College campuses across the United States are on the boil as protests rage on against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
Last night, hundreds of police officers in riot gear, including some on horseback, arrested at least 50 protesters at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), where students marched to the campus’s main lawn with plans to set up an encampment. Almost 100 arrests were also made in University of Southern California (USC), and police action was threatened in Harvard and Brown universities where students set up encampments in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Protests are currently ongoing in at least 30 university campuses, across the US, including in Stanford University, Yale University, Princeton University, and MIT.
The latest spurt in student protests began last week when the New York police officers entered the Columbia University campus and arrested 108 student protestors who had built a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the school’s grounds. The Columbia students are calling for the Ivy League school to divest from companies and organisations with ties to Israel.
The crackdown, on what the NYPD itself described to be a “peaceful” protest, shocked many. But it is very much in line with a history of police action against student protestors in the United States, including at Columbia University itself.
On April 30, 1968, about 1,000 police officers were called in by Columbia University president G L Kirk (much like the police was called in this time by president Minouche Shafik this time). At the time, students were protesting the US’s war in Vietnam, the university’s affiliation with a Pentagon-linked think tank, and racist university policies. For more than a week, students had occupied five university buildings — which were emptied on April 30 after a violent police crackdown which injured over a 100 protestors, and and saw 700 being arrested.
Like in 2024, Columbia was also not the only university which saw protests in 1968 — and the 1960s in general.
The Greensboro sit-ins
Among the most influential student protests in US history began on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina after four Black teenagers entered a Whites-only lunch counter at a cafe, and refused to leave. They would soon be joined by thousands of others in more than 50 cities in the US South.
The sit-ins occurred against a backdrop of continued black frustration with Greensboro’s racist policies — and the white resentment against minimally progressive legislation. They expressed young Black people’s anger at the indignities they suffered while growing up, and the discrimination they continued to face almost a century after the abolition of slavery. And they would end up bolstering the movement which culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which, for the first time outlawed racial segregation in all public spaces.
“Although similar demonstrations had occurred before, never in the past had they prompted such a volcanic response,” historian William C Chafe wrote in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980). “The Greensboro “Coffee Party” of 1960, one observer noted, would rank in history with the Boston Tea Party as-a harbinger of revolutionary shifts in the social order,” he wrote.
Kent State shootings and the anti-War movement
By the late 1960s, the focus of student activism had shifted to the Vietnam War, with student groups influenced by the success and tactics of the Civil Rights movement earlier in the decade. For young men, protesting the war had personal meaning, because most were eligible for the military draft — meaning that they could be packed off to the jungles of Vietnam to fight a war the US was never going to win.
In what became a defining moment in US history, four unarmed students were killed, and nine wounded during a protest at Kent State University after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on May 4, 1970. The protestors were demonstrating against the further expansion of the United States’ campaign into Cambodia, and their deaths sparked a mass student strike in over 450 college campuses, many of which turned violent. They also had a significant impact on US public opinion vis à vis the already contentious Vietnam War.
A history and culture of student protests
While the political turmoil on student campuses in the 1960s has occupied a special place in the country’s cultural imagination, sociologist Nella Van Dyke argues that they were not an “anomaly” (‘The Location of Student Protest: Patterns of Activism in American Universities in the 1960s’, in Student Protests: The Sixties and After, 1998).
“Students are often at the cutting edge of social radicalism,” historian Gerard De Groot wrote. “They alone possess the sometimes volatile combination of youthful dynamism, naive utopianism, disrespect for authority, buoyant optimism and attraction to adventure, not to mention a surplus of spare time,” he wrote (‘The Culture of Protest’ in Student Protests: The Sixties and After, 1998).
In the US, the earliest student protests trace back to before the American Revolution. In 1766, for instance, Harvard students carried out what is known as the “Butter Rebellion” after the dining hall served some particularly rancid butter.
Historian J Angus Johnstone wrote: “American students agitated against the Crown in the 1760s and slavery in the 1830s — a few even fought the draft in the 1860s, a century before the Vietnam War. When no national causes stirred student passions there were riots over restrictive regulations, [and] harsh punishment” (‘Student Activism in the United States Before 1960’ in Student Protests: The Sixties and After, 1998).
Protests after the 1960s-70s
After the 1960s, the next major protests on US campuses were against South Africa’s apartheid regime. These protests spread from South African schools to the United States, where students blockaded buildings, disrupted speeches by South African politicians, and even built shantytowns — like the ones where South Africa’s impoverished Black population resided — in the middle of campuses.
The protests were crucial for administrators to withdraw billions of dollars of investments from companies tied to South Africa (a demand similar to the one made by protestors vis à vis Israel in 2024). Over time, the resultant economic stress from this divestment contributed to the eventual collapse of apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s.