Following the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Palestine conflict, college campuses across the United States served as hotbeds for protest in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Beginning in April 2024, pro-Palestinian encampments calling for divestment from Israel—most notably at Columbia University—spread to the lawns of over three thousand universities across the nation. As U.S. history shows, college campus protests, spearheaded by students and faculty, is certainly not a new concept. Educational institutions in the United States have long been the grounds overseeing transformative, youth-led protests from the civil rights movement, to anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, to prison divestment efforts, and more. Such activism has triggered nationwide conversation and policy changes. A historical parallel occurred over fifty years ago, in April 1968, when Columbia University’s Democratic Society and Afro-American Society student groups organized protests against the university’s ties to the Vietnam War, that led to thousands of students occupying campus buildings for a week. The university administration involved the police, arresting over seven hundred students and sparking a university shutdown. Nonetheless, the demonstration sparked national protest and attention and prompted Columbia to sever ties with military research and recruitment.

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