When police cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University earlier this year, officers doused Moataz Salim’s hands and arms so thoroughly in pepper spray, he says, they burned for days.
Salim, a graduate student studying clinical psychology who says he has lost more than 160 relatives in Gaza, wasn’t among the dozens of people arrested that day in May. But after the raid, Salim decided to take a leave of absence from his education – in part, to focus on his activism, but also so he might avoid disciplinary repercussions from his university.
Salim, 27, said he’s spent the summer speaking out alongside members of Congress and attending protests, mostly recently during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial visit to Washington.
Although he and others are facing disciplinary hearings for their involvement in the encampment, Salim said, it’s clear the student body won’t be deterred from protesting in some form as classes resume.
“These students and myself, we aren’t taking on these repercussions and consequences because it’s fun,” he said. “It’s because it’s the right thing to do.”
As the fall term gets underway at many colleges, administrators are preparing for another possible surge in campus activism. The last school year ended acrimoniously as anti-war protests persisted on many school grounds, disrupting graduation ceremonies and jeopardizing some students’ academic standing.
Though on-campus demonstrations lulled this summer as students dispersed, the conditions that motivated the recent wave of activism haven’t changed dramatically since the spring. While several high-profile college presidents have left their roles, many schools haven’t substantively changed their investing strategies – a demand made by the lion’s share of protesters but a complicated ask in practice. International negotiations over a potential cease-fire in Gaza are tenuous. And members of Congress continue to see political opportunity in inserting themselves into the debate over how campuses should go about quelling unrest.
As young activists prepare to ramp up the momentum again, harsher rules await them on some campuses. Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, a private school in Connecticut, hopes others in his shoes have learned a few lessons from the chaos of the last school year.His approach to encampments like those that sprang up at many schools, including his, is not a uniform, across-the-board stance, but rather a nuanced one.
“If you have a space of expression and not intimidation, it should be encouraged,” he said. “If it veers into a space of intimidation or harassment… it’s the responsibility of the university to shut it down.”
Tougher rules, bans on clubs
A protest encampment at Indiana University Bloomington lasted for nearly 100 days before students voluntarily took it down in response to the new “expressive activities” policies that went into effect on Aug. 1, according to Bryce Greene, founder of the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. The policies effectively ban encampments on campus by prohibiting camping. The rules require advanced approval for signs and temporary structures and state that protest activities must occur between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., according to the Herald-Times, part of the USA TODAY Network.
The standards were adopted after the university came under fire for quietly changing an on-campus event policy that had been in place since 1969, suddenly requiring tents and other “structures” to obtain prior approval. They led to the arrest of more than 50 people, the Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network reported. The prosecutor’s office in Monroe County called the process behind the change “constitutionally dubious” and declined to charge dozens of people arrested, the Herald-Times reported.
Greene, a doctoral student involved in the Indiana University protests, said he was among those who had the criminal charges against them dropped. He said that although students view the new rules as a threat to their ability to protest, they’re still willing to make their voices heard.
“What this means is that we have to be hyperaware of the ways in which our university intends to crack down on us, and we have to be creative in some ways,” he said. “Sometimes we decide to stay within the boundaries when that suits, but our major plan for the fall is rejuvenizing the energy that we felt over the summer, getting people to rallies, getting people to marches, and specifically training.”
Many student activists organized last year through a network of clubs, some of which are banned at specific campuses headed into the new school year. The George Washington University chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which bills itself as an anti-Zionist organization, have been suspended through the spring of 2026, according to the school’s list of disciplined clubs.
In a statement, university spokesperson Julia Metjian said the school “has an obligation to address violations of university policy, and does so without regard to the content of the message those demonstrating seek to advance.”
Read more:Do college protests pay off? Wins are varied and sometimes lasting, experts say
Punishing protesters: Discipline varies across campuses
Allie Wong, a doctoral student, said she was arrested outside a student-occupied building on Columbia University’s New York City campus this spring and thrown to the ground by police officers, leaving her with an injured hand, bruised ribs and golf ball-sized welts on her head. But she said the trespassing charge against her was later dropped, and she was one of the few students arrested that night who didn’t face disciplinary action from her university.
“I explicitly told the head of my department the day of that I would like to be arrested,” she said, speculating that that request possibly deterred officials from punishing her. “On some level, I think that probably had to do with it.”
Last week, congressional Republicans criticized the university for, in their view, not adequately punishing student protesters who violated school policies last semester. According to disciplinary records received by the House education committee, 18 of the 22 students arrested after occupying the building Wong was in were returned to “good standing.” Three faced interim suspensions.
