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Erin Hooley

An edgy calm held on many college campuses Friday after more than two weeks of chaotic protests, following police crackdowns on encampments of demonstrators and a growing number of deals between students and administrators to defuse tensions peacefully.

The scenes of clashes between police and pro-Palestinian protesters that had played out on campuses nationwide in recent days were far fewer, even as police launched fresh moves to clear tents and signs at a handful of schools, including New York University.

Whether the lull was temporary or signaled the beginning of a return to normalcy was unclear, but the concerted efforts of school officials and law enforcement to quell the protests seemed to be having an effect on one of the largest campus movements in decades.

Noam Emerson-Fleming, a 20-year-old sophomore at American University who has closely monitored events across the country, said he felt the action reached a crescendo when New York police forcefully removed protesters from Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, the center of the protest movement, late Tuesday night. But he sees a possible end in sight, something protesters say is<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/03/college-protests-movement-summer/" target=_blank> not in the offing</a>.

“I think this ends after graduation,” Emerson-Fleming said. “Everyone’s got to go home.”

The Biden administration on Friday also pushed forward with efforts to address the campus unrest, one day after the president made <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/02/college-student-protests-gaza-war/" target=_blank>his first substantive remarks</a> on the protests amid criticism from political opponents, including <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>, that he wasn’t doing enough.

In a letter to college leaders, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote that he is concerned about the rise of antisemitism on some campuses and warned that such discrimination is a violation of federal law. The message echoed a speech by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a> on Thursday.

Cardona noted that Jewish students have reported being assaulted and harassed and that vandalism at colleges and universities has included swastikas on doors. He said his department has opened 100 investigations into anti-Jewish bias and other discrimination on campuses since the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

“These and other such incidents are abhorrent, period,” Cardona wrote. “They have no place on our college campuses.”

The department also shared a <a href="https://sites.ed.gov/cfbnp/us-department-of-education-meets-with-universities-on-school-policies-during-the-israel-hamas-conflict-spring-2024/" target="_blank">list of ideas</a> for how campus leaders can create “safe and inclusive learning environments” for all.

Biden and top Democratic lawmakers in Washington increasingly distanced themselves this week from the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/03/university-protests-ucla-columbia-college-news/" target=_blank>pro-Palestinian protests </a>engulfing college campuses public and private, large and small — many students’ response to the Gaza conflict. The Hamas attack last fall left about 1,200 people dead in Israel and some 200 as hostages, according to the Israeli government. The counterattack that it then launched has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Susan Walsh

So far, the Democratic rebukes aimed at young protesters range from vague cautioning against violence to strongly worded calls for crackdowns on rule-breaking students to allegations of antisemitism.

Democrats appear to feel a sense of political urgency to dissociate themselves from the unrest as they seek to portray Republicans and Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, as agents of chaos. But in doing so, they also risk further alienating a key constituency in what are expected to be close contests for the White House and Congress in November.

On the other side of the political aisle, Republicans are working overtime to associate them with the turbulence at colleges.

Despite less drama Friday, tensions still flared on some campuses.

New York City police arrested several dozen more demonstrators Friday morning, according to department spokeswoman Floretta Chow.

At the New School, a private university in Manhattan, 43 demonstrators were taken into custody, and 13 more were detained by police at New York University. Chow noted that the situation in both locations remained unsettled and that those numbers were subject to change.

The police action at the New School came after demonstrators blocked an entrance to a hall that houses 600 students. Administrators offered a meeting between students and the university’s investment committee, but demonstrators declined, according to a statement from interim president Donna Shalala.

Police at SUNY New Paltz arrested 133 demonstrators between 10 p.m. Thursday and 2 a.m. Friday, according to school spokesman Andrew Bruso. The arrests came after a 9 p.m. deadline for protesters to disperse.

On the West Coast, police had arrested at least 30 people at Oregon’s Portland State University as they cleared a library — first on Thursday morning and again in the late evening after protesters, who had occupied the building for several days, scaled fencing and returned.

Nearly 2,300 protesters nationwide have been arrested as of Friday, according to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/university-antiwar-campus-protests-arrests-data/?itid=lk_fullstory&itid=lk_inline_manual_12" target=_blank>count kept by The Washington Post</a>. But increasingly, they and university officials are finding ways to resolve differences without such confrontations.

George Walker IV

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at about a half-dozen universities were packing up their encampments after student activists and university leaders reached agreements to end protests. The parameters of those deals differ widely.

Rutgers University plans to build an Arab cultural center and create a department of Middle East studies. The University of Minnesota and University of Michigan promised to look into divestment in Israel, a key demand on many campuses.

The four-day encampment at the main Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, N.J. — a tent city along the tree-lined square known as Voorhees Mall — ended peacefully despite the university announcing they would send in law enforcement if occupants did not clear out by 4 p.m. Thursday.

