americans, some displaced Palestinians are expressing solidarity with the antiwar demonstrators and gratitude for their efforts.Message of support were written on some tents in the southern city of Rafah, where roughly a million displaced people have sought shelter from the Israeli bombardment and ground fighting that Gazan health officials say have killed more than 34,000 people.“Thank you, American universities,” read one message captured on video by the Reuters news agency. “Thank you, students in solidarity with Gaza your message has reached” us, read another nearby.Tensions have risen at campuses across the United States, with police in riot gear arresting dozens of people at Columbia University on Tuesday night and officers across the country clashing with pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had erected encampments and seized academic buildings at other institutions. The protesters have been calling for universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel, and some have vowed not to back down.The protests have come at a particularly fearful time in Rafah, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowing to launch a ground invasion of the city to root out Hamas battalions there despite glimmers of hope for a temporary cease-fire.Palestinians “are very happy that there are still people standing with us,” said Mohammed al-Baradei, a 24-year-old recent graduate from the dentistry program at Al-Azhar University who spoke by phone from Rafah.“The special thing is that this is happening in America and that people there are still aware and the awareness is growing every day for the Palestinian cause,” he added.Akram al-Satri, a 47-year-old freelance journalist sheltering in Rafah, said Gazans are “watching with hope and gratitude the student movement in the United States.”“For us this is a glimmer of hope on a national level,” he added in a voice message on Wednesday.Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old Palestinian who has been documenting the war on social media, said in a video posted to her more than 4.5 million Instagram followers that the campus protests had brought her a new sense of possibility.“I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza Strip and I’ve never felt hope like now,” said Ms. Owda.Nader Ibrahim More

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      Columbia Asks N.Y.P.D. to Stay on Campus Through Middle of May

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      Columbia University asked the New York Police Department in a letter on Tuesday to clear a building occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters and encampments, and asked that the police remain on campus until at least May 17, after commencement.President Nemak Shafit requested the N.Y.P.D.’s assistance in a letter that was released after police entered Hamilton Hall and arrested protesters that had occupied the building on early Tuesday. Columbia’s commencement is currently scheduled for May 15.By late evening, dozens of police officers had arrived, climbed through windows on campus and arrested protesters who had occupied a building since early Tuesday. Much of the campus had been cleared of people, although dozens of protesters still chanted outside of its gates.Dr. Shafik said in the letter that “the takeover of Hamilton Hall and the continued encampments raise serious safety concerns for the individuals involved and the entire community,” adding that “these activities have become a magnet for protesters outside our gates which creates significant risk to our campus and disrupts the ability of the University to continue normal operations.”A decision earlier this month to bring police onto campus to clear a tent protest led to sharp criticism from some students and faculty. But Dr. Shafik said on Tuesday that she was left with “no choice.”“With the support of the University’s Trustees, I have determined that the building occupation, the encampments, and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to persons, property, and the substantial functioning of the University and require the use of emergency authority to protect persons and property,” she wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More