Republicans escalated their pressure on the university Wednesday, issuing a subpoena for documentation of any conversations among high-level administrators related to antisemitic incidents on campus since Oct. 7.
Wong, who said she is still shaken from the violence of her arrest, decided to take a break from organizing over the summer. The 38-year-old muted the Signal chat used by her peers in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, spent time abroad with family and started seeing a new therapist to help process what happened to her.
“It was a pretty dramatic experience and one that I don’t think I realized, like, the physical impact of until later, just kind of the anxiety, the stress, the ways that that has manifested in my life,” she said.
Meanwhile, Wong said her fellow students have been hosting healing circles and trainings to gear up for a fresh wave of actions in the fall. Though the university faced criticism over changes to its protest policies earlier this year, an administrative body of faculty and students spent the summer poring over revisions to how the campus, which became a flashpoint in nationwide divisions over the war, will handle protests going forward.
Read more:How Columbia University became the epicenter of disagreement over the Israel-Hamas war
“They will certainly be seeing more of us,” she said.
The punishments for anti-war protests have differed significantly across campuses. At Purdue University in Indiana, one student who faced disciplinary action was required to read the book “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win,” according to the campus newspaper. (Trevor Peters, a spokesperson for the school, said in an email that federal privacy laws prevent Purdue from commenting on specific students or cases, but there is a standard process for reviewing and determining sanctions.)
Federal judge intervenes at UCLA
In the meantime, at the University of California, Los Angeles, administrators have “taken the hardest line that they could” against the faculty and students arrested during protests, according to Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science and a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
More than 200 people were arrested in early May a day after a mob of counterprotesters attacked a previously peaceful pro-Palestinian encampment. In June, dozens more were arrested when students tried to reestablish the encampment, the Daily Bruin, the school’s newspaper, reported.
Blair estimated about 70 students received notice of disciplinary proceedings against them and he expects the bulk of them will be resolved before the school year starts in October. But Blair said being in limbo has been especially difficult. The disciplinary action has prevented students from graduating, disrupted their plans to apply for summer jobs and barred them from accessing housing.
“It is a punishment regime that is out of touch with what students were trying to do, which was to speak up for vulnerable people and to talk about one of the most important and difficult issues in our society today,” Blair said.
Michael V. Drake, the president of the larger University of California system, warned last week that his 10 campuses will be streamlining a set of rules about protests. Those policies include strict bans on encampments and face masks meant to conceal protesters’ identities.
“Clear communication and consistent application of policies and laws are key to achieving the delicate but essential balance between free speech rights and the need to protect the safety of our community and maintain critical University operations,” Drake wrote in a public statement.
The message came after a federal judge weighed in about campus access in response to a lawsuit from three Jewish UCLA students. The students argued in court that their access to campus was limited in a discriminatory way during recent protests. Lawyers for the university said the students lacked legal standing to sue. The court order, in the university’s view, was unnecessary to keep the school compliant with federal anti-discrimination laws.
U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi, in a scathing decree, said if the university can’t make sure that its ordinarily available programs and campus areas are available to Jewish students, it will have to restrict those things for all students, too.
“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” he wrote in the preliminary injunction. The university has appealed.
Read more:Campus protests across the U.S. result in arrests by the hundreds. But will the charges stick?
Will agreements with protesters make a difference?
The tumult of the last school year reminded George Boggs, a former community college president in California, of a protest he responded to in the 1990s. After a debate about faculty hiring choices, trustees made comments that professors and students of color perceived as racist. The students, wanting to make their voices heard, pitched an encampment similar to the ones which, decades later, were erected in the months following the Israel-Hamas war.
Though he acknowledged the ’90s demonstration happened at a different time in American history, Boggs said he did come away from the experience with a valuable lesson: Take students seriously.
“They’re not the enemy,” he said. “We have to realize that our current Jewish students are not the Israeli government, and Muslim students are not Hamas.”
At some colleges, including Brown University, protests in the spring arrived at more amicable conclusions. The private school in Rhode Island struck a deal with student groups in late April to end the school’s encampment, and, as part of the arrangement, students were allowed to make their case to top administrators about why the university should divest from companies the students said wrongly support the oppression of the Palestinian people.
School officials are set to vote on the matter in October. Eli Grossman, one of the architects of the pact, is optimistic. Though he graduated in the spring, the 24-year-old has found time away from his demanding new job – fighting wildland fires – to check back in with student organizers.
“The cost to our learning community of completely ignoring this issue, and letting it fester and build resentment, is not worth pissing off a few donors that happen to have strong opinions,” he said.
