This past spring, as thousands of college students launched campus encampments and took part in a variety of demonstrations in protest of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Public Books felt an imperative to collect on-the-ground narratives from individuals participating in, supporting, and observing campus encampments. We did so as a means of both documenting this historic moment and providing individuals on the ground the opportunity to share stories that are either erased or misrepresented in the mainstream press. From the end of April through the summer, through our open call, we received submissions of essays, reflections, poetry, art, and photography from students, faculty, and staff who experienced the protests firsthand. Each day this week, new perspectives will be added to our portfolio, “The Campus Transformed: A Protest Archive.”
Inspired by protests at Vanderbilt that began with a sit-in at Kirkland Hall on March 26, 2024, as well as Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which student protesters launched on April 17, 2024, pro-Palestinian encampments and related actions emerged at over 140 universities in the US in 45 states and Washington, DC, and at universities across the globe. While university responses varied, a majority of university administrations responded to students’ protests with shows of force. Encouraged by Boards of Trustees and a bipartisan coterie of government officials, university administrators deputized campus police, local law enforcement, and, in some cases, state troopers, to break up encampments and arrest students engaging in protest actions. They also sought to suppress pro-Palestinian activism and speech, such as banning student chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, preventing pro-Palestinian students from speaking at commencement (or even canceling commencement altogether), and suspending students involved in the campus encampments. These crackdowns, however, did not fully deter the undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff who frequently reconstituted or continued their protest activities even after clearance actions, disciplinary threats, and arrests. In total, over 3,100 people were arrested, a majority of whom have been charged with minor infractions like trespassing or disturbing the peace, but some of whom have been slapped with more serious criminal charges in addition to facing disciplinary proceedings from their university.
A mix of political repression, summer break, and the politics of “joy” promulgated by Kamala Harris’s late-breaking entry as Democratic Party presidential candidate have not diffused or softened many students’ resolve, but the landscape of campus protest has altered. University administrators have used the summer months to revise their student codes of conduct in ways that toughen university restrictions on protesting, particularly protests that take the form of encampments. They have implemented changes to rules and codes of conduct, often unilaterally or without significant faculty consultation, that severely restrict how students can engage in activism on campus and that make protesting Israel (and any nation engaging in human rights violations) more difficult. In some cases, they have physically transformed campuses into theaters of surveillance by increasing police and campus public safety presence, building fences around campus greens, restricting access to campus for non-students, and deputizing campus police to monitor once relatively standard student events such as “Palestine 101” or anti-Zionist shabbats. And due to pressure from Republican members of Congress who have smeared protesters as “antisemitic” and threatened institutions for not punishing them enough, some institutions have also eliminated due process for students facing disciplinary charges and voluntarily complied with congressional witch hunts of faculty members.
As we pass the one-year mark of October 7 and Israel’s harrowing siege on Gaza, it’s clear that the events of last spring will continue to have massive, as-yet-unpredictable consequences for the structure of higher education and the future of liberationist and antiwar movements. There is no better time, then, to revisit the accounts and reflections from the spring uprisings, in the words of participants and onlookers themselves—not merely to memorialize the moment’s upsurge in campus activism but to absorb and grapple with lessons learned, and what they might yield for the long struggle ahead. 
Featured image of protesters at CCNY by Ricardo Martin Coloma.