I had conversations with student organizers at NYU, the City College of New York, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and Spelman College, from mid-May to early June, and see patterns in the discipline they experienced over the past two semesters.

In recent months, the distinctions between campus administrative and security offices and off-campus police forces have collapsed. College officials have mobilized the otherwise internal disciplinary processes as extensions of state force. While spectacular police raids of encampments or sit-ins are immediate threats to bodies and psyches, it is more often the case that students’ jobs and living conditions are threatened by the enforcement of rules against “disorderly conduct” and the disruption of the business of the university.

In encampments, we provide food and mental health resources, access power, manage waste, familiarize ourselves with comrades and friends’ medical needs, etc. Yet we rarely treat the necessary work of maintaining and reproducing the collective life of social movements as valuable in its own right. The takeover of university and college buildings gives us a glimpse of what we must do to transform these spaces into something other than infrastructures for more displacement, more capital accumulation, and more climate catastrophe. Such transformation of space mirrors Palestine, which is a place where alternative practices of survival and space-making have been preserved across millennia.

— Lennie Hanson

Destiny, NYU I graduated from NYU this spring. Most of my organizing on campus before October had been environmental. I wouldn’t have called myself an organizer, just someone who was into activism. But then in October I really picked up again with Shut It Down NYU (SID) doing deoccupations. And then the Palestine Solidarity Coalition (PSC) launched fully mid-April.

My first disciplinary hearing was in early April for a disruption at a career fair. We were just holding a banner in front of a General Dynamics table until they left. We got disciplinary hearings for it, but we weren’t even kicked out of the event. The security guard just watched us the entire time, and we then left on our own.

And then there were the encampments, which kicked off in April. I had a written warning first. Then I had sanctions from the encampment, which was temporary persona non grata status [barring entry to campus buildings, even for class and work, and deactivating student IDs] and reeducation modules. Then from the actions we held in Bobst Library, I got an immediate interim suspension, which turned into a permanent persona non grata status that is still in effect after my graduating.

December 2023 was our first big occupation, where we were in the Paulson Center for a week because of the call for a global strike. Campus security was extremely upset. They called the NYPD, who stationed themselves in the building. From that moment, campus safety became a lot more aggressive.

During the encampment in April, which was on a privately owned public space, the way the campus security officers (CSOs) were acting was full-on police state. A lot of them would be annoyed with us for going to the bathroom. One student was followed and watched in the bathroom at 3 a.m. and had to argue with the police to use the bathroom. Afterward they sent the student an email saying that they’d violated their persona non grata status just for using the bathroom in the university they pay for.

When I was in the library action in May, a CSO came up to me and said, You have persona non grata status, you can’t be here, and was super aggressive. One of the big things for me this semester is that most of the CSOs they’ll sic on us are also POC — a lot of Black and Arab CSOs. They thought it would help, but it just made it worse because of the power imbalance. They should understand our world, and they still choose to uphold white supremacy and punishment. For me it was upsetting for this Black CSO to call the NYPD on me at 10:30 at night.

Anytime a thing goes down, there’s always someone willing to support us, willing to get involved, willing to help out. NYU is so fractured and fragmented that so many of the people who enforce rules don’t know the rules themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to any faculty members as much, even my own adviser, outside of this semester. Getting through the repression with community has been important for me. Everywhere I turned, there was someone checking in or people coming to offer healing spaces for us. There were people dropping off food and water. Faculty were coming at 3 a.m. to watch out for us. That showed us that nothing the university could do would harm us with the support that we have.

Ryna Workman, NYU I’m a law student. I graduated this May. I had not really been involved in campus activism during my time at NYU until this year. In October 2023 I sent out an email to law students about my solidarity with Palestinians and condemning genocide, apartheid, the military-industrial complex, all that stuff. People did not like that. I lost the job I had planned to take after graduation.

