College campuses across the U.S. have seen a rise in protest encampments and other demonstrations over the past week, many of which have drawn intense media scrutiny as well as mass arrests and other heavy-handed police actions. And the protests continue to spread.
But overseas campus protests have been sporadic and small-scale, and none have launched a broader student movement.
For example, in the UK, small groups of students temporarily occupied university buildings on the campuses of the University of Manchester and the University of Glasgow. But they never generated national news or sparked widespread protests.
There is still a possibility that the wave of protests will spread to foreign universities. There were some early signs of this this week. On Wednesday, students set up a protest camp on the campus of the University of Sydney in Australia. On Friday, classes at Paris’s prestigious university, Sciences Po, were canceled due to student protests.
But then the question remains as to why this particular protest movement first ignited and spread at American universities. Experts say the answer has more to do with the partisan political context in Washington than with events in Gaza.
The ‘Applause’ Effect: Why the Protest Wave Started in Colombia
Protests, like many forms of collective action, can be contagious.
One way to understand how protest movements spread is the “applause model,” said Omar Wasow, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies how protest movements can influence politics.
In a theater audience, “when some people in front stand up, others start standing up, and it cascades through the auditorium,” he said.
In this case, he said, it was no surprise that the ‘applause’ began at Columbia University last week. He said the university’s proximity to national media outlets in New York and its status as an Ivy League institution give it the reputation of a front-row seat in the auditorium. So the pro-Palestinian protests there attracted more attention than elsewhere. Additionally, the campus is home to a large number of Jewish students, many of whom have said they fear anti-Semitic harassment or attacks by protesters. These expressions of fear prompted more media coverage and political scrutiny.
More than 100 protesters were arrested on April 18 after Columbia University asked police to vacate an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters. This fulfills university president Nemat Shafiq’s promise to parliament that he would be prepared to punish people for unauthorized protests on campus. .
But the arrests led to further actions in solidarity with the protesters, and a reaction quickly spread across the country from those who saw the protests as anti-Semitic or in support of Israel.
“The conflict there contributes to this huge cascade, other campuses join in, and other media outlets around the country and around the world take notice,” Wasow said.
Daniel Schlozman, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies American social movements and party politics, said the case might not have received as much attention without the arrests.
But this arrest was more than an isolated decision by a university president. This was the result of a special political and legal situation in the United States that made Colombia the most likely place where the “applause” would begin.
The unique politics of American campus protests
“Basic politics is finding issues that unite your side and divide your opponents,” Schlotzman said. And the war in Gaza turned out to be a particularly powerful case for Republicans.
The Republican Party is broadly united in its support for Israel. Republicans have also long sought to portray universities as bastions of left-wing ideology, incubators of radicalism on race and gender issues, and hostile environments for anyone who does not subscribe to those ideologies.
Democrats, by contrast, are much more divided over Israel, the war in Gaza, and when and whether anti-Israel protests spill over into anti-Semitism.
So for Republicans, accusing college presidents of failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism is a useful political issue that could deepen divisions among Democrats. Naturally, this is an issue they have pursued passionately.
College presidents are, in many ways, soft targets, Schlozman said.
“Inside the university, administrators are trying to reassure a diverse constituency, including donors, protesters and faculty,” he said. “But those alliances are imperfectly aligned with national politics.” Actions that could calm tensions within the campus community could invite political scrutiny from outside. And as evidenced by arrests on campuses across the country this week, the opposite is also true.
Last December, Republican lawmakers chastised university presidents for their handling of protests against the Gaza war in hearings that contributed to the ultimate resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Columbia President Shafiq said he feared for his job when he appeared before Congress last week and promised to punish student protesters if necessary. That evening, she called the police to campus.
It’s unclear what role congressional questioning played in her decision. But her actual motivations are less important than the impression she gives to people on all sides of the issue that Republican pressure led to the mass arrests. Schlozman said it would have acted like a “bat signal” to people on different sides of the issue.
The arrests serve as a warning to Republican politicians who have used campus protests and criticism of anti-Semitism as a justification: “Look, we are winning. “We can split the coalition of opponents,” he said.
For students and others who may have sympathized with the protesters rather than join them, the shock of the arrests may have galvanized them into action rather than passive support. And for faculty and others in the political center, it was anger over the arrests themselves, rather than the underlying political debate over the war in Gaza, that led many to join the protests.
In other countries, less drama means less interest.
In contrast, in other countries, protests and anti-Semitism on campuses have not so far become political flashpoints. (Of course, there were large-scale protests against the war and anti-Semitism in cities around the world.) Last February, students at the University of Glasgow occupied campus buildings for 15 days, but left after negotiations with senior university officials. The story barely made it to the local news.
There was brief political outrage in France last month when a Jewish student claimed he had been banned from attending university events because of his religion, but that quickly passed as other students, some of them Jewish, offered different versions of the proposal. event.
Presidents of several universities were summoned to the French parliament to discuss anti-Semitism on campus, but discussion of the consequences received little media attention. This was a far cry from the hearings held in the United States.
Ultimately, nonviolent protests are most effective when they create some kind of “drama,” Professor Wasow said. In other countries, campuses might have been relatively quiet due to the lack of drama.
But now that the applause has begun, that may change.
