In November 2023, one month into Israel’s siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, a coalition of U-M students held a die-in on the Diagonal Green, called “the Diag” on campus, to honor the more than 10,000 Palestinians killed at the time and to demand the Regents of the University of Michigan divest the university’s $18 billion endowment from the state of Israel.
Nearly a year later, when university police arrested four people at a die-in organized during the U-M “Festifall” club fair in August 2024, activists saw a marked shift in the environment for pro-Palestine protests on campus.
“Starting off this semester, the university has responded much more aggressively against pro-Palestine protesters,” says one student organizing with U-M Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), who requested anonymity for safety reasons. The four arrests, the student tells The Progressive, demonstrated that the university was “much more willing to exercise brutality against protesters in ways they haven’t in the past.”
The August 28 die-in was broken up on the grounds that students did not reserve the Diag, according to a statement released days later by U-M President Santa J. Ono and other administrators. The statement explained that the university administration and police dispersed the protest to enforce university policies governing the “time, place, and manner of speech” and to prevent disruptions to university events.
However, the policies in question were part of a slate of revisions made by the U-M administration over the summer. The changes came after students organized a month-long Gaza solidarity encampment in the spring, which university police broke up using pepper spray and riot gear. At the request of the U-M Regents, seven students were charged with felonies for resisting police officers by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
In July, the university adopted a policy indicating that “individuals or groups may not ‘disrupt University activities or operations’; neither may people ‘obstruct human or vehicle traffic, ways of ingress and egress, paths, stairs, aisles, and the like.’ ” A U-M Faculty Senate committee outlined the policy revisions in a letter published before the start of the fall semester, calling the changes “overbroad, vague, and overly punitive, and infringing on First Amendment rights.”
The most notable policy change empowers the university—via a proxy—to file disciplinary complaints against students, whereas previously only other students, staff, or university faculty were permitted to file complaints. The changes also remove the right of students to negotiate potential sanctions with a “resolution coordinator” during the disciplinary process. The previous body for appealing sanctions—which included student and faculty representation—has also been eliminated.
“What the University of Michigan can now do is raise complaints against any student and effectively extort resolution officers to reach a conclusion that suits stakeholders within the administration,” the student organizer says. Resolution coordinators are hired and paid by the university—a dynamic the student says is a conflict of interest.
The U-M policy changes were implemented without the required approval of faculty and staff, according to the Faculty Senate letter: “By this covert and undemocratic process, the university has undermined the principles of shared governance.”
The University of Michigan is one of many universities and colleges across the country that overhauled their student codes of conduct over the summer. These changes prohibit forms of protest taken by pro-Palestine activists demanding their institutions sever ties to Israel and to companies arming its genocidal war in Gaza. Some estimates claim the war—which has expanded in recent months to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran—has killed at least 186,000 Palestinians.
New campus rules range from banning tents and the use of megaphones to requiring permits to assemble on communal spaces. Others, like at the University of Michigan, grant university administration increased powers to take disciplinary action against students for their involvement in protests.
In early September, the University of California, Los Angeles, implemented a sweeping ban on “unauthorized visual displays”—such as chalk—on university property; restricted megaphone use and the distribution of food; and confined protest activities to designated areas. The University of Pennsylvania adopted similar measures, including a ban on images projected onto university buildings without prior approval. In November 2023, pro-Palestine organizations digitally projected messages critical of UPenn’s investments in Israel’s genocidal war on campus buildings.
At Cornell University, harsher enforcement has not just affected pro-Palestine advocacy. Cornell maintenance and dining workers, members of United Auto Workers Local 2300 who were striking at the beginning of the fall semester, were allegedly targeted for violating the university’s Interim Expressive Activity Policy. After a few days of allowing picketing, the university began to go after those using amplified sound, even ticketing bus drivers for honking in support of the strike, according to Sam Poole, a spokesperson for Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and organizer with the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation. Cornell YDSA has organized with the union, Ithaca Public Schools, and the Palestine solidarity movement at Cornell.
“It’s just an example of [how] from the beginning of the year, the university has been really committed to this vision of ‘you can have speech as long as it doesn’t disrupt anyone,’ ” Poole tells The Progressive. “Which, in practice, doesn’t really mean you can have any kind of protest at all. If you can never have a protest with amplified sound because it might annoy someone, then the right to protest doesn’t functionally exist.”
Additionally, Poole says the university enforced a double standard against pro-Palestine organizations. Whereas other organizations can write in chalk on campus and put up posters uninterrupted, pro-Palestine student activists have been met with vigilant enforcement and police presence.
