After the Encampments

On April 24th, I entered Harvard Yard for a rally. In my eight years as a PhD student and graduate labor organizer at the university, I had joined gatherings under the John Harvard statue too many times to count, protesting for demands ranging from union recognition to fossil fuel divestment, ruining many a tourist selfie in the process. Some of these rallies were part of broader disruptions, such as a 2019 graduate student strike that slowed down teaching and grading at Harvard for nearly a month, or a three-day 2021 strike that interrupted parents’ weekend. Each time, however, we watched the university calmly shrug off our efforts. The work of engineering such crises wore out each new crop of organizers, but Harvard barely seemed to feel them at all.

This time was different. Instead of dispersing after the usual routine of speeches, chants, and circling the quad, students dashed onto the roped-off lawn and began rolling out tarps and setting up tents, erecting a Gaza solidarity encampment to demand that the university divest from Israel—one of more than 120 such camps that sprang up across the country in the spring. In the days that followed, I returned to the encampment almost every afternoon, drawn to the makeshift society that had finally, somehow, suspended business as usual. The little tent city blocked no one’s path to class, stopped no critical deliveries, prevented no grade submissions or grant wins, and instituted no hard pickets—and yet, it triggered a five-alarm fire unlike any I had seen at Harvard before, with the university closing Harvard Yard to the public for weeks and deploying campus police in round-the-clock shifts. The protest was constantly making the news—the mayor of Boston canceled an on-campus event, and the head of the ADL personally visited Harvard to urge administrators to remove the camp—and everyone from parents to members of Congress was watching to see the students’ next move. This camp was not alone in progressively pushing its university to the brink. All over the country, its counterparts eventually brought about the postponement or cancellation of classes, exams, and commencements; provoked a national media frenzy; and precipitated the fall of university presidents via votes of no confidence, resignations, and firings—a kind of disruption that other campus organizers, including unionists, had previously only dreamed of.

But while campers successfully created a crisis, they did not always know how to exploit it. “We had to translate the power from some tents on grass into the divestment of millions of dollars,” Aditi Rao, a graduate organizer at Princeton’s camp, told me, “and there wasn’t an ideological or tactical consensus on what would do it.” This lack of consensus came to the fore when administrators began approaching their students to negotiate an end to the encampments, creating a clear fork in the road for protesters. According to data gathered by Jewish Currents, students at at least 40 schools—including Northwestern University, Brown University, and Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus—took one path, using negotiations to secure pro-Palestine concessions that fell short of divestment in exchange for voluntarily clearing the lawns. Administrators and national media alike held up these deals as models for how campus protests should end, even as some of the students involved argued that the concessions they settled for were inadequate. Meanwhile, at other schools—including Columbia University, California State Polytechnic University, University of California (UC) Irvine, and Princeton University—students went a different route, letting negotiations fail rather than relinquishing the demand for divestment. Instead of striking deals or staying on lawns while their power waned, these camps escalated their protests, taking over school buildings in a bid to get their schools to concede. But this approach often resulted in immediate and violent police sweeps, mass arrests, and the end of the campus movement for the rest of the semester.

In hindsight, it is clear that—with few exceptions—neither negotiation nor escalation managed to secure real commitments to divestment last spring. Instead, both the deals that came from negotiations and the sweeps that followed escalations seemed to have hastened the end of the encampments, and thus the dissipation of students’ leverage. Such decampments, whether voluntary or forced, ultimately worked together with the arrival of the summer break to offer a reprieve that universities could use to refortify themselves against future uprisings. Administrators at more than 100 schools took to this task with gusto, instituting draconian policies penalizing protest; cordoning off lawns and other common campus spaces; announcing sweeping bans on pro-Palestine speech and, at times, speech writ large; and giving themselves new pretexts for calling the police on demonstrators who do not, say, confine their rallies to specific corners of campus or certain hours of the day. With these moves, universities seem to have shaken off the finite disruptions of the spring, signaling, in a University of Michigan regent’s words, that “it’s summer, school’s out. It’s time to move on.”

