Campus protests leave imprint on families of college-bound students

For Long Island families with college-bound children, the wave of campus demonstrations this spring over the Israel-Hamas war has had a powerful, polarizing effect.

Some, fearing that pro-Palestinian student demonstrators’ beliefs hewed dangerously close to antisemitism or their actions were too radical, are rethinking their college choices. Others see in one of the largest student movements since the Vietnam War a moral response to humanitarian catastrophe.

 Kate Kerpen, a Jewish student at Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, dismissed the option of University of California at Santa Barbara. Kerpen, 16 and a junior, said that on a recent tour there, she was unnerved to see a sign somebody had posted saying “No Zionists,” and an anti-Israel piece in a school newspaper. “I can’t go to a school so far from home, where I wouldn’t feel safe,” she said.

Mamoon Iqbal, a Huntington dentist and co-founder of the Muslim Council of Suffolk County, a coalition of area mosques, said he and his daughter — a high school senior who has not yet decided where she will attend college next fall — took the opposite message from   r ecent protests  at one of the schools she is considering. “In her book, this is not a crime in the sense that these people are trying to go and rob somebody — this is civil disobedience,” he said. “It’s a source of positivity.”

College demonstrations started after the war began last October and have spread to dozens of campuses in recent weeks. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have called for colleges to sell off endowment investments tied to Israel and cut ties with companies tied to the country’s war effort.

With commencement season nearing, protesters have disrupted day-to-day life at dozens of campuses across the country, including at high-profile schools like Columbia, Harvard and UCLA. On Long Island, nearly two dozen students and two faculty members were arrested this week at a Stony Brook University demonstration.

Israel’s military campaign to eliminate Hamas strongholds in Gaza followed the group’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which Israeli officials have said killed more than 1,200 people, with hundreds more taken hostage. Health officials in Gaza say the death toll exceeds 34,500, and United Nations officials said this spring that children there were starving to death. The United Nations' humanitarian aid agency on Friday said hundreds of thousands of people would be “at imminent risk of death” if Israel carried out a military assault in Rafah, a southern Gaza city that Israel says is the last Hamas stronghold there. The city is filled with displaced Palestinians.

Iqbal said his daughter followed the war closely on social media. "It's raw, live footage of kids being pulled out of the rubble," he said. "There's a profound impact on any human being when you see families being destroyed. ... They're asking, 'Are we a part of this, are we funding this, are we condemning this or looking the other way?'"

Unnerved by protests

Some parents said they were unnerved by the demonstrations and in some cases by the response from college administrators, which they called inadequate. Dave Kerpen, Kate Kerpen’s father, pointed to Columbia, where students this week took over a building — barricading it, police said, with furniture and soda machines.

"As a parent, my greatest concern is my daughter's safety," Kerpen said. He said he had “grave concerns” about her safety at schools where “antisemitism” is being tolerated.

Columbia did not comment, but university president Minouche Shafik said at a congressional hearing last month that “Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

A UC Santa Barbara spokeswoman, Kiki Reyes, forwarded a statement from that school that said in part that “antisemitism and discrimination of any kind, including any efforts to intimidate, harass, or discriminate against members of our community, will not be tolerated."

Some college admissions consultants working with Long Island families also said spring, the season when acceptance and rejection letters go out, was more nerve-wracking this year because of the protests. Andy Lockwood, a principal of Lockwood College Prep in Glenwood Landing, said he’d heard from more than 30 families, many of them Jewish, who were “nervous and waffling” on a college choice. Those whose children were admitted to elite schools were typically not changing their decisions but watching to see if protests will dissipate over the summer and new policies for campus behavior will be implemented before fall classes start.

It was unclear how college protests were affecting enrollment at elite schools. In March, Columbia announced it had received 60,248 applications for first-year admission and offered admission to 2,319, numbers showing slightly higher demand and higher selectivity than last year. Harvard said it received 54,008 applications for first-year admission, a drop of more than 5% from last year, and offered admission to 1,937. That admission rate remains minuscule, about 3.6%.

At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a top public school where there were also protests this spring, the number of applications jumped 15% from last year. Because UNC’s enrollment deadline is May 15, it was not yet possible to say how the number of accepted students for fall 2024 who enroll compares with previous years, a school representative wrote in an email. 

Arrests, but violence rare

While police have made more than 2,000 arrests at college demonstrations since mid-April, violence has been relatively rare. One exception was UCLA, where 15 people were injured after, the school’s chancellor said, “a group of instigators” came on campus to “forcefully attack” a pro-Palestinian encampment. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, four police officers were injured and four people were charged with battering law enforcement after police with shields removed most of an encampment and shoved protesters.

Andres Rodriguez, 16, a junior at Brentwood High School who founded Student Advocates of Long Island, a group devoted to human rights and food access, said some of his acquaintances were shying away from schools whose response to the protests they saw as heavy-handed and chilling to a decades-old tradition of free speech in higher education. "These students should not be mistreated. They have a voice, they should stand up," though protesters should abide by the law, Rodriguez said. 

Dayna Greenberg, whose son attends a Nassau County high school, said that on a recent visit to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, they saw students chanting and gathering around a table with Palestinian flags on it. When they toured Binghamton University, a pro-Palestinian protest was underway.

"While we were walking around, people were approaching us with pamphlets saying, 'Do you want to know where your money goes?'" Greenberg said.

The family decided to cross the University of Massachusetts off their list of possible colleges because "it's a little too liberal. We were worried about aggressive protesting. ... Until that, I thought of us as a liberal family."

A spokesman for the university, Ed Blaguszewski, said in an email that “we understand the concerns families have as they consider where to attend college. At UMass Amherst, we firmly believe that ideas and viewpoints should be explored and debated within a space of civility and respect, including peaceful protests. The university also clearly condemns hatred in all forms.”

After a Uniondale High School social studies class this week where students discussed the protests, senior Allen Webber, 17, said he valued the right to peaceful protest, but that after years of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, he was not eager for more.

“The only thing I’m worried about is the schools locking down or shutting down because of the protests getting too rowdy or violent,” said Webber, who will study electrical engineering in the fall at SUNY Canton. He said he had no specific concerns about that school.

A university spokesman, Travis Smith, said in an email that SUNY Canton “has not had any protests in recent memory.” The school is “dedicated to maintaining an open environment promoting the free exchange of ideas,” he wrote.

With Bart Jones