WITH COMMENCEMENTS DRAWING near, encampments still stand in many college quads, campuses echoing with pro-Palestinian chants from students objecting to Israel’s actions in Gaza. While nearly uniformly calling for the encampments to come down, university responses have run the gamut from forceful police intervention at Columbia University, to limiting access to Harvard Yard and deescalation negotiations with student protesters at Wesleyan University.

But the ticking clock to graduation has created a pressure cooker for a situation already fraught with international socio-political conflict. 

“You’re seeing the lack of preparedness for what was already known on the calendar,” Juliette  Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security and Security and Global Health Projects at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said on The Codcast. 

Student protesters are calling for transparency into college endowments and divestment from companies materially supporting Israel’s military action in Gaza. The Hamas terror attack on October 7 killed about 1,200 people in one day in Israel, with dozens still held hostage. Israel’s aggressive and widespread military response in Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children. 

Colleges and universities “have an interest in, say, safe and secure buildings as Columbia did, and certainly safe and secure communities for all of their students, and in particular Jewish students,” Kayyem said. “So each school is going to be different.” While some look at the tents in discrete areas and say “we’ve had encampments before. I’m not gonna lose my head,” she said, others have decided against disbanding the camps though a public safety rationale in favor of a free speech approach to “engage what the students are saying and what they want, to essentially deescalate.”

A third model has become a national flashpoint: “schools that come on strong,” in Kayyem’s words. After weeks of protests and mass arrests, Columbia University canceled its university-wide commencement in favor of smaller events. Days earlier, police arrested dozens of protestors who occupied a Columbia building, some of whom were not associated with the university.

Kayyem, who favors a deescalation approach to the protests, characterizes Columbia’s response as a swift escalation from “DEFCON 5 – peace – to DEFCON 1 – war.”

University encampments are polarizing Massachusetts elected leaders, with divisions in Boston over using police powers to broom Emerson students from a public way. While US Rep. Ayanna Pressley said Harvard protesters should not face disciplinary action for their encampment in Harvard Yard, which is closed to those unaffiliated with the university, US Rep. Jake Auchincloss said that the encampment creates such a disruptive and hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students that the protests should be shut down on civil rights grounds.

Kayyem, who was assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, said her biography places her family right in the middle of the debate. She is Lebanese and Christian. Her husband is Jewish, as are her children. “Two of them are college age,” she noted, “and definitely sympathetic with the concerns about how Israel is conducting the war and criticisms of the presidential administration that I’m supportive of.”

But she is critical of the president’s characterization of the protests writ large.

President Biden over the weekend offered a forceful condemnation of some of the student protests, saying in a White House address, “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

There is chaos, Kayyem said, “if you want to define chaos as protest. I don’t. And we’re a country in which protest has been part of our fiber.” Though the reaction to the Gaza protests has been anything but normal, she said, the protests themselves have parallels to anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid student movements in the past.

“Protest is an outlet of free speech,” Kayyem said. “It is a part of free speech. Students want to protest and they should be allowed to.” Many of the schools are private institutions, so “they can kick anyone out they want, but it behooves them to be consistent. So yeah, maybe putting up tents or whatever is unlawful in the sense that, arguably, it’s an unlawful trespass, but it’s not violent or chaotic.”

The fact that counter-protesters attacked a UCLA encampment, Kayyem said, “shows that this idea of the outside agitator isn’t just coming from pro-Palestinians. I want to be very clear here – If people who don’t like the protestors delude themselves into thinking this is just a pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic movement, they are not focused on what actually is happening. There is a grassroots effort. It’s reflected in national polling that there is extreme criticism of the Israeli war effort in Gaza. This is not an outlier opinion.”

A plurality of Massachusetts residents surveyed by the MassINC Polling Group in March, prior to the encampment conflicts, said they opposed the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza and almost half said the US should push Israeli leaders to end the war right away. 

The generational divide was stark. Respondents between 18 and 29 years old were most likely to say they opposed the war – 49 percent – and those over 60 years old were most likely to support it, at 47 percent.

At some point, Kayyem said, “Jewish groups are going to have to acknowledge how many Jewish kids are part of the protests, which should be listened to.” 

Even after the spring commencement calendar passes, in whatever form it takes, Kayyem’s eyes are on the fall as the presidential election looms. 

Universities need to think about a new standard during the summer, she said, “so that when students do re-arrive – and I don’t know what the atmosphere’s gonna look like – they are better ready, not just operationally but communications-wise, for a constituency that’s complicated… They’ve got to do this better, so that you’re not going from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1 in 12 hours.”