“Our posters get taken down within a day. Our people have been harassed by [Cornell police] while trying to chalk messages. We’re not doing anything different than any other club. But because of the content of the posters, the content of the messages, the university has been trying to crack down harder.”
“They’re not doing this when the band goes and chalks ‘Join band’ or when . . . Cornellians for Israel chalks ‘Bring them home,’ ” Poole says. “They’re not being harassed in this manner, but when we chalk, we will be.”
Poole adds: “Why us and not others? The answer to that is pretty clear.”
“It absolutely does not seem like business as usual,” says a student organizer with the Vanderbilt University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), who asked to remain anonymous. Vanderbilt had “one of the harshest responses in the country” to activists, according to the student, expelling three students for participating in an April sit-in, earning distinction as one of two universities in the country to expel students for pro-Palestine activism.
In August, Vanderbilt University published a press release announcing updates to its policies on the freedom of expression, banning specific actions that were staged last year, including the sit-in and an “Apartheid Wall” exhibit highlighting Vanderbilt’s ties to Israel. In addition to the ban on camping, the university prohibited members of the public from attending campus protests, banned overnight gatherings, and heavily restricted art installations—such as the Apartheid Wall.
“Last semester, it definitely felt like we had a lot more freedom,” says the Vanderbilt student. “But now it feels, frankly, almost kind of hopeless, just because every avenue that we have for meaningful change has been pretty much shut down.”
“Right now, the outlook for anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine expression at the university is bleak,” says the University of Michigan student. “But the fact that the vast majority of the campus community outwardly opposes these restrictions by the university is an indication that with proper mobilization, we’ll be able to defeat this repression and achieve divestment.”
Policy changes are not the only way campus administrations are trying to outflank the student movement for Palestine. Many colleges and universities, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of North Carolina system, have adopted a stance of “institutional neutrality,” with more in tow.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) defines institutional neutrality as “the idea that colleges and universities should not, as institutions, take positions on social and political issues unless those issues ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’ ” By imposing a flat ban on commenting on issues unrelated to the operation of the college or university, institutional neutrality would allow them to avoid conceding to the political demands of activists, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).
“College and university presidents are coming under increasing pressure to use the imprimatur of their office to support or decry ideological or political causes external to the university’s mission,” wrote ACTA in an August report titled “An Equal Space for All: A Trustee Guide to Preventing Encampments and Occupations on Campus.” “The best way to avoid this is an unequivocal policy of remaining neutral as an institution on political matters.” But activists contest the idea that colleges and universities with investments in Israel and the war industry are playing a “neutral” role.
“The whole ethos of Vanderbilt University, especially under our current chancellor [Daniel Diermeier] is this principle of institutional neutrality, where Vanderbilt as a whole claims to be neutral on controversial political topics to allow for students to have these debates within themselves,” according to the Vanderbilt SJP member.
“But inasmuch as Vanderbilt is invested in the bombs that are killing people in Gaza and in Lebanon and . . . takes an active role in developing those [weapons], Vanderbilt obviously can’t claim to be neutral. It’s just very obviously a facade.”
One vocal critic of institutional neutrality has been Wesleyan University President Michael Roth. In an interview with CNN in September, Roth called Harvard’s move to neutrality “silly” and “educational disservice at best and cowardice at worst.”
One week after the interview, Wesleyan called the Middletown Police Department to detain five student protesters engaged in a sit-in to demand the university Board of Trustees divest from Israel. Roth, who in May published an op-ed titled “Why I’m Not Calling the Police on My Students’ Encampment” in The New Republic, made the call, according to Batya Kline, a graduate student at Wesleyan and organizer with Wesleyan SJP.
“It’s a performance of wanting to have more free speech, but in reality, the cops have been called,” Kline tells The Progressive. “Myself and other students have been charged with on-campus disciplinary hearings—multiple of them—in an attempt to get us to stop our Palestine activism.”
It may be, as Kline argues, that Wesleyan’s administration was “sweet-talking” in the spring to set themselves apart from more enforcement-happy administrations. “Now this semester, when the spotlight is not on nationwide protest, their actions have mirrored all of the universities that got so much negative publicity because they called the cops on students.”
After more than a year of Israel’s brutal bombardment of homes, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps in Gaza, students remain committed to ensuring that their schools’ stated commitments to social justice are reflected in their actions.
“The way I see this movement is reaffirming the fundamental values of this institution and saying, we’re gonna hold you to them,” Poole says. “You say you care about this? Let’s actually show it in our money and in our tuition dollars.”