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.