The Daily Targum, a student-run newspaper, reported that the Rutgers community “received three emails from Rutgers officials,” including one from New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway saying there would be “anticipated escalation” if protesters didn’t leave the Voorhees quad. The campus in New Brunswick has seen pro-Palestinian protests for decades.

After negotiating eight out of their 10 demands, protesters dismantled peacefully, taking down their banners and tarps after saying they’d concluded successful negotiations with university officials. Their demands, students detailed Friday, included Rutgers providing aid for 10 displaced Gazan students to finish their education at the state university; reviewing a relationship with <a href="https://www.birzeit.edu/en/about/history" target=_blank>Birzeit University</a> in the Palestinian West Bank; and divesting from its Israeli business interests.

In a statement, Conway said that the “resolution was achieved through constructive dialogue between the protesting students and our leadership teams.” The university provided a list of what the protesters had wanted <a href="https://newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2024-05/response_05022024_2.pdf" target=_blank>and the university’s response</a> to each.

“This agreement opens the door for ongoing dialogue and better addresses the needs of our Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian student body, which numbers over 7,000,” she said.

Morry Gash

The agreement followed other resolutions at a small group of schools that, like Northwestern University, agreed to discuss divesting from Israel or from military weapons companies with products being used in the war. Brown University agreed to consider a divestment vote, becoming one of the first schools looking to end protests without arrests or potentially violent confrontations.

Some Israeli professors working on those campuses, as well as pro-Israel students, said Friday that they didn’t feel that the decisions were fair.

“It’s a terrible mistake. The administration made a joke out of itself,” Efraim Benmelech, an Israeli professor at Northwestern’s business school, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the deal with protesters.

Benmelech resigned as co-chair of the university’s antisemitism committee, along with six other Jewish members of the group. Their decision prompted the entire committee to announce that it was shutting down.

Pro-Palestinian student groups are promising to renew demonstrations next year if schools don’t keep their promises.

The student-led protest movement continues to spread beyond U.S. campuses. About 90 pro-Palestinian protesters held a sit-in Friday on the central campus of Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Demonstrators — many of them wearing kaffiyehs — locked arms as they chanted slogans including “Stop the genocide!” and “Viva, Viva, Palestine!” The chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — banned in Germany since November — was also heard.

Berlin police began to remove some protesters from the scene about two hours after the sit-in began.

Pro-Palestinian protesters staged a sit-in Thursday night at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and the prestigious French university’s campus in the capital was closed Friday. Parisian students outraged by Israel’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">war in Gaza</a> have held protests for days, including at France’s most well-known university, the Sorbonne.

Liz Goodwin, Hannah Natanson, Clara Ence Morse, Kate Brady, Frances Vinall and Ellen Francis contributed to this report.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Pomona College among the schools that have made decisions on whether to consider divestment. The article has been corrected. 

2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, part of national team covering the Navy Yard Shootings. 

2011 Virginia Press Association award first place award for feature writing for her stories on kings and queens from Afghanistan and Ghana who now call the Washington suburbs home. 

Finalist for 2008 South Asia Journalism Award for outstanding piece or series for coverage of Mumbai attacks

2004 winner of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for outstanding reporting on violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. 

Four time finalist for the Livingston Award for her reporting on wars in Sudan, Congo and Liberia. 

Her reporting on Sri Lanka's war is featured in Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia

Rutgers University, BA in political science

Columbia University, master's in journalism

Emily Wax-Thibodeaux is a National staff writer who covers national news, with a focus on gender issues and social movements for the America desk. She is an award-winning former foreign correspondent who covered Africa and India for nearly a decade.

Emily Wax-Thibodeaux

Nieman Fellowship, Harvard University, 2003-2004

Livingston Award for National Reporting, 1999

First place, Shutdown “Feddie,” for coverage of the government shutdown, National Press Foundation (team award), 2014

First place, series, North American Agricultural Journalists (team award), 2008

Third place, beat reporting, Association of Health Care Journalists, 2007

George Polk Award for Justice Reporting for “George Floyd’s America," 2021 (team award)

Education Writers Association, finalist, beat reporting; finalist, feature writing, 2021

Educations Writers Association, finalist, beat reporting, 2020

DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

Washington University in St. Louis, A.B. in political science and international development

Laura Meckler covers the news, politics and people shaping American schools. She previously reported on the White House, presidential politics and immigration for the Wall Street Journal, as well as on health and social policy for the Associated Press. She is author of DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, about her hometown.

Laura Meckler

Fulbright Scholar, Germany

Northwestern University, BS in journalism and international studies

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff is a reporter on The Washington Post's General Assignment desk, where he covers breaking news and writes of-the-moment features. He has reported for The Post from Europe and covered crime and criminal justice on the Metro desk. He previously worked for the Texas Tribune and was a Fulbright scholar in Germany.

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

Justin Jouvenal covers the Supreme Court. He previously covered policing and the courts locally and nationally. He joined The Post in 2009. 

Justin Jouvenal

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