College Protests Then and Now

We had been vigilantly peaceful throughout that stressful but buoyant weekend in April 1972 as we occupied the office of Boston University’s dean of student affairs to protest the university’s ties to the military and the war in Vietnam.

We remained there overnight Friday and into Saturday afternoon, a total of 22 hours.

Then suddenly, inevitably, a jerk showed up outside in the plaza below us amidst hundreds of other B.U. students who had gathered, peacefully, to support us.

The jerk picked up a brick and threw it at a Boston patrolman, striking him in the back of his head.

A faculty monitor who had been advising us during the occupation ran into the dean’s office, told us what had happened and said we could no longer be protected. We should prepare to be arrested.

Soon afterward, under police escort, we put our hands on our heads and walked peacefully to the line of police vehicles. You can see me in the photo above, standing next to the railing with a policeman’s hand on my arm. I am wearing my New York Yankees hat.

When we got to our temporary detention facility I was lucky to be put in a cell with Howard Zinn, the famous and inspirational peace activist and B.U. professor. He was calm and smiling during our brief time in lock-up. (Eventually the trespassing charge against the 62 of us was dropped.)

All of this played out 52 years ago during the height of the Vietnam War protests on college campuses. And now we’re seeing it play out again across America amid protests against Israel’s war policy in Gaza. This time the jerks are hurling anti-semitic slogans at Jewish students.

University administrators, conservative Republicans and commentators are making full use of these jerks to justify calling in police officers (some on horseback) to cart away peaceful protesters for “trespassing” on their own campus. (At B.U. we were willing to be arrested for occupying an unauthorized area in order to make our stand against the war. We were not in a public campus plaza).

The recent arrests first happened at Columbia University, whose president, Nemat Shafik, wanted to show conservative Republicans in Congress how tough she could be on protesters. (Why do those people in Congress have such power at our colleges and universities?) Shafik called in New York City police to arrest 108 students who were peacefully camping on campus in opposition to Columbia’s ties to U.S. military aid to Israel.

Those students weren’t just arrested; they were also suspended from the university. Many of them were kicked out of their dorms without any hearing. That’s quite unlike what I and the rest of “the B.U. 62” experienced. We were allowed to have full use of the campus and remain in our university residences. This is called “innocent until proved guilty” in court.

Another Republican trying to exploit the student protests, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, came to Columbia to accuse Shafik of not properly controlling the situation. Calling in the cops for mass arrests wasn’t enough. He suggested it might be appropriate to call in the National Guard. (Hello? Kent State?)

Meanwhile at NYU (my elder daughter’s alma mater), 133 students were arrested after refusing to leave a plaza. At the University of Texas in Austin, police on horseback rode into campus, arresting at least 20 non-violent student occupiers. More than 90 students were arrested at the University of Southern California.

Why are college students being arrested for peacefully protesting on their own campuses? A prime reason is that a small minority associated with them have used hateful speech against Jewish students, which is unforgivable. But this doesn’t justify arresting hundreds of peaceful students who aren’t being anti-semitic.

Here in my hometown of New Haven, Yale University police Monday morning arrested 48 people, 44 of them Yale students, who were peacefully occupying a campus plaza to demand Yale divest from military weapons manufacturers. The police surprised the occupiers (many of them asleep in their tents) by swooping in at 6:30 a.m. and taking them to police vehicles while also dismantling their encampment. The remaining protesters moved nearby to a busy traffic intersection and refused to leave. City officials avoided further confrontation by allowing them to remain for most of the day. The students then moved on to a plaza in front of the university library, where they have remained.

On Monday, late in the morning, I checked out the festive scene at that intersection. Some of the students were singing and dancing while others were writing colorful chalk messages in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. A few of the students wore clothing identifying themselves as Jewish. I’m sure they, more more so than those of us who aren’t Jewish, were traumatized by the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 that began this war when more than 1,160 Israeli civilians were slaughtered. But since then at least 34,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces.

Yale President Peter Salovey said he had the protesters in Beinecke Plaza arrested because “the situation was no longer safe.” He said there were police reports of “harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites.” The most troubling incident occurred when a demonstrator jammed a Palestinian flag into the eye of a Jewish student.

But do such reprehensible acts justify sweeping arrests of peaceful protesters? Not at all.

Salovey should study how one of his predecessors, Kingman Brewster, adroitly de-fused escalating tensions during the May Day protests of 1970. Brewster opened the campus to anti-war demonstrators and Black Panther supporters, offering food and shelter. He discussed issues late into the night with protest leaders such as Abbie Hoffman. Police were not called to Yale. There were few arrests or injuries in New Haven or at Yale that weekend.

How will the rest of this year’s spring semester play out on our campuses? Commencement ceremonies — those that are going forward — will be tumultuous. My graduation day at B.U. certainly was. Most of us wore black armbands to protest the war and we chanted anti-war slogans. My parents, conservative Republicans, were appalled. But free speech was exercised, peacefully, and we had the graduation ceremony we deserved.

This won’t be happening at USC, and probably elsewhere. USC officials have cancelled their main commencement ceremony. They said new safety measures would require too much time to process 65,000 students and guests. This followed USC’s decision to cancel the commencement speech by valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a Muslim. Jewish organizations had complained she is linked to a pro-Palestinian group.

Where’s the free speech, USC?