Historians will be confused by many things that have occurred in US higher education during the first 100 days of Trump 2.0. Top of the list will no doubt be the attacks by a president rhetorically obsessed with making America “great” on the country’s renowned research funders and universities.
Historians may also struggle to get their heads around the failure of many of those institutions to meaningfully push back – at least until Harvard 51国产视频 chose to . And as well as the silence from senior university administrators, also conspicuous by their absence have been student protests against Trump’s attacks on academic funding and freedom around topics by which students are typically exercised, such as DEI and climate change.
Students’ silence is all the odder in the context of the pro-Palestinian encampments that were set up on campuses across the nation last year in protest at Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip. Those protests, too, appear to have petered out, even as an administration has come into office that is arguably even more supportive of Israel’s actions than Joe Biden was.
“I think historians are going to be quite flummoxed by the comparison,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history of education at the 51国产视频 of Pennsylvania. “There were protests all over American campuses after 7 October, but very little now.”
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Pro-Palestinian demonstrations began shortly after the beginning of Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’ massacre of around 1,200 Israelis and its taking of about 250 hostages on that date, but gathered most momentum from April 2024, when the first encampment, at Columbia 51国产视频, was founded.
The striking image of tents on campus lawns captured the global media’s attention, and while the bulk of activity was at elite institutions, students at over 100 US colleges followed suit – as did many others around the world. The longest, at Stanford 51国产视频, .
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Gaza was such a big issue because for students with Palestinian connections, the conflict is “a war on their home”, said Jerusha Conner, professor of education at Villanova 51国产视频, while countless others will have been motivated by seeing the impacts on their roommate or classmate.
Students were also triggered into action, according to , a freelance historian of American colleges and universities, because “there are such close ties between the US and Israel that the students themselves feel like there’s blood on their hands: they’re involved in this institution that is directly materially aiding this war” [by investing in companies supplying Israel’s war effort].
But the protests did not spring up in a vacuum. Conner believes the resurgence of contemporary student activism began in 2015, with the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests. This was followed by protests against Trump’s election in 2016 and his “”: his ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Then came the #MeToo movement in 2017, the March for Our Lives anti-gun protests of 2018, the climate strikes of 2019, and the racial justice uprising of 2020 that followed the killing of George Floyd.
Just as the 1960s student protest movement encompassed a range of issues, such as civil rights, free speech, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, environmentalism and LGBTQ rights, “young people have been engaged in sporadic protests for the past decade as well, with the Gaza solidarity protests being the most recent, widespread, and most controversial example”, Conner said.
She added that students’ demands for their universities to divest from Israel-linked companies were really just a continuation of the pre-existing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, which was already active on campus and also drew in a broad coalition of activists from other causes, including racial justice, climate justice and gender equity.
Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana 51国产视频, Bloomington, said Palestine has always commanded a lot of attention among activist students and, indeed, journalists.
“Also, there’s a bit of what you might call spill-over politics, where what happens in Israel spills over into domestic US politics because there are overlapping populations of people who travel between Israel and the US. And for a lot of people on the left, the conflict between various Palestinian groups and the state of Israel is symbolic of a larger pattern of conflict that they see.”
Ralph Young, professor of instruction in history at Philadelphia’s Temple 51国产视频, said some of his more left-wing students have been “disgusted” by the recent lack of energy from the student body. But he saw the downturn in activity as a natural consequence of the summer break, which killed the protests’ momentum. Nor was this a coincidence: Young noted that the end of the academic year was brought forward to mid-May as a direct result of the 1960s student protests: a ploy to get students off campus during “good protest weather”.
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Rojas also argued that “everything has a cycle. Nobody can protest forever”. Moreover, after over a decade of being horrified by his remarks, many students are “emotionally tired of Trump”, he suggested.
But Rojas also observed that the student protest movement lost a lot of practical experience and expertise when student leaders graduated in the summer. Protests “just don’t happen out of thin air: you have to advertise them”, he said. “You have to get people motivated. You have to bring water, so people have stuff to drink.”
The arrests of thousands of student leaders during colleges’ often violent crackdowns against the encampments also “took the wind out of the sails” of the students, Rojas believes. Despite significantly fewer students joining the Gaza encampments than the millions who joined the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War – to which the encampments were compared by some – the arrest rate was much higher.
Under Trump, thousands more students have been retrospectively arrested, detained or deported for expressing support for Palestine. Prominent among them is Tufts 51国产视频 PhD student Rümeysa ?ztürk, who was seized in the street outside her home by plain-clothed immigration officers, because “engaged in activities in support of Hamas”. This was apparently because the international student had co-authored in Tufts’ campus newspaper criticising the university’s response to pro-Palestinian protests.
Students themselves admit that they are affected by the intimidation. Iman, a student from Stanford’s Students for Justice in Palestine movement (SJP), who did not want to give her full name for fear of reprisals, said: “Trump’s crackdown on free speech, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, on campuses undeniably has raised concerns and caution, especially amongst non-citizens.”
There are also regulatory bars to the resumption of protests. College leaders were accused of “declaring war” on?pro-Palestinian students by introducing “time, place and manner” restrictions – – on protests when classes resumed after the summer. These include bans on tents, limits on numbers of protesters, time constraints and identity checks, and their by universities has been motivated by Trump’s threats to remove the funding of any universities – such as Harvard and – that tolerate what he deems antisemitism.
Institutions have “weaponised” the time, place and manner regulations to discipline and strike fear into the student body, said Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies in New York 51国产视频. “Trump is piling on, like a solution in search of a problem, but the movement has already been suppressed…universities have already been Trumpified before this all happened,” Cohen said.