As an interim measure, my dean prevented me from acting in my role as the student bar association president, and that kicked off my disciplinary action. That process was ongoing officially from Nov. 10, 2023, until March 2024. I was being accused of violating the anti-harassment policy. In March this was informally resolved but still resulted in a censure on my transcript and included a joint stipulation of fact and sanction, which basically was a statement of events and me agreeing to follow the conduct policies until graduation.

I and others involved in the Law Students for Justice in Palestine also got accused of vandalism for writing on chalkboards in classrooms about our cease-fire sit-in.

Students had been holding actions in campus buildings in the fall and the spring. But once the encampments went up, they roped off the lobby in the building where Shut It Down NYU had been organizing deoccupations in the fall and spring. They also put up barriers and police watches outside. They put up a wall at Gould Plaza. The Kimmel Center for University Life has been closed to the public for months. They put up a wall on the stairs.

There is no other place on campus where we are allowed to assemble. So the disciplinary action is inevitable when you’ve closed down and heavily restricted access to every other part of campus where students had been organizing previously.

There are two arms to this. One is the Office of Student Conduct and, in my case, the law school administrators, but there are campus safety officers who lie about their power and enforce rules completely indiscriminately.

Campus safety likes to take on the role of judge in whether or not we are violating policy. And there have been many occasions where I have read these policies and have had to correct them and tell them, “No, that’s not actually a policy violation.” CSOs take on the role of being the Office of Student Conduct. But they don’t know the policies. They aren’t briefed on them. Then they blend these ideas of student safety with conduct violations in a way that only works against us as student organizers. And this is with Palestine specifically because nothing else has led to this arbitrary nature around what is a policy violation and what is a problem for student safety.

The moments we were in the encampments at Gould Plaza and outside the Paulson building were some of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had at this university. To me it’s about getting creative and finding community, even when we know that camps are not sustainable, because it’s not just about the individual locations. It’s about what relationships we’re able to build, what programming we’re able to have, how we’re able to learn with each other — and how we’re able to protect each other, like my getting to know the other law students who became heavily involved later this spring with jail support and organizing for disciplinary action representation. The repression allows people to find their place in this movement in a way that makes us more sustainable and allows us to continue to grow.

Anonymous, Spelman College I got started organizing around October 2023, because some students were holding a protest against Starbucks. I helped found the Student Intercommunal Coordinating Committee, which organizes across the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUC), which includes Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University. We set up a table and passed out chai and Arab-style tea and coffee. We handed out flyers about how there was union busting, how the Starbucks union got in trouble for being pro-Palestine, and how the CEO of Starbucks supports Israel. Someone from our administration came by and threatened one of our members with expulsion for passing out flyers. They also came and threw away all of the coffee and the desserts. That was the beginning of our interactions with administration.

Those of us at the AUC work as a part of the larger Atlanta student movement. That means we work with schools like Emory, Georgia Tech, and Oglethorpe to organize actions around the city. The encampment at Emory was not only to show a united force of students and universities in Atlanta but also to show our institutions that they don’t exist in a vacuum and their actions affect the local community. Community members, like a chaplain and local activists, were present. There we witnessed the worst instances of student repression. My friend, a Morehouse man, was tackled by the police and put in a chokehold. I was tear-gassed, and we were kettled. When one of my friends was getting arrested, I saw police pin him to the ground, handcuff him, then tase him.

A bunch of students came to the encampment just as onlookers and were detained. It’s important to mention that they were visibly Black, visibly Muslim; they were detained until they could prove they were Emory students. There were about 28 people arrested, a majority of whom are Black and Brown students. Twenty of them were Emory students, and Emory keeps pushing this narrative of outside agitators. That narrative is horrible — the same narrative was used during the civil rights movement to discredit activists. Like I said, we work in tandem, we work together. So it’s not really us coming as outsiders.

The administrators rely on the Atlanta Police Department (APD) at our protests to threaten us. They have used the threat of expulsion before, but they haven’t gone through with the proceedings, partially because we have a really strong alumni connection. It’s a little bit twisted because we are Black students. Any interaction with the police, even in the most casual terms, puts our lives in danger. For them to employ that shows the recklessness and lack of care they have for their students. Even when they don’t use punitive actions, they tell the police to show up at our peaceful speak-out, which is a form of potential violence.

