As preliminary hearings begin for students arrested for their involvement in the Kirkland Hall sit-in, The Hustler looks back at pro-Palestine protests on Vanderbilt’s campus and universities nationwide in the 2024-25 school year.

I. Vanderbilt encampment and subsequent expulsions

II. Arrests across the country 

III. Comparing demands and actions

IV. Actions against journalists 

V. Changes to academics

VI. Responses from university leaders

VII. End of encampments and future plans 

VIII. Methodology

Members of the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition entered Kirkland Hall on March 26, 2024, to urge the university to reinstate a Vanderbilt Student Government constitutional amendment supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to the ballot. The sit-in occurred after alleged failed attempts to schedule meetings with administrators. It followed an “Apartheid Wall” exhibit and sit-in on Rand Yard hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine during its Palestine Awareness Week. After approximately 21 hours, all 27 students inside Kirkland Hall were interimly suspended, with three arrested for assault of a security guard and a Nashville Scene reporter arrested for trespassing. 

VDC erected the encampment outside Kirkland Hall during the sit-in. The encampment lasted 40 days before being voluntarily taken down by VDC on May 4, the official move-out date for non-graduating students. 

“The encampment started very organically, and I think that that's really powerful because administrators thought that if they removed the 27 students who were inside from campus, suddenly the protest would stop,” a VDC representative being kept anonymous for protection from retribution said. “What they failed to understand is that this is so much bigger than individual student suppression and that targeting students won't stop a movement that's grounded in the liberation of Palestine.”

Pomona College erected its encampment two days after Vanderbilt, followed by Columbia University’s — which garnered widespread national attention — on April 17. By the end of the month, 90 encampments were formed on campuses across the nation. 

Vanderbilt was the first of only two institutions in the country to expel students, and it was the first to take administrative action against students for pro-Palestine protests. Expelled Vanderbilt students were charged with misdemeanor assault charges and are currently going through the legal process. The University of South Florida expelled one student for “breaking university policies” in her involvement with pro-Palestinian protests. Of the 136 universities with encampments, 25 suspended students and 109 had no suspensions or expulsions.

Arrests were common across the nation in response to the protests, including the arrest of one reporter on March 26 as well as four students on March 27 during the sit-in at Vanderbilt. At 96 of the schools — about 21% of all schools with protest activity — at least one person was detained during pro-Palestine protests. The three schools with the most individuals arrested were UCLA with 279 people, Columbia University with 227 and the University of Massachusetts Amherst with 192 protestors detained.

At Emory University, 28 protestors were arrested on April 25, including two professors. Dr. Noëlle McAfee, chair of the philosophy department at Emory, was seen in a viral video being detained and asking bystanders to contact the philosophy department to inform them of her arrest. McAfee described the day as “absolutely awful” to The Hustler, due to the strong force used against student protestors. She said police officers attacked students and tore down tents the moment they reached the lawn. 

McAfee described the moment she was arrested, saying she had been standing about six feet from the lawn, calling for the police to stop, when an officer approached her.

“One of the cops — it turns out he was one of the late ones [to arrive on scene] — he stands up and steps forward at just one step. He’s still a good ways away from me, and he says, ‘Ma’am, you need to step back,’” McAfee said. “I said no, knowing that this would be an issue for him, and then he immediately arrested me.”

McAfee said she was released quickly, and she believes it would be hard for the university to take action against her due to her tenure status. She expressed frustration with the use of force by the Atlanta Police Department against students as she believes students should have the right to protest.

“I’ve made a point that I am not getting into the content of this protest. I support students’ right to — and not just right, but duty — to be involved in public affairs,” McAfee said. “I think demonstrations are an important step in a larger political process.”

Vanderbilt was one of 204 universities in which police arrived on the scene, amounting to 45% of the total schools. This included officers from campuses, city departments, national police, state troopers or the national guard. At Vanderbilt, MNPD officers detained the three arrested students on March 27 after they were escorted out by VUPD that morning along with the other 22 protesters inside. 

The anonymous VDC representative said they saw a network form between pro-Palestine protestors across the country in response to police and administrative actions. 

