On the evening of April 30, Columbia University professor Gregory Pflugfelder stepped outside of his Morningside Heights apartment in Upper Manhattan to document the presence of hundreds of NYPD police officers preparing to commence a raid on the pro-Palestine encampment at neighboring Columbia University.
“I certainly posed no danger to anybody,” he told USA Today. “I was literally standing in the street and not blocking anybody.”
The lecturer, who was celebrating the end of his 28-year career at the prestigious university, wandered a short distance from his building to capture video of the immense show of force. One officer warned Pflugfelder to go home and leave the area. When he protested that he lived in the neighborhood the officer ordered him detained on charges of “obstructing government administration.”
“I just stayed on my block, relatively well behaved,” he said. “Poorly located, unfortunately.”
Pflugfelder’s arrest marks one of dozens against college faculty in recent weeks, many of them far more violent. News of Noelle McAfee’s detention at Emory University in Georgia went viral after the professor was forced to the ground after inquiring about the arrest of one of her students; video shows police slamming her head into the concrete pavement.
In Missouri, 65-year-old history professor Steve Tamari was beaten by police while documenting their response to protests on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Video shows Tamari being slammed to the ground and his limp body being carried away from the scene.
Doctors told the professor, who suffered 9 broken ribs and a hand injury requiring surgery, that he was lucky to survive.
The incidents have shed light on accusations of widespread police brutality in officials’ response to pro-Palestine protests, which have swept across US college campuses.
On the night of Pflugfelder’s arrest officers entered the campus of New York City’s Columbia University, ejecting demonstrators from the school’s Hamilton Hall. The building is known as a target of student occupation during campus protests; undergraduates also took control of the building during protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and demonstrations against South African apartheid in the 1980s.
These events are now commemorated on the university’s website in a self-flattering retrospective of protest on Columbia’s campus.
The historical precedent of their actions hasn’t stopped the demonstrators from being widely vilified in mainstream media and by local officials, who claimed the protests had become “threatening” and “disruptive.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams alleged the dangerous presence of “outside agitators” at the encampment. The claim has a long history of use to disparage social protest, perhaps most famously during the 1960s when reactionaries employed the term to allege Soviet support for civil rights demonstrations.
A violent crackdown on protesters at UCLA’s campus capped off a week of state repression Wednesday, just days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded action against the “horrific” and “antisemitic” demonstrations. Video shows security forces employing rubber bullets and flashbang grenades to forcefully disband the protest.
Local police were previously observed amicably conversing with pro-Israel demonstrators the day prior, just before the counterprotesters launched an hours-long violent attack on the encampment while the LAPD purportedly looked on. West Los Angeles is home to a large community of Israeli IDF veterans and right-wing Iranian monarchist exiles.
Still, protests continue at dozens of college campuses throughout the United States. Activists’ efforts have begun to bear fruit as Evergreen State College in Washington state became the first university to divest its endowment from Israeli interests profiting from the country’s occupation of Palestinian territories. The school is the alma mater of Rachel Corrie, an American activist crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer while protecting the home of her Palestinian host family in Gaza.
Officials at the University of Minnesota have also agreed to begin a discussion around divestment. Brown University in Rhode Island has agreed to hold a vote on the matter, as has New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College after students there launched a 12-day hunger strike. Dartmouth made headlines this week after the former chair of the school’s Jewish studies department was thrown to the ground and arrested while participating in a pro-Palestine protest.
Gradually, socially conscious students are raising awareness of the United States’ complicity in Israeli violence, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. Yet the question remains whether the country’s creaking political bureaucracy and repressive state apparatus will respond to Americans’ widespread horror over the US ally’s myriad abuses.