All of these institutions have a connection to Cop City. Eighty-four percent of deaths at police hands in Atlanta are of Black people; 90 percent of arrests in Atlanta are of Black people. I feel disappointed that institutions that are supposed to uplift and support Black people continually choose to support their oppression and facilitate their death by supporting Cop City. On the GILEE [Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange], APD is sent to Israel to be trained. The Israel Defense Forces has this project over there called Little Gaza where they build miniature Palestinian villages to run drills in and figure out how to shut down resistance or oppress people as fast as possible. That is what Cop City is modeled after.

Spelman definitely uses APD surveillance cameras all over campus and all over the AUC as well. Our administration is watching my social media. I’ve seen them — I don’t know why they are not more covert about it, but they’re looking at my LinkedIn. They’re looking at my Instagram. One of them accidentally followed the Coordinating Committee on Facebook.

I’ve been telling everyone that if I wasn’t radicalized before, I’m radicalized now. This experience has really opened my eyes up to the world or to the state. I don’t want to sound crazy. This is probably something you shouldn’t say out loud. But my thinking has become more that this is actually war with the state rather than anything else. Their tactics, the militarization used against students, the riot gear — yeah, this is war.

We shouldn’t support the same circumstances that led to the creation of historically Black colleges and universities. The only reasons HBCUs exist in the first place are forced displacement and apartheid and genocide. The HBCU support of Cop City is disgusting, genuinely disgusting.

I want to remind the college presidents that they’re Black, and no matter how things have changed, no matter your title, you’re Black. And the hand that feeds you is an oppressor. It might feed you, but it’s not going to shield you.

Anonymous, Vanderbilt University I came to Vanderbilt already having a clear understanding of trans issues in education and across the country. I already had experience advocating for trans people in my high school. A lot of my organizing on campus has been around supporting trans people and supporting trans identities and making sure people feel that the Vanderbilt campus cares that they exist and cares that we have a place in the fabric of the university.

By the first week of the spring semester, the university was already showing signs of repression. They canceled events from Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. They denied room allocations for specific organizations’ meetings and events that were related to Palestine. Then over 20 organizations that were most vocal about supporting Palestine on campus formed a coalition. Students for Justice in Palestine started doing more direct actions — we put up an apartheid wall and had to hold a sit-in because the university threatened to remove it.

The university did not respond to any of our demands from the sit-in, which lasted over 150 hours. Students slept outside, guarding the wall from hecklers and from university administration threatening to take it down. Because the university didn’t respond, we had a sit-in at our administrative building, Kirkland Hall, and demanded to have a referendum on divestment reinstated. This was our demand for months, so that the student body could vote on where our student government funds go. We wanted to boycott companies on the BDS movement list that support Israel or Israeli companies.

At that sit-in at Kirkland, students were given the most punitive consequences, which included expulsions, suspensions, and over 20 disciplinary probations. Once students entered Kirkland for this protest, the administration felt that this was outside of the scope of what was allowed in the student handbook. They decided to take punitive measures as far as they could.

We entered at 9 a.m. on March 26. The sit-in ended at 6 a.m. on March 27.

At the sit-in, the police department was in full force. We have an armed police department, the Vanderbilt University Police Department, which also houses multiple security units. There’s a community service officer unit and there’s Allied Universal, which is a third-party unit. There’s a lot of security on campus.

We were inside for more than 20 hours and not given the opportunity to go to the bathroom or to allow food into the building. We had snacks, so we were able to eat, but when it came to going to the bathroom, we had to get resourceful. It’s clear that the university uses the police to remove our humanity from us. Denying us access to the bathroom was the police officers’ main job. Leshuan Oliver, lieutenant of the Vanderbilt University Police Department, came in at one point, and we essentially begged him to use the bathroom. And he denied us.

