Yousef Hasweh is set to receive his diploma from the University of Chicago on Saturday.
What he received instead was an email from the associate dean of students informing him that his participation in a protest camp in a campus courtyard was under investigation and that “your degree will not be awarded until this matter is resolved.”
Like many other student protesters across the country, Haswe has been caught in a kind of disciplinary limbo: He was allowed to attend the graduation ceremony, but the university has withheld his degree until it decides whether and how to punish Haswe, who violated the university's code of conduct by refusing to leave the encampment that police cleared on May 7.
He has already received a formal reprimand from the university for being part of a group that occupied a university building last year in protest at the war between Israel and Hamas.
The question of how severely to discipline such students is a serious one in academia, where many universities pride themselves on their histories of student activism against issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and income inequality. Some faculty members have themselves celebrated such activism and encouraged students to become politically involved, but others have been arrested or disciplined for doing so.
But today, some students are making demands of the university that are troubling administrators and veterans of past social movements: They want all charges against them, academic and legal, to be dropped. Many have been charged with minor offenses like trespassing. Others have faced disciplinary action from the university, ranging from warnings on their records to suspensions and expulsions.
“There's nothing,” he said. Of Palestinian descent, he added, “I think it's hypocritical to say we're causing chaos when they're actively involved in genocide that's so disruptive to my family.” At the University of Chicago's graduation ceremony on Saturday, dozens of students walked out to voice their opposition to the university's response to cases like Hasweh's.
When the encampments first appeared this spring, colleges struggled to respond. Many initially tolerated them, then called in police after students repeatedly refused orders to disperse. Since Columbia University arrested its first protester on April 18, more than 3,000 people have been arrested on college campuses across the country, including California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt University, and Emory University.
Now, with most of the encampments now cleared, university officials face similar challenges over disciplinary action.
By being too lenient, universities risk encouraging further camps when students return in the fall. Too harsh a response, such as revoking degrees or placing students on permanent arrest records, could come across as too harsh a punitive response to a largely nonviolent protest and jeopardize the futures of the students universities are meant to nurture into productive citizens.
Some universities have agreed to less strict measures, but with conditions. At Johns Hopkins, for example, school officials announced that they would end disciplinary proceedings if students who set up camps agreed not to set up new camps or disrupt campus life.
Other students, like Brown, have flatly rejected calls for clemency. Activists and their supporters had urged the university to require local police to drop criminal charges against 41 students arrested during the sit-ins in December.
In response, Brown University President Christina Paxson wrote a letter to the student body saying those arrested had made “informed choices,” adding that seeking immunity from liability is inconsistent with the nature of civil disobedience. “The practice of civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of a decision on a matter of conscience,” Paxson said.
In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that during a workshop on nonviolent protest, he asked participants, “Can you stand the ordeal of prison?”
“Those who break unjust laws must do so openly, with love, and with a readiness to accept the punishment,” Dr. King declared.
Scholars say making personal sacrifices in pursuit of a cause has historically helped social movements garner mass support.
“They do it to awaken the conscience of the state or the institutional power in question — to make them aware of what they believe is a larger moral obligation,” said Tony Banaut, executive director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at the University of Chicago.
“I think this tradition is worth celebrating, and society has seen tangible improvements thanks to activists willing to work on it,” he said.
Civil rights activists created the illusion of realizing that cost by occupying lunch counters or marching peacefully through the streets in suits, only to be met instead with brutal police repression.
Few protesters today have faced anything close to such brutality or punishment, but they say they fear being identified and harassed or their personal information exposed, so they wear masks and kaffiyehs to hide their identities, and some refuse to give their names even when negotiating face-to-face with officials.
Anonymity and the denial of penalties could weaken their movement, Dr Banout said.
“My fear is that it will actually alienate people and ultimately not alleviate the suffering in Gaza,” he said.
Veteran civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said he believes this generation of student protesters is not a monolith and, like other generations, some are more willing to accept the responsibilities of civil disobedience than others, but added that he sensed a sense of entitlement among some demonstrators in their desire to avoid consequences.
“If you're going to fight for rights, you can't fight for the disenfranchised,” he said.
Sharpton said he understood why activists would fight the charges against them, having been arrested multiple times and spending nearly three months in jail for protesting military bombing exercises on the island of Vieques.
It's unlikely that a student would spend months in jail, but, he added, “you have to be prepared to say the cause is more important than my freedom.”
A generational shift in attitudes toward law enforcement officials also appears to be a factor in students' unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of the charges against them. Many students experienced a political awakening during their high school years in the wake of the mass riots following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Those demonstrations were driven by anti-police sentiment and, in many cases, a desire to abolish them.
At George Washington University's graduation ceremony, international relations major Nam Lam said he was dismayed by the university's perimeter fencing and checkpoints, which, combined with police use of force to clear encampments on campus, made him uneasy.
“It's hard to comprehend the police being deployed in large numbers and using pepper spray on students,” Lam said.
Students and faculty allies say disciplinary action against protesters is actually an attempt to stifle free speech — and university leaders who tout it as a hotbed of vigorous debate should know they're wrong.
And some faculty members see their universities as abusing their power: Harvard University refused to award degrees to 13 seniors amid disciplinary proceedings, and hundreds of students boycotted graduation ceremonies last month.
Ryan Enos, a Harvard political science professor who has advised some of the students facing disciplinary action, said the university's response has been harsher than that of camps in other movements, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and support for fossil fuel divestment and minimum wage proposals.
“This seems like excessive enforcement and it breaks precedent,” he said, “and it raises concerns that they're prioritizing the content of what was said rather than applying equal punishment.”
But Enos cautioned: protests for environmental issues or higher wages should not offend people of a particular religion or identity.
“Certainly no one on campus felt threatened by it,” he said, adding that it would be reasonable to consider whether some of the protests made Jewish students feel threatened.
Any protest movement risks losing public support if its methods are perceived as too offensive or extreme. Rob Wheeler, The Stanford University sociology professor and director of the university's Institute on Polarization and Social Change said he doesn't think the student protests have reached that point yet.
But even isolated instances of violence and extremist rhetoric can be damaging, Dr. Wheeler said. “Occasional extremist rhetoric is wrong because it does real harm and scares off potential supporters,” he said. A study he co-authored concluded that certain protest behaviors, like inflammatory rhetoric, traffic disruption and vandalism, can be effective in raising awareness of a movement, but that these tactics ultimately alienate people.
Colleges and universities have little consistency in how they hand out punishments or how long the process takes. Northwestern University's president said at a recent congressional hearing that no students have been suspended but that “numerous” investigations are ongoing. At the same hearing, Rutgers University's president said the university has suspended four people. In more liberal jurisdictions, such as Chicago and Austin, prosecutors, not university officials, drop criminal charges for trespassing.
At Yale University, Craig Birkhead Morton found out just before graduation that he'd still be able to get his degree, even though he'd been arrested twice during protests. (If a disciplinary case is still ongoing at the time of his senior year graduation, the student's degree is withheld until the case is resolved.)
“It was unsettling, but I feel I cannot compromise on this issue,” he said. He received a formal reprimand.
At Yale's graduation ceremony, several students showed support for their indicted classmates, including Rex Schultz, who held a banner that read, “Drop all charges.”
Joanna Demrich He contributed reporting from Washington. Gaya Gupta Born in New Haven, Connecticut.