Watching the divestment protesters’ significant power ebb away over the summer, I was reminded of something that radical academic unionists have often pointed to as a challenge for higher ed organizing: the university’s remarkable resilience to single bouts of disruption. “Academia is not an industry in which striking for a few days or even two weeks necessarily causes intense disruption to the boss,” a labor working group based at UC Santa Cruz wrote in 2023, after a massive but short strike at the UC system failed to yield the concessions students had demanded. “It is only through the gradual accumulation of incomplete work and grading deadlines that the power of withholding labor makes itself felt in this sector.” Graduate labor organizers from UC Santa Cruz told me that this theory of change takes seriously the durability of the university’s various revenue and legitimacy streams—its diversified portfolio of investments, reliance on creditors and donors who are largely immune to campus protest, and ability to manufacture its own political and cultural legitimacy. In this climate, they said, strikes must aim to grind, instead of jolt, operations to a halt. Teaching must be stopped for long enough that university accreditation and tuition flows, and thus financial ratings, come into question, and research must be prevented for long enough to threaten the loss of billions in grant revenue. Militant unionists have termed this approach “the long-haul strike,” and, in the past years, have employed it at campuses ranging from the University of Michigan to Columbia to the still-ongoing strike at Boston University to push universities beyond their so-called “last, best, and final” offers over and over again.

The events of the past spring suggest that it is not only more systematic disruptions like strikes that need time to be able to wear down the university’s resilience: Immediately disruptive tactics such as the encampments—despite proving uniquely potent, in large part due to their focus on the political lightning-rod that is Palestine—ultimately face the same challenge of translating chaos into real leverage at an institution equipped to wait them out. This state of affairs seems to demand a kind of “long-haul protest” that, like the long-haul strike, sustains the crisis week after week, semester after semester. Students trying to envision such a strategy need not start from scratch: Scholars of the paradigmatic campus divestment movement of the 1980s, which targeted apartheid South Africa, recount how those engaged in that struggle intuitively acted out such a model. For instance, historians Matt Ray and Matthew Wranovics observe that at UC Berkeley, a key campus in that fight, students returned to quads again and again between 1984 and 1986, staging mass sit-ins, constructing shantytowns, taking over important campus buildings, and generally upending university life over consecutive semesters. “At the start of that struggle, the admin thought that, if given enough time and space and lip service, the movement would dissipate on its own,” Wranovics told me. Administrators also tried to demobilize students through rounds of mass arrests and, rarely, negotiations in which activists were pressured into accepting unfavorable deals. But students proved able to absorb these blows, unfailingly returning to protest the next semester. “Students seemed to have a sense that their strength lay in their unflappability, their dogged persistence, more than anything else,” Wranovics said. “After two full school years of university operations being dramatically impeded, [administrators] realized that this could not be waited out, that it could go on for a very long time. That’s when the UC system decided to divest.”

This orientation toward sustained disruptive protest may be starting to take root in today’s student movement. Over the course of the spring and summer, I spoke to dozens of organizers from more than 10 campuses. In April and May, most of those I interviewed were focused on more discrete tactical questions—about negotiation versus escalation, risk versus safety, and incremental versus immediate wins. But in follow-up interviews in the late summer, I heard students reorienting themselves to a fight that would span semesters, if not years. “We all now have a much more long-term view of what it’s actually going to take for the university to divest,” said Mariam, a graduate organizer at UC Irvine who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal. Starting from this long-haul strategic orientation fundamentally reframes the tactical questions from the spring, with the key issue no longer being whether to negotiate or escalate, but rather how to do both in a way that prolongs students’ presence on their quads, and keeps the five-alarm fire going for as long as possible. As an undergraduate organizer from Cornell’s camp, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me: “We forced universities to consider divestment by creating conditions that were intolerable for them. Only by sustaining those conditions for an extended period of time, with whatever tactics necessary, will we ever win this transformative demand.”

It was obvious that the spring’s encampments presented a severe crisis for college administrators. But they also presented a nearly immediate crisis for students, many of whom were overwhelmed by the intensity of the repression they faced. Some camps were patrolled by campus cops or private security at all hours; others faced attacks by counter-protesters; and all were receiving constant administrative threats of removal, suspensions, expulsions, and arrests. In this climate, the work of organizing the camps, and the complex demands of running them—providing tents, food, first-aid, garbage pick-up, security patrols, media training, cultural programming—quickly exhausted participants. “Each day that the encampment went on, it was harder and harder to sustain,” Mariam told me. “Almost everybody agreed that it was untenable to stay there without any change, whether that was taking it down or growing it.”

If all parties were, in some sense, eager to resolve a situation that seemed unsustainable, administrators took it upon themselves to suggest how to do so—through negotiations that favored their own interests and terms. Though the overtly repressive facet of the universities’ response to protesters has rightly garnered attention, data gathered by Jewish Currents shows that administrators were much more likely to negotiate with protesters than to evict them off the bat, with more than 85 of the over 120 universities where students were encamped engaging in talks with camp representatives. For universities, the advantages of using such talks in place of police sweeps were obvious. “The thing they really, really wanted to avoid was the bad publicity of a Columbia-level blowout,” said Sarah Wachs, an undergraduate at Northwestern and a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organizer, referring to the highly publicized mass arrest of Columbia students that fueled the spring movement.