I will say very clearly that they use Black police officers to do their bidding for them, which we have seen across the country, across the globe, in the way that the United States has used a Black woman in the UN. These institutions will continuously use Black faces to do their suppression so that they don’t have to be the forward-facing ones. A lot of those officers denying us our rights were Black.

The Vanderbilt University Police Department was surveilling us through the cameras inside the building. The administration and the Vanderbilt University Police Department are one and the same. They were surveilling us to identify specific students, using these cameras for facial recognition. That’s how they sent out the initial interim suspensions. And then for the final interim suspensions that they sent out the next day, they took pictures of people’s Vanderbilt IDs while they were being escorted out of the building.

After we received the suspensions, we were given until 5 p.m. to pack up anything we needed from our rooms and leave campus. We were not allowed to use our meal plans or stay in our dorms past 5 p.m. From there we found housing and stayed together as best we could. The next day we received notifications that we had a disciplinary hearing.

Now they’ve put up fences at our solidarity encampment, covering it with black tarp so you can’t see in. They have blocked off the entire area where we had our encampment from March to May.

I was one of the first students to enter the building. I was placed under arrest, and now I’m being expelled and not allowed to graduate. I am not getting my degree. It’s been difficult because I know what I am advocating for and know deeply what I’m fighting for, and I am not afraid of the punishment, but it is hard to know that this university is willing to use that against individuals who are clearly just standing up for what they believe in.

This is the first time on Vanderbilt’s campus that over 20 organizations have come together to support Palestine. We want to do anything that we can as Americans attending a roughly $10 billion–endowed institution. More people will recognize their privilege and begin using it in ways that don’t just benefit themselves but may make them lose some of their privilege. It will happen. It’s not just Palestine, it’s Sudan, it’s the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s Haiti. People understand how things are connected. This is driving people to act and learn and understand what they can do. So I have hope.

Anonymous, the City College of New York Before the encampment in April, we had protests every Thursday since October. Ever since the encampment the college has told us we need permits in order to have any protest. We never needed permits before. And if we’re protesting outside a designated area, then it becomes a problem.

The encampment ended April 30, and students have felony charges from it. [Note: Charges were dropped against seven of the 17 students and faculty members who were arrested.] On May 13 we had a protest to ask our school to drop the felony charges and the disciplinary charges against students. I got a letter that day saying that I’d be suspended if I didn’t leave the protest. Nobody left. And it seems like none of the suspensions have happened.

Afterward public safety officers came up to us and told us what we’re doing is worthless and that we’re not helping people. One officer was mad they have to work extra hours. He said, My job is only to protect students, and I asked him, “What about the students like me who are getting harassed at school every day because of their stance on Palestine?” I’ve been called a terrorist. I’ve been spat on, I’ve been told that I was a child rapist, all this really horrific stuff, by people at school. This has happened in front of campus safety. They did absolutely nothing. They just looked.

On May 15 we also did a sit-in at CCNY, and they called the Strategic Response Group (SRG). They weren’t deployed onto the campus, but they were around the corner, ready to come in. But the school was willing to send SRGs, who are very brutal; there’s a lot of evidence of them being brutal at different campuses [in New York City], including ours. And they were willing to deploy them in the middle of the school day, on the last day of classes. The students ultimately got up and left, so they didn’t deploy SRG. But they were there on standby.

They know exactly who we are. They’ve recorded us, they’ve watched us, they walk behind us. I’ve seen the heads of public safety record all of us. They’re not very subtle. They’re making sure to get our faces. I don’t know if it’s to build a case later on or to use it for our suspension. But they do have videos of us.

They militarized our campuses like crazy. Every gate is locked and has security at all times. You cannot do anything without the administration knowing. They all have walkie-talkies to keep public safety informed. I’ve heard them say, Oh, there’s this many students wearing keffiyehs here. They always pay attention to students who are wearing hijabs.

