Crowd Counting Consortium data show a resurgence of pro-Palestinian activism at U.S. colleges and universities as students have returned to school and started probing the limits of new restrictions on campus protests.
Demonstration against new campus protest regulations at Carnegie Mellon University on August 30, 2024 (photo credit: Jonathan Aldrich)
While the wider Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S. has kept rolling, activism on college and university campuses slowed to a trickle over the summer, as it invariably does. Now that schools are starting back up, however, protest activity is picking up along with them. In direct response to last spring’s wave of campus activism, many schools used the summer to tightenrestrictions on protests and other demonstrations, and the events we’ve seen in just the first couple of weeks of the new academic year show that the student movement is persisting and adapting right along with them.
The chart below shows daily counts of protest events and sums of their estimated crowd sizes (when information on that is available) on U.S. college and university campuses from August 1 through September 3, 2024. In the past couple of weeks, the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has logged scores of new campus protest events across dozens of schools. The counts remain much lower than what we saw last April and May at the peak of the encampment wave, when many days included more than 100 events on campuses nationwide, but many schools don’t even start until after Labor Day, so we’ll probably see them continue to climb for at least the next few weeks.
Notably, a number of the events we’ve seen so far have taken forms meant specifically to probe or push the limits of newly imposed restrictions. In this way, they honor and extend a long tradition of creative adaptation and transgression in protest movements worldwide. Here are a few notable examples.
At Indiana University in Bloomington — site of one of the longest-running Gaza solidarity encampments from last spring — organizers have already staged several events directly or creatively defying new constraints on “expressive activity” there. For the past two Sundays, students and staff have gathered for candlelight vigils at the Sample Gates at 11 PM in contravention of a rule barring gatherings from 11 at night until 6 in the morning. The second gathering reportedly drew more participants than the first, when about 60 turned out. On Tuesday, September 3, two demonstrators crawled more than half a mile with protest signs strapped to their backs, technically but not conceptually complying with a rule that prohibits holding signs in close proximity to university buildings. And on Thursday, August 29, a plain old rally on the IU campus drew hundreds.
At the University of Houston, the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter organized a week of day-long gatherings with various lessons and other creative activities inside the student center, where they had also gathered last spring. Administrators and policerepeatedlyinteracted with demonstrators, and the demonstrators adapted in various ways; one video from the action shows students holding laptops facing out with political messaging on their screens, apparently in response to strict limits on the display of signage inside the building.
Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment was not the first on a U.S. campus after October 7, but it was probably the one that got the most attention, and the university’s aggressive response to its initial incarnation helped trigger the wider student encampment wave last April and May. Unsurprisingly, it is also a school that saw additional securitization over the summer. September 3rd marked the first day of fall instruction there, and activists tried to turn the new security measures against the university by calling for a strike and then picketing at one of the school’s main entrances, now effectively a bottleneck where affiliates have to wait in line to have their IDs checked before entering campus. Also picking up where they left off, the New York Police Department responded to the picket by hemming it in with additional metal barricades and then forciblyarresting two picketers after the group had moved to a different gate. Earlier in the day, anonymous activists dumped red liquid over the campus’s Alma Mater statue and publicized a statement enumerating their demands.
At Sonoma State University, demonstrators set up mock Israeli checkpoints at either end of Seawolf Plaza on the first day of classes. Organizers reportedly met ahead of time with Dean of Students Ryan Henne to discuss the school’s new rules for protest activity, and Henne watched the demonstration in person on the day.
At the University of Maryland in College Park, students affiliated with that school’s SJP chapter recently placed 15,000 small flags in the lawn on McKeldin Mall, each representing 10 of the more than 150,000 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since October 2023, according to an estimate published in The Lancet in July.
At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where new rules governing “expressive activity” on campus require, among other things, advance registration for demonstrations expected to involve more than 25 people, a group of 30 students, faculty, and staff gathered in front of the administration building on August 30 without pre-registering their action and held signs numbered 1-30, along with a larger one that read, “Stop restricting free speech” (see photo at the top of this piece).
In a similar vein, five faculty members gathered around the John Harvard statue at Harvard University on Tuesday, September 3, and chalked messages on the sidewalk in contravention of new campus use rules that restrict chalking and signage on campus, among other things. As with the action at Carnegie Mellon, this demonstration focused on freedom of speech rather than opposition to genocide or solidarity with Palestinians, but the response to it and similar actions at Harvard and elsewhere will undoubtedly shape the space available to the movement targeting the latter.
As the school year progresses, CCC will continue to track these actions, as we have been doing with protest activity on all sorts of political issues across the U.S. since 2017. Meanwhile…
You can always find our full dataset and information about our sources and methods on the project’s GitHub repository.
If you have public information about an event we seem to have missed, or additional public information about one we’ve recorded, please consider sharing it with us via our anonymous online form.
If you are a scholar, journalist, or activist with questions about the data and how they can be used, please email me at julfelder@hks.harvard.edu.
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