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    Shapiro’s College-Era Criticism of Palestinians Draws Fresh Scrutiny

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    Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote in his college newspaper three decades ago that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East, prompting criticism as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him to be her running mate.Mr. Shapiro, 51, has embraced his Jewish identity and been one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel at a moment when the party is splintered over the war in Gaza.But he says his views have evolved since publishing an opinion essay as a college student at the University of Rochester in New York, when he wrote that Palestinians were incapable of establishing their own homeland and making it successful, even with help from Israel and the United States.“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” he wrote in the essay, published in the Sept. 23, 1993, edition of The Campus Times, the student newspaper. “They will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.”Mr. Shapiro, who was 20 at the time, noted in his essay that he had spent five months studying in Israel and had volunteered in the Israeli Army.“The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.”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

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      Protesters at University of Chicago Take Over Institute of Politics Building

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      They confronted the institute’s director, the former senator Heidi Heitkamp. At the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrators also tried to occupy a building.Pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the Institute of Politics building at the University of Chicago on Friday afternoon, overturning furniture, damaging property and confronting the institute’s director, former Senator Heidi Heitkamp. She refused their demand that she leave her office, university officials said, adding that she was the only staff member in the building.The demonstration continued into the evening outside the institute, which is about two blocks from where the police removed a protest encampment last week.In a statement, the protest group on Friday said that it had occupied the building to protest the University of Chicago’s ties to Israel. Bystander video showed protesters climbing through second-floor windows to leave the building, as the crowd below cheered.After demonstrators were cleared from the building by the police, other protesters remained outside and in yards nearby, chanting, yelling and pounding drums.Jeremy Manier, a university spokesman, said in a statement that protesters had tried to block the entrance of the building, damaged property and ignored orders from law enforcement officials to leave.“The University of Chicago is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express a wide range of views,” he said. “At the same time, university policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the university’s operations or involve the destruction of property.”Officials said that earlier in the day, the institute held a board meeting in the building that included David Axelrod, the organization’s founder who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama.The Institute of Politics is two doors away from the University of Chicago Hillel and across the street from Rohr Chabad, where some students were having a Sabbath dinner when the demonstration began. As the protest continued, counterprotesters held Israeli flags within sight of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Rock music blasted from a nearby house, in what appeared to be an effort to drown out the protest chants.A sign identifying the Institute of Politics building was covered with a cardboard placard that read “permanent cease-fire now,” and a set of demands were hung from the building. Among the demands was “abolish the university.”A group of protesters at the University of Pennsylvania also tried on Friday evening to occupy a campus building. The university police and the Philadelphia police made several arrests and cleared the building, Fisher-Bennett Hall. The hall is across the street from College Green, the site of the encampment that was cleared last week by the police.Mattathias Schwartz More

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      On a Day of Graduations, Berkeley’s Protests Stand Out

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      At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.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

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      Police Arrest M.I.T. Protesters After Suspensions Ramp Up Tension

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      Several protesters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were arrested on Thursday after blocking access to a parking garage on campus, a day after some students involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment there received notices of suspension from the university.University police arrested “fewer than 10” people, according to a statement posted Thursday night on M.I.T.’s emergency management website. It was unclear what charges they would face, and a university spokesperson declined to comment further.The university had set a Monday deadline for protesters to vacate the encampment on the Cambridge campus or face suspension. Since then, the M.I.T. administration has begun sending notices of suspension to students who it says defied the deadline. Administrators would not say how many students had been suspended.“This means you will be prohibited from participating in any academic activities — including classes, exams or research — for the remainder of the semester,” said a letter received by one student and viewed by a reporter. “You will also be prohibited from participating in commencement activities or any cocurricular or extracurricular activities.”The university had detailed the consequences of suspension in a letter to student protesters before the Monday deadline, making clear that those who had previously been disciplined “related to events since Oct. 7” would also be barred from university housing and dining halls.As an additional condition of suspension, some students also lost their eligibility to be employed by the university, a penalty that cut off the income of graduate student employees who were suspended.“I don’t know what comes next,” said Prahlad Iyengar, a first-year graduate student who said he had lost his income and housing as a result of his suspension. “I have friends and a community, and I can find a place, but there are people affected who are housing- and food-insecure, some with children.”M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, was one of three university leaders who were harshly criticized last year for their testimony in a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism. The other two, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned in the fallout.Although Ms. Kornbluth did not face the same level of criticism, hundreds of M.I.T. alumni signed a letter calling for the university to take stronger actions to combat campus antisemitism.In a letter to the campus on Monday, she wrote: “This prolonged use of M.I.T. property as a venue for protest, without permission, especially on an issue with such sharp disagreement, is no longer safely sustainable.” More

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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.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