I also want to point out that President Vincent Bourdeau was arrested five times for student activism for South Africa at Cornell, the same activism that we’re doing for Palestine. He was arrested for encampments; he was arrested for a sit-in. He was in our shoes years ago. He was at some point one of the people who paved the road for us and what we are doing. But now he’s assigning people to pepper-spray people, to pull off people’s hijabs, and to brutalize his own students. When we try to speak to him in meetings, he basically says, The past is in the past.

But the disciplining hasn’t affected us because we see what’s going on in Gaza. Children are literally being burned to a crisp and beheaded. This is something that we cannot let happen. It’s just too much. We cannot be scared and let these things happen. To me that’s a privilege. I grew up in a war. I’m from Iraq. I’ve seen what happens to kids, what it’s like to hear bombs constantly and fear the sound of every little thing, and how it feels to have the place that you’re staying in shake. I know exactly what they’re feeling. But I had the privilege to leave, and now I have safety here. I can’t just throw everything that I’ve experienced away. We want to show [the college] that we’re not scared of suspension. We’re not scared of expulsion. We’re not scared of any of this.

I really want to emphasize how the school has militarized so much. It feels like a hostile environment. I have to pick up my cap and gown, and as a Muslim woman, I am scared. I push it off, though. I don’t want to be on campus because I can feel all eyes on me. At first I thought I was being paranoid, but a lot of my friends feel the same exact way. I’m constantly being followed.

Anonymous, the University of Chicago I’ve been involved in the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter since I came to the university. We had a smaller chapter at the beginning. But of course a lot changed after Oct. 7. We immediately set up a table in the middle of our quad and said we wouldn’t leave until the genocide was over. We were able to do political education, get people interested, maintain a public presence, attract new people to the organization, and be a visual part of the quad every day.

There was always a protest component to the table. We would chant, read news from what was happening in Palestine, and have local activists, faculty, and others speak. The year prior, we had established a relationship with students at Birzeit University [in the West Bank] and the Right to Education campaign there. So we were getting updates on the increased repression against student activists there — administrative detention, torture, their offices being raided — but also their calls to the international academic community to take a stand on the genocide.

With the help of this open and public presence, we were also able to rebuild a coalition, UChicago United, that had emerged during other waves of student organizing. SJP deepened its collaboration with Care Not Cops, a group dedicated to police abolition, particularly of the University of Chicago Police Department, which is one of the biggest private police forces in the country. UCPD polices far beyond the boundaries of campus and has a well-documented record of racial discrimination against the surrounding communities, which are predominantly Black.

In mid-October we held a really big rally. We never officially booked the space to hold the table. Then a bunch of Zionist organizations on our campus booked that same place, knowing that we were there every day. They came and held a huge rally. But we didn’t move. We had our rally. After that, they filed a complaint against SJP for having disrupted their event, which went to a disciplinary process. They framed it specifically in terms of the University of Chicago’s free speech values. That took months.

Over time, we more precisely formalized demands among the organizations in the coalition. Our main demands were divestment, disclosure, and repair. Divesting is about fossil fuels and weapons contractors arming Israeli genocide, but also cutting ties with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and other Israeli institutions that the University of Chicago has partnerships with. Reparations is to fund the Birzeit Rebuilding Hope initiative, which is dedicated to rebuilding higher education in Gaza. It also includes putting funding, which the university has promised but has never lived up to, into South Side community organizations and defunding and disbanding the UCPD. Finally, it means cutting our ties with the Israel Institute, which is a U.S.-based nonprofit and propaganda operation that hosted an Israeli general to teach classes on “counterterrorism” on our campus. We consider this repair because the class was harmful and unsafe for Palestinian and other students on our own campus.

A further step we took was a soft blockade of the administration building, Levi Hall, where we linked arms and blocked the entrances to the building for one hour. That led to another disciplinary hearing against SJP, where the administration made the complaint. For both the rally and the blockade, we were charged with disruptive conduct and substantially disrupting operations to the university.

