ST. LOUIS, Missouri — Protests from college students and some faculty members who oppose Israel's military offensive in Gaza have been testing the power and the patience of university administrators nationwide over the last week.
While university officials at Northwestern and Wesleyan opted for a soft touch without police intervention, others at Washington University, the University of Florida, and the University of Texas at Austin implemented harder crackdowns with police arrests and suspensions from school.
Washington University issued an initial warning for demonstrators to disperse on Saturday night before police moved in and made arrests. Many of the protesters complied with their orders, but those who didn't face swift consequences.
Nearly 100 protesters were arrested and released from the county jail later that night. At least six faculty members and 23 students have since been suspended or barred from returning to campus.
Wash U's chancellor Andrew Martin claimed inaccurately that the demonstrators are already "facing criminal charges for trespassing and, for some, potentially resisting arrest and assault."
According to local prosecutors at the county and municipal levels, campus police still have not filed any charging documents, but they may seek to press charges soon.
Martin also said the university "made the decision to peaceably remove [protesters]. Unfortunately, they physically resisted."
While St. Louis County police won't release body camera video until after the conclusion of the investigation, videos posted online show the arrests involved physical force in many instances. Students bristled at Martin's letter and described the police use of force as "brutal and aggressive."
Now, in the aftermath of those police crackdowns, some of the protesters who were at the Saturday event are drawing comparisons between local police and the Israeli military.
"We are calling people to see that these are global patterns of oppression," Wash U sophomore Penelope said at a press conference outside the campus on Tuesday afternoon.
Penelope, a member of Jewish Students for Palestine who wore a facemask and asked reporters not to use her last name, highlighted protest chants "likening police forces and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) together."
Steve Tamari, a 65-year-old history professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, said he suffered serious injuries when officers took him to the ground.
"I was body slammed and crushed by the weight of several St. Louis County police officers and then dragged across campus by the police," Tamari wrote in a public letter.
"As a result of police brutality, I am now in the hospital with multiple broken ribs and a broken hand," he said.
St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Megan Green (D-St. Louis) was one of the faculty members suspended and barred from campus until at least the end of the semester. Video from Saturday's protest shows Green shouting at police officers and criticizing their use of police resources to stifle the speech of students.
"Washington University teaches classes on organizing, activism and social movements," Green said on Tuesday. "I teach one of them. Yet it is using authoritarian measures to disciple students who put into practice what they learn in the classroom."
"The response by police was reckless and I am ashamed that our city, the city that I represent, used its resources to shut down a peaceful demonstration on a college campus," Green said.
In October, Green looked to city police officers to clear the chambers at City Hall when some of the same pro-Palestinian protesters started shouting during their meeting at the Board of Aldermen. None of the demonstrators were arrested and a handful of the elected officials stayed back to talk with some of them after their meeting adjourned.
"I am stunned that our police department, one that has consistently described itself as short-staffed, directed its officers to Washington University on a day when eight shootings sent 12 people to the hospital," Green said Tuesday. "We need our officers to address violent crime in our city rather than arrest those calling for the end of violence in Gaza."
Green said Mayor Tishaura Jones should "absolutely" tell police to stand down at a demonstration planned for Wednesday night in city limits at St. Louis University, another private campus.
“My administration and the City of St. Louis remain firmly supportive of the right to peaceful protest,” Jones replied. “After conversations with St. Louis University’s administration and SLMPD, it is clear to me that we all share the same sentiment.”
St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy said the department "is determined to protect the safety and security of all individuals expressing their first amendment right to assemble and engage in nonviolent protest."
“The department is aware of a planned protest that is set to occur on St. Louis University’s campus on Wednesday evening," Tracy told 5 On Your Side in a written statement. "We have been in contact with the school’s administration, and will be available to assist in ensuring the safety and security of all parties involved.”
An aide in Jones' office said she has not spoken with Green about the potential for police deployment or the protests planned for SLU.
"Our expectation should be that protests at St. Louis University take the same for as form as occupy SLU back in 2014, where there is no police presence and instead the university chooses to engage in productive dialogue with their students," Green said.
Green would not say if she supports the full list of demands demonstrators brought with them to their rally, which include calls for the university to divest all financial holdings it may have in Boeing stock, to sever all recruitment efforts and partnerships its engineering school has with the defense contractor, and to surrender all of its lands to "indigenous communities," according to materials distributed on social media and a resolution agreed to by the student union.
Financial audits show the university holds $15.4 million in investments and its Managed Endowment Poll is valued at $12.5 billion. SEC filings list the university's top five stock positions, and Boeing, a company worth $103 billion, is not listed among them. University administrators would not disclose how much stock it holds in Boeing, if any.
The university, which was founded in 1854, lists an acknowledgment on its website that the modern campus now "occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria, Illinois Confederacy, Quapaw, Ho-Chunk, Miami and many other tribes as the custodians of the land where we reside, occupy, and call home."
If the university does not cease buying new land and surrender its real estate portfolio back to indigenous people, some students feel it would show a certain degree of insensitivity from the administration.
"It does not respect indigenous rights here, it does not respect indigenous rights in Palestine," Penelope said.