Administrators had reason to believe that they could use negotiations to stem the crisis, likely based on their experience bargaining with academic labor unions, a context in which they have often managed to offer concessions that avert protracted shutdowns while containing workers’ most radical demands. Now, the administration returned to this playbook—albeit in a much more informal setting—trying to pressure student protesters to abandon their encampments and their core demand for divestment. “They made the point to us quite frequently that ‘this is how negotiations work’ or ‘it’s a give and take,’” said Sueda, one of two negotiators for Columbia’s encampment and an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), who asked that only her first name be used to avoid retaliation from her university. The things administrators were willing to give were usually low on the students’ list of demands, if they had demanded them at all. At Columbia, the university floated scholarships for Palestinian students. At the New School, students were offered “courses and lecture series on Palestine, funding for rebuilding Palestinian universities after the ceasefire, and so forth—just things they were pulling out of the air,” according to Amna, a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) member and encampment organizer who asked to use a pseudonym to avoid reprisal. And if students objected to such concessions, Mariam said, administrators switched registers, from “we’re offering you these things out of kindness” to “we want to remind you that what you’re doing is illegal.”

At some campuses, this carrot-and-stick approach to negotiations ensured that the encampment crisis was resolved quickly, and without clear commitments to divestment. The “stick” did much of the work: At every encampment that struck a deal, students said that administrators threatened them with a raid immediately prior to the camp’s decision to accept the agreement. This was the case at Northwestern, where administrators told campers on the final day of negotiations that “we had to come to an agreement on the deal by the end of the night, or else they would be sending in police in the morning,” Wachs said. Meanwhile, even as the Northwestern administration insisted that divestment was impossible, they offered a number of “carrots”: funding for five Palestinian undergraduates and four visiting faculty, and space for a temporary community center for Muslim and Middle Eastern and North African students, with a commitment to renovate a permanent one. Much more relevant to organizers’ demands, the administration also offered partial disclosure of Northwestern’s financial investments, which students hoped could be used to reattempt a divestment campaign down the line.

Backed into a corner by these imperatives, campers voted to take the deal, but with “a sizable number of people in dissent,” according to Wachs. Proponents of the deal, like undergraduate JVP organizer Evgeny Stolyarov, said that it was worth taking because “the university was ready to give really large concessions that it just would never, ever give in any other form,” and because the alternative was a sweep. But others felt that getting off the lawn after just five days, and without any attempted escalations, was a mistake, especially since the camp’s base of support had increased over that time. Indeed, students across the divide agreed that the encampment had grown from an original group of 50 people to roughly 300 participants, but disagreed about what this people power meant, with some holding that a larger camp would just mean more arrests, while others argued that more tents and greater militancy could have deterred arrests altogether. “We could have refused to comply with the admin’s protest perimeter and expanded the camp; we could have mobilized the thousands of community members who showed up in the first day or two to disrupt university operations,” said Briana, a graduate organizer who asked to be pseudonymized due to concerns about university repression. “But people were afraid of jeopardizing negotiations, so we ended up leaving before anything had even happened.”

Northwestern was not the only school where students debated whether negotiations were spurring them to decamp too quickly. At Rutgers New Brunswick, campers took a deal right after pulling off a large rally that led to “around 28 finals being canceled, affecting some 1,000 students,” according to Nusrath, an organizer there who asked that only her first name be used. What’s more, commencement was coming up, raising the possibility of a much more reputationally costly disruption to the university. But Rutgers administrators deterred such disruptions when—with police in riot gear already circling the lawn—they gave students an hour to disband or face arrests. Students ultimately left in exchange for, among other things, funding for 10 displaced Palestinian students, the creation of a new cultural center, and verbal promises of a divestment meeting (which was ultimately canceled). A similar pattern unfolded at Brown as administrators rushed to defuse students’ potential leverage. “The encampment was becoming more disruptive simply by staying up because we were very much in the way of the university’s commencement preparations,” said Katlyn Andrade, a graduate student and member of the camp’s negotiating team. But because negotiations were contingent on a promise of non-escalation, many students feared that testing their power would jeopardize talks, not to mention their own safety. “We were debating what escalation would mean in terms of police violence, especially for Black and brown participants in the encampment,” said Arman Deendar, an undergraduate student organizer at Brown. “If we got arrested, if all of the organizers got suspended, and our organizing power was just gone for the next semester, that wouldn’t make sense for the longevity and sustainability of the movement.” Ultimately, Brown students were offered a stronger deal than their counterparts at Northwestern or Rutgers—perhaps as a result of months of nonstop campus protest preceding the encampment, including multiple sit-ins that led to a total of 61 arrests. In particular, the deal on the table included a trustee vote on divestment in October, which many organizers thought would offer a goalpost for future organizing.