As part of the disciplinary process for the blockade, we got protest probation. We were supposed to produce an educational infographic for other student organizations on effective modes of protest. Instead we created Instagram posts showing historical examples of protests at UChicago that the university now uses to glorify its image. And we made it into kind of a joke infographic: Here’s how not to protest at the University of Chicago. We got a lot of traction from that.

There was a sit-in in November where 26 students and two faculty were arrested by the UCPD for trespassing. The charges were ultimately dropped because the state’s attorney has repeatedly refused to prosecute peaceful Palestine protesters. The dean of students also filed a complaint against us, and we went through a disciplinary process.

The university sent in dozens of police officers to the sit-in. They locked down Rosenwald Hall, the admissions building that we were in. We didn’t get any engagement with any of our demands. We just had the deans on call and the police warning us, If you don’t leave, you will be arrested.

Most of us didn’t leave. Some people couldn’t stay, like international students, but 20-some students and two faculty stayed. The faculty, by the way, were just observers. They weren’t protesters, and they made that clear. The university also denied access to legal observers. We were all arrested and then released.

It’s very important for this administration not to arrest students in front of the press, so we got a lot of people to mobilize outside the buildings and had press. Then the administration turned one of the rooms in the building into a de facto processing center.

They only handcuffed two students, visibly Muslim men. The rest of us, including myself, didn’t get handcuffed. But the main goal was to get us out of the building, intimidate us, and not get too much press. But after the sit-in, our coalition grew a lot. UChicago’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine formed, and a big reason was the fact that the university arrested faculty at the sit-in.

We each had to write statements in response to the complaint that was filed about the sit-in. Instead of responding to the evidence suggesting that we were disruptive, each of us wrote about why we participated in the sit-in and why we were justified. I focused on the children who held a press conference outside al-Shifa Hospital in October. We had the option of keeping what we wrote confidential. Instead, we had people film us reading our responses inside Rosenwald Hall, where we had been arrested, and we published them in the student newspaper.

After the sit-in, we did the encampment, which was up for eight days. The president and provost finally panicked on the third or fourth day and met with us. Our lowest-tier demand was to have a public meeting with our administration. That had never happened in the past 30 years of student protest on campus. It happened only with the encampments. Our president, on the basis of institutional neutrality and that some people might disagree, wouldn’t even admit that universities in Gaza had been destroyed. He never even mentioned the encampment by name. He refused to say the words “Palestine” and “Palestinians.”

They suspended the negotiations on the sixth day. We got multiple tips on the seventh day that there was going to be a raid by the UCPD. People were starting to get really tired and paranoid. And then, at 4 a.m., there was a raid by about 50 UCPD officers in riot gear. They terrorized the students, they smashed all the art, they smashed the encampment and pushed people out.

There were no arrests the night they raided the encampment. There are no disciplinary cases that we know of yet.

The story is ongoing. Recently, there was an occupation of the Institute of Politics building, which the students renamed after the Palestinian intellectual and martyr Basel al-Araj. So our campaign is still continuing and popularly supported, but the university has shown a willingness to use riot police, armed batons, zip ties. The police shoved multiple students and threw parts of the encampment around. There was a big Chicago Police Department presence at the last protest. All of the negotiations at the encampment took place under the threat of police raids.

The main point I’d like to get across is that regardless of the effect of disciplinary hearings, arrests, or whether they’re listening to our demands or not, this university has dozens of heavily armed, militarized police officers whom the trustees and administration are willing to deploy to crush a popular movement as soon as it gets strong enough. And that intimidation and repression is reflected not only by brute violence but also by surveillance, by infiltration, by undercover cops, by implicit threat.

Disciplinary cases have been opened against 10 students for their alleged involvement in the encampment. The administration has withheld degrees from four graduating seniors based on their alleged involvement with the encampment. One graduate student’s degree is being withheld based on their alleged involvement with the autonomous occupation of the Institute of Politics. At a recent walkout from the graduation ceremony, UCPD pepper-sprayed multiple people and violently arrested one woman.