University campuses across the United States are facing a growing wave of student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Campus officials have responded by taking unprecedented measures, including calling in the police, to try to clamp down on the unrest and contain an increasingly chaotic situation. The end result? Some of America’s most prestigious educational institutions look less like places of learning and more like crime scenes.
At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, hundreds of people gathered on campus yesterday, refusing to leave. Police, some in riot gear, arrested nearly 50 protesters. Similar student demonstrations have paralysed campuses at the University of California in Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts and Emerson.
The situation hasn’t been helped by the complete loss of moral authority on the part of many university leaders. Some of them faced widespread criticism for failing to publicly condemn campus anti-Semitism in the days immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.
University authorities appear to have been caught off guard by the sheer scale of the unrest
Columbia University forms the epicentre of this latest round of unrest.
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