As some students took deals that, at worst, left divestment out of the picture and, at best, left it uncertain, others became convinced that they would not make headway on their goal at the negotiating table. Not coincidentally, some of the campuses where students took this stance—like Columbia and UC Irvine—were also home to unionists who had loudly denounced concessionary deals in labor bargaining. Organizers at these schools in particular, and on the left flank of the labor movement in general, have long warned about the asymmetrical dynamics of the bargaining table—where, according to a 1975 picket-line pamphlet oft-cited by long-haul unionists, the boss has the upper hand in a “war of nerves” that pressures students toward resolving crises rather than sustaining them. Under this orientation, campers rejected what Sueda called the “sweeteners” offered to them in lieu of divestment, such as scholarships and hardship funds for Palestinian students and new programs in the West Bank and Gaza. “You can’t simultaneously contribute to the bombing of people, and then suggest that you will pay for a scholarship for them,” she said. This position was shared by student organizers at UC Irvine and Princeton, where negotiators likewise refused non-divestment concessions which, in the words of Princeton’s Rao, would likely become a “cudgel against divestiture”—a pretext to get students off the lawn.

Holding negotiated settlements at bay often allowed camps at these schools to stay up longer: Whereas Rutgers New Brunswick’s encampment lasted four days, Northwestern’s five days, and Brown’s a week, at Irvine, Columbia, and Princeton, the encampments lasted more than two weeks, creating a significant headache for their universities. The large sweeps provoked by greater escalation also provided fuel for the student movement at large. “Columbia doesn’t have anything in terms of a deal, but Columbia gave the rest of us the political power to do this,” said Gabriel, a graduate student at the New School who was part of that encampment’s negotiating team and asked to be pseudonymized. And yet, even as they avoided being demobilized by a deal, these encampments were disbanded by decisive sweeps, which effectively shut down organizing for the rest of the semester. As an anonymous graduate organizer with CUAD told me, “the mass arrest tactic, while necessary at that point in the movement, made it so we lost capacity by being arrested, facing discipline, being on the radar of the university.” In other words, even though students were able to use escalation to impose severe reputational and political costs on their schools, in the process they sacrificed their single most important point of leverage: the ability to create more disruption.

At the end of April, students at the New School—a small, highly progressive private university in Manhattan with multiple militant labor unions—watched their counterparts across the country vacate university lawns days or at most weeks after they had occupied them. “Seeing the early concession at schools like Brown and Northwestern, it seems like they didn’t get a lot once they were willing to disband the encampment. So it was clear to us that we couldn’t just accept whatever they offered us early on,” Gabriel said. “On the other hand, we saw Columbia and NYU, where students pushed hard and ended up getting very fast and aggressive retaliation.” In response, New School protesters tried to chart a third path, attempting to use escalations and negotiations in concert rather than picking one of the two. Their efforts generated a month-long, nonstop crisis spanning four distinct encampments—one of the longest protests of the spring, and the only one where full-scale building occupations ended in a promised divestment vote.

As they had at other schools, students at the New School—where I spoke to five organizers over the summer—entered talks with administrators almost immediately after setting up an encampment in the lobby of the University Center, the academic-cum-residential building at the heart of the school’s urban campus. But unlike on other campuses, where students accepted early on that talks would only continue if they did not escalate their protests outside the negotiating room, New School students grew more disruptive as negotiations wore on, even when the administration threatened to stop talks. At the same time, students resisted a total breakdown of talks, so as to decrease the chances of a sweep. “As we were escalating,” Gabriel said, “we constantly were like, ‘Hey, you don’t have to raid your way out of this. Let’s solve this. Let’s get this done with the negotiations.’”