The recent protests haven't disrupted much in the way of classes or other campus life, other students told 5 On Your Side, but they have drawn criticism from other classmates as they approach finals and graduation.
"The demands that they're making are rather strenuous for the school, but also rather absurd," Mason Stallings, a junior, said. "They're trying to make Wash U's financial decisions for the school."
Stallings, the editor-in-chief for the Danforth Dispatch, penned a rebuttal to the list of demands from demonstrators.
"It is taking a view on that conflict half a world away that is very one sided," he said in an interview on Monday afternoon.
"I think that the school has handled it well," Stallings said. "There's a very small cadre of student activists who are not representative of the whole student body that run the Student Union and have all of these far-left activist demands that are very disconnected from the student body itself."
Some of the other faculty members who participated in Saturday's protest are barred from campus and from making any in-person contact with students on campus until the end of the semester.
On Tuesday afternoon, some professors again protested administration policies they perceived as chilling to free speech. However, just as the First Amendment grants them freedom to speak, the same rights allow the private school freedom to associate with them or not.
Other recent examples suggest the university may have taken disciplinary action against faculty who supported Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza.
This past fall, Wash U professor Seth Crosby claimed he had been fired after tweeting Israel was carrying out a "much needed cleansing" that he felt wasn't "targeting humans."
"Seth Crosby's speech was genocidal in nature," Professor Angela Miller said. "So I think there is a distinction that we have to make there."
An incomplete count of the dead in Gaza surpassed 30,000 in recent days. Crosby published his inflammatory post ten days after the October 7th surprise attack from Hamas.
While his contact information was scrubbed from the university site and his Twitter account no longer exists, the school confirmed on Tuesday that he remains employed. Wash U would not comment on any other disciplinary actions it may have taken against Crosby.
When asked how she might teach her students to adjust when they learn their Jewish classmates express fears or concerns, Miller downplayed the idea that they face any real danger.
"The claim of safety is being used by universities all over the country, even as they call in very violent police reaction," Miller said. "At Columbia, actually armed reaction. The claim of safety is completely spurious. We have many anti-Zionist Jewish students in the movement who have been physically assaulted by the police. Their safety is different from the safety of other Jewish students."
Miller made her remarks within hours of students using blunt objects as battering rams to break into buildings and barricade themselves inside. Other chants heard at Columbia protests included calls to "burn Tel Aviv to the ground."
One of Miller's colleagues at Wash U, professor Bret Gustafson, faced criticism and calls for his dismissal last fall when he said it was "pretty cool" to see protesters deploy gas canisters outside the home of a Jewish political donor in Los Angeles. He is currently on administrative leave.
Gustafson was arrested at Saturday's demonstration, suspended and banned from campus, he confirmed in an email Tuesday night.
"We hold the First Amendment paramount," Campus Rabbi Jordan Gerson told 5 On Your Side on Sunday. "What happened yesterday was not a pro-Palestine rally, it was an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hate rally which called for violence against the Jewish community with calls for intifada, which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel."
"There was a lot of framing of Palestinian Liberation versus Jewish safety," Penelope said on Monday. "I truly, truly, through my entire core, believe we can and we must have both."
What does Penelope say to other Jewish students on campus who fear for their safety during these protests? he asked.
"Feelings are feelings," Penelope said. "I'm not gonna say people don't feel that way. However, I think, to prioritize feelings of unsafety versus tangible effects of military spending and military war mongering, I think, to me at least, rings hollow."
"I think we can build a world safe for Jewish people, and I think we must," she said.
But should that world exist in the disputed territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea? he asked.
"Across the world," she said, avoiding the crux of the question. "I think the entire world has a history of anti-Semitism. I think to exclusively focus on Jewish safety through militarily arming Israel is something that fundamentally does not ring true to me throughout history."
Another hurdle that might prevent the university from adopting the demands of protesters is state law. Missouri, like dozens of other states, bars companies or entities that boycott or divest from Israel from doing business with the state.
Gov. Mike Parson (R-Missouri) praised the police officers and campus administrators for their actions during a press event Tuesday afternoon.
"I think Wash U did an excellent job trying to take care of the problem, looked like to me," Parson said. "We were kind of keeping briefed of it during the whole process and kind of watching it over the state. I think Wash U did exactly what they needed to do. My hat's off to them for taking care of the problem and making sure classes go on and people get educated. It's a great institution, and they want to be able to teach young people what it is they're there for."
Parson, a former county sheriff, did not directly answer questions from reporters about whether or not he'd consider using the National Guard to provide security assistance to local law enforcement but did scold students for disobeying campus orders to disperse.
"We're going to protect our universities in the state, period, against this kind of kind of behavior," Parson said, without directly answering the question. "You know, it's just, it's not productive for anybody. There's places to do that if you want to do it, but all of a sudden decide you kind of own something that you don't really own? You're gonna say you're gonna be out here, and you're gonna camp out here? That's not the way we do business here."
"I think Wash U did the right thing by getting them off," he said. "If you don't want to be there, if you want to cause obstruction to education, that's probably not the place for you. You need to go somewhere else."