The University of Chicago is not the only campus imposing harsh punishments on student protesters.
At the University of Minnesota, seven students face up to two-and-a-half years of suspension and $5,000 in alleged damages, months after being arrested during an October protest.
The students had occupied a campus building they renamed ”Halimy Hall“, after a 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok personality killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza last year.
In January, 11 students at New York University were issued one-year suspensions after they staged a nonviolent sit-in at a library last December.
The university also declared two tenured faculty members “personae non gratae” for joining the sit-in, which prevents them from accessing certain school buildings.
The heavy-handed punishments have come as universities have rushed to pass stricter rules for campus protests following last year’s encampments, including restrictions on the