New School protesters observed that their repeated escalations began to change the balance of power in negotiations. When they first occupied the University Center lobby, for instance, administrators negotiated to have them change their location to a downstairs cafe instead. “We agreed to go downstairs—if they got us a meeting with [vice president for business and operations] Mark Diaz the following day, and in exchange for the re-establishment of the school’s investment committee,” which could recommend divestment to the trustees, Gabriel said. “The moment they indicated they might violate their side of the agreement, we brought our tents back to the lobby.” In the following days, the pattern continued as students exchanged tactical concessions—a clear pathway to the elevators, the end of a hard blockade on a dorm building—for more substantive ones from the university, including the partial disclosure of university investments and information about previously anonymous university decision-makers. “We were creating so many problems for the university that they needed us to make concessions on the level of the crisis itself, and we did that in order to get movement from the admin,” said Gabriel. Instead of seeing the disclosures they won as endpoints unto themselves, organizers immediately funneled this information into further escalation. “Soon after we found out about the investment committee and Board of Trustees members, we printed out huge posters with their faces on them that said, ‘This person in complicit in genocide,’ and hung them up across multiple buildings,” Amna recalled. The university demanded that the posters be taken down, which became yet another point of leverage for students to use.

Minor escalations were useful in reorienting power at the table, but as on other campuses, organizers felt that the status quo of the camp was untenable, and that they were due for a major escalation. After over a week of indirect negotiation where trustees and students communicated through intermediaries, they established a second encampment in the Design School, flooding the university building with around 1,000 rally-goers. Soon after, students were given a direct line to the trustees, who offered them an ultimatum: Settle for a Board of Trustees divestment vote on May 21st, or expect a police sweep the next day. The students had pushed admin to the brink with the length and repetitiveness of their protest, managing to secure a divestment vote on a faster timeline than any encampment in the country. But, afraid of wasting any leverage, they still refused to cut a deal. “We tried calling their bluff like we had done a million times, and said the latest date we would accept for a vote was May 9th,” Gabriel said. This time, however, the administration was not bluffing. The police arrived the next morning to clear both camps, arresting 45 protesters, all of whom were temporarily suspended. “We miscalculated,” Gabriel acknowledged.

It seemed to be the worst-case scenario—one that students at many other schools had feared: Protesters had overestimated their power, and now they had lost all their leverage, and were facing severe punishments. But even as students worried that their militancy had returned them to square one, the aftershocks of the sweep began to shift the terrain, with the entire university shutting down on the day of the raid, faculty casting a vote of no confidence in the administration, parents expressing outrage at the police violence, and even certain deans decrying the police presence on campus, which they called “unimaginable” and “far removed . . . from our history, our values.” This dynamic, in which the outcry that followed a violent response actually made administrators more amenable to negotiation, was not unique to the New School. Columbia administrators only started talks with students after their disastrous first raid on the camp resulted in over 100 arrests; at Princeton, the university opened negotiating channels in the aftermath of a sweep that arrested 14; and at the University of Wisconsin Madison, bad press following 34 arrests finally kickstarted a negotiation process. But the New School’s progressive reputation made it particularly vulnerable to post-sweep criticism, a weakness protesters immediately exploited. After the arrests, student negotiators maintained communication with administrators and emphasized how catastrophic the raid had been, especially for international students who were arrested and put at risk of deportation. “We made it a big deal,” Gabriel said. “Then they put us in touch with immigration lawyers. They were worried.” This pressure alone was not enough to get movement from the admin, however, so five days after the raid, New School faculty encamped at the University Center demanding divestment, and four days later, students and faculty established a fourth encampment, this time in the school’s admissions and administration building.

As a result of these recurrent crises, the New School eventually agreed to a Board of Trustees divestment vote on June 14th. “It was the fact that we were able to go again and again and again—across three buildings over the course of a month—that was crucial,” Gabriel said. “From the start, we knew the admin’s tactic was to create stagnation and wait us out. In response, our focus was on continuously not resolving the issue. Combining escalation and negotiation allowed us to do that: to actively create a constant sense that the house is on fire.”

For all its tactical savvy, the New School encampment saw its power start to wane right after striking a deal with the administration and disbanding in mid-May. On an empty campus devoid of protesters, the newly formed investment committee was able to postpone its advisory recommendation until September, delaying the trustee vote. “We thought we had something more tangible, and then it fell apart, in part because our organizing dissipated over the break,” Gabriel said. This accords with what happened on other campuses: The departure of students and subsequent relief of pressure enabled administrations at the University of Oregon, Northwestern, and Rutgers New Brunswick to variously renege on the terms of their agreements with protesters. It permitted Indiana University and Rutgers Newark to sweep the last remaining tents off their quads without much public pushback; empowered administrators in the UC system to take legal action against a large pro-Palestine strike there; and allowed university leaders at schools including UC Irvine, the University of Michigan, and the University of Georgia to mire students in legal and disciplinary charges.