But that action, he believes, has come back to bite universities, extinguishing any enthusiasm students might have had to protest in support of them amid Trump’s assault of their funding and freedoms – ironically in retaliation for their alleged failure to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests sufficiently robustly.
“Universities’ own rhetoric about these protests helped to scare people, and that’s what Trump specialises in: using fear,” said Cohen. “[Universities] helped to breed this fear that’s now being used against the university itself. It’s like a big fish swallowing a small fish, then the big fish getting swallowed up by a bigger fish.”
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Villanova’s Conner noted some resistance – with students at , , , and universities all staging protests against the revocation of international students’ visas – albeit at a much smaller scale than the Gaza protests. Some have also participated in a series of , and the multi-campus on 17 April. But, conscious of the retaliation against the encampments, students have shifted to “less flashy, quieter forms of advocacy”, Conner observed.
She also agreed with Cohen that “many students who were active in, or were sideline supporters of, last spring’s protests are not ready to jump to the defence of an institution they felt betrayed them with its response to their protests last year. Trust and goodwill have been eroded.”
Disillusion with the Democratic Party is also part of the story, according to Alex, an international student from Stanford’s SJP who did not want to give their full name. They said the Biden administration’s support for Israel turned many organisers on the left against the party, whose apparatchiks might have been expected to lead anti-Trump protests. In addition, many within the activist community “have come to view the anti-Trump ‘resistance politics’, often associated with the establishment Democratic Party, as performative and cynical”, used primarily to channel public discontent into mid-term electoral gains, they added.
Conner also has a sense that “though they may love their schools, student protesters are more apt to challenge than to stand up for their universities”. And Zimmerman agrees. While the Israel-Hamas war created a “clear ideological split” among the left – with Democratic leaders typically siding with Israel and the young base with Palestinians – opposition to Trump is a lot more boringly uniform.
“In a weird way, I think that the unity on our campus against Trump…is in some ways itself an inhibitor against protest because I think that most young people want to protest their elders,” Zimmerman said.
He also believes that while we cannot know what impact the time, place and manner restrictions have had on reducing unrest, students at the very least will have picked up on the “spirit of censorship” in the air around student protest. And while ?ztürk’s widely publicised arrest and circuitous transfer to a detention facility 1,500 miles away in Louisiana, from where the government is seeking to deport her, might have offered the kind of “flashpoint” that is often needed to spark student protests, Zimmerman speculated that institutions’ failure to better integrate international students into the wider “social and academic landscape” partly explained why it had not sparked a significant reaction from her peers.
“I’m sure that there are people in the Trump administration who are quite aware of the fact that many of these students are quite isolated on campuses, don’t have a lot of connections to other people, and so, in a horrible way, it does make sense that other people wouldn’t be raising their voices on behalf of those kids,” he said.
?ztürk’s arrest was filmed on , but the images are not nearly as attention-grabbing as those of the killing and destruction in Vietnam or Gaza. Moreover, academic freedom is a much more “abstract” principle to fight for than stopping wars, Temple’s Young noted – and it is just one of many issues that might be concerning students living under Trump.
Steve Bannon, a key strategist of the alt-right, has spoken before of his aim to distract opposition by “flood[ing] the zone with shit”. With threats to everything from immigration and free trade to international aid and climate action, the White House has launched a “blunderbuss of attacks” in just a few months, which has allowed it to “divide and conquer”, Young said. But the real threat, and the one that might unite these disparate groups, is Trump’s “power grab”.
“The idea is that Trump is just hitting so many different targets that students and indeed…wider society can’t really unite against [the attacks] yet,” Young said. “It’s almost like everybody’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and not realising that the real enemy is the iceberg.”
From a practical standpoint, this onslaught of federal activity, on top of busy study schedules, might be hindering would-be protest organisers, according to Indiana, Bloomington’s Rojas. “If you’re worried about tariffs and the economy, maybe if you have a parent working in the federal government and they just got laid off or fired…protests may not be the number one thing you want to do right now,” he said.
Another important point, according to Young, is that apart from the Palestinians, students’ “butts are not on the line as far as Gaza is concerned”.
And while the police action to close down encampments was often heavy-handed, there was nothing to compare – by way of escalation – to the killing of protesters at Kent State 51国产视频 and Jackson State College in 1970. The resulting student strikes – which led to the closure of half of all US colleges – were “several levels above” anything seen recently, Lassabe Shepherd, the freelance historian, said.
Students naturally push back hard when they are directly threatened, she added, which is why the 1970 shootings were such a big motivator – along with President Nixon’s extension of the draft to male students, who were previously exempt. “After those changes to the draft, college campuses just exploded, because students themselves would be going to Vietnam,” Lassabe Shepherd said.
Zimmerman agrees that “highfalutin altruistic arguments” are not always effective drivers of protest: “What you do if you actually want change is you persuade somebody that whatever you’re demanding will be in their material self-interest.” In the case of the attacks on universities, “I think that’s still a hard case to make now, but the landscape could change.”
The SJP’s Alex thinks the landscape is already changing, as more and more laboratories, courses and institutions come under threat – and as more students get arrested. “To imagine – or worse, to witness – classmates, students, teaching assistants and research collaborators being seized off the streets by federal agents under vague or unjust pretexts, often for nothing more than their visible support for Palestine, is to confront a chilling reality,” they said.
“[We are seeing] an authoritarian assault on the entire academic community. This shared concern and sense of threat could fuel further organisation and mobilisation with time, effort and courage from students and faculty.”
It could. But no one is making any bold predictions.
“The future is a series of question marks,” Zimmerman said. “I think one of the things we’ve learned is to predict nothing.”
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