Negotiate or Evict? University Administrative Responses to 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampments

• In Event: 20467 - Social Movements and Institutions in US Politics

Abstract

Media coverage of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, which were created at over 130 colleges and universities in the United States in the spring of 2024, centered on the high-profile evictions and arrests of student protesters at campuses like Columbia, UCLA, or NYU. Far less visible were the dozens of universities that negotiated with protesters and reached agreements that ended encampments with concessions and/or without the use of force or arrests. Dominant research on social movements, which centers the role of protester disruptiveness and threat in driving administrative responses, cannot account for this extensive variation in response to similar tactics. Using data drawn from the Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium, hand-coded data on protester demands, university governance and presidential power, and anticipated qualitative interviews with student protesters, we examine the contextual factors that drove decisions around negotiations and evictions. We hypothesize that universities that chose to negotiate tended to be structurally isolated, insulated from external pressures, and avoided aggressive early interventions that escalated protester tactics. These results speak to broader questions of what enables institutions to tolerate potentially disruptive or unpopular collective action, in contexts that overall favor repression. 

Authors

• Alexander Vosick Barnard, New York University

• Terrence Ting-Yen Chen, New York University

• Yuchen Luo, New York University

• Michelle Julia Cera, New York University