“I think that there is something that's really powerful and beautiful in being able to connect with other students and getting to understand different movements in history,” the representative said. “[Palestinian] protesters have been consistently advising American protesters on how to deal with police brutality, and now, students are doing the same thing and building those networks of safety and support.”

CORRECTION: This article was corrected on Sept. 3 at 7:50 p.m. CST. It previously stated that Carleton College and the University of Oregon’s encampments were the shortest, but they were actually the shortest of the top 15 longest encampments.

Protesters at all universities that performed pro-Palestine actions called for Palestinian liberation and freedom from genocide. Other common demands included divesting university funds from Israel, a statement from the university condemning genocide in Gaza, ending U.S. military funding to Israel, starting an academic boycott of Israel and amnesty for protesters. 

A total of 450 universities had pro-Palestine actions of some kind occur on their campus. Of those, 156 universities had an encampment over the past 10 months. Currently, there are no active encampments, with Indiana University recently ending its encampment on Aug. 2. Stanford’s encampment was the longest, lasting 160 non-consecutive days. However, most encampments were far shorter, with almost 40% of schools' encampments lasting less than a week. 

At Vanderbilt, protest actions included walkouts, sit-ins, marches in the street, chalked sidewalks and occupation of campus buildings. Other universities also had die-ins, hunger strikes, teach-ins, singing and prayer. 

Nashville Scene journalist Eli Motyca was arrested while reporting on the Kirkland Hall sit-in on March 26, and he was released on the same day with no charges pressed. In a statement to The Hustler, a university representative claimed Motyka was arrested because Kirkland Hall was “closed to the public for ongoing construction.”  

“Journalistically, Vanderbilt’s response to the pro-Palestine protests were more intense and punitive than in the past,” Motyca said. “It was quite adversarial, both in the tone and the speech that students were employing but also the response from the university. They both clearly imagined the other as their adversary in the situation.”

Following Motyca’s arrest, Vanderbilt conducted an independent legal review investigating the arrest and Vanderbilt’s media access policies. The report concluded that Motycka was not arrested to impede media coverage of the protest but because he repeatedly attempted to enter Kirkland Hall. 

“Police power is a very significant thing because it is counter to a free society to be put in handcuffs and to be forcibly moved somewhere,” Motyca said. “So when [arrests happen], without such justifications, it’s important to pay attention to the decision to use that power. And Vanderbilt’s decision to use that power, in my case, reflects the level of control that the administration and the campus was comfortable employing.”

Journalists nationwide were met with obstacles while attempting to cover the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. At the University of California, Los Angeles, four student journalists claimed they were assaulted by counterprotestors. Tyler Davis, a junior at American University and Managing Editor of The Eagle, discussed the challenges that come with student journalism, particularly in covering friends and peers, in an interview with The Hustler.

“The difficulty of being a student journalist is having to report on and take photos of people that you go to class with and you see in clubs that you attend and you hang out with on the quad,” Davis said. “Then you have to turn around and be like, ‘I know we’re friends, but I have to be completely detached from that in order to do my job properly.’ It’s just a lot.”

Amidst the sit-in, student arrests and an active encampment, Vanderbilt did not make any changes to exam schedules or normal university operations. There were no attempts made to remove the encampment by university officials or other students on campus. 

Unlike Vanderbilt, Columbia canceled in-person classes on April 22 after five days of pro-Palestine protests and the arrests of over 300 people, including student protesters. Classes at UCLA went virtual on May 1 after a violent interaction between student protesters at the university’s encampment and counter-protesters trying to disband the encampment. Classes were also held remotely from May 6 to May 10 after 60 people were arrested for holding a sit-in at Moore Hall.

Columbia Law School postponed their final exams and Harvard moved its undergraduate final exams from Harvard Hall to buildings on the periphery of Harvard Yard. Although the university did not give an official reason for moving the exam locations, students claimed the change was due to the pro-Palestine encampment occupying the yard. A few universities also made changes to their graduation ceremonies, including the University of Southern California and Columbia. USC announced on April 25 that it would cancel its main-stage graduation ceremony scheduled for May 10.

Immediately following the sit-in, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier sent a statement to the Vanderbilt community in which he acknowledged the protestors’ suspensions, reiterated the university’s commitment to free expression and civil discourse and promised to work with student protestors. In an interview with The Hustler on April 25, Diermeier claimed his staff was yelled at when asking student protestors if they wanted to hold a meeting during the sit-in, but VDC members said they were denied meetings prior to the demonstration.

Other university presidents decided to meet with protestors. President Michael Schill at Northwestern University and President Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers University both reached an agreement with student demonstrators, while Williams College President Maud Mandel released a statement in May saying that student protestors would present their demands to the Board of Trustees.

Diermeier continued to support principled neutrality in interviews with The Hustler and in national media. On April 2, Diermeier wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he said the university would not divest from any companies based on national affiliations. He claimed that free expression is “alive and well” at Vanderbilt. Diermeier has expressed his support for the idea of principled neutrality among institutions of higher education in various newspapers including Forbes, the WSJ, NPR and the New York Times. 

Diermeier publicly pushed for other universities to adopt this principle. Harvard announced on May 28 that it would refrain from taking any official position on controversial issues. The University of Chicago, Columbia and Stanford University already had existing policies of neutrality.

While Vanderbilt announced on May 30 that the Board of Trust had voted to extend Diermeier’s contract — which was slated to expire in 2027 — to 2035, other university leaders have left. On May 9, Cornell University President Martha E. Pollack resigned following a decision to suspend four student protestors, although Pollack has claimed her leaving is isolated from this spring’s events. Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned on Aug. 13 following an April appearance in Congress in which she discussed antisemitism on campus and her calls to bring in the New York Police Department to respond to student protestors.

VDC officially ended its spring encampment on May 4. The encampment lasted 40 days, making it the ninth longest-running encampment in the nation. 

In an Instagram post on May 3, VDC claimed they planned to end their encampment the next day because most students are not allowed to stay on campus over the summer, making it unsafe to continue. They stated that they would resume the “fight for Palestine” in the fall. 

“These next few months are not for rest, but for building and strengthening the relationships necessary to continue our fight for liberation,” the post reads. “When students return in the fall, we will be more prepared than ever to fight for Palestine by any means necessary.”

The university updated its student handbook policies for the 2024-25 school year to include bans on camping and sleeping outside as a means of protest, restrictions on the public’s access to campus protests and limitations on the use of installations and art during campus protests. 

Other universities in the nation have also changed policies regarding protests and conduct codes. Many universities limited the use of tents and canopies to require approval from administration, while other universities completely banned encampments. Rutgers suspended its SJP chapter until July 2025 after alleged violation of terms of an earlier probation, while Columbia’s SJP chapter has been permanently banned from Instagram. Some universities updated their policies to emphasize training on antisemitism and Zionism during student orientation.

Currently, there are no active encampments across the country, but VDC has expressed desires to continue its advocacy efforts.

The scope of this project includes pro-Palestine protests that occurred at universities in the United States. The Vanderbilt Hustler utilized data from October 7, 2023 to August 5, 2024 compiled by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut. 

The Hustler only labeled protests as encampments if they were described as such in the “participant_measures” column of the CCC data. Protests that were only labeled as “sit-ins” were not included in this count.

Arrest counts include all individuals — including students, faculty, journalists, members of the public etc. — that were arrested at the event. Suspensions include interim suspensions. Arrests, suspensions and expulsions recorded in the data may have been overturned at a later date; this information was not systematically recorded in the dataset. 

The Hustler found some inconsistencies and missing information in the CCC data, which the writers of this piece manually changed. The CCC did not mention that an expulsion occurred at the University of South Florida. While the CCC data lists that the Vanderbilt encampment lasted for 38 days, it lasted for 40 days. While the CCC data lists that nine individuals were arrested at Vanderbilt University protests, five people were arrested — four students and one journalist. It is possible that other inconsistencies are present in the dataset. 

Aaditi Lele and Salma Elhandaoui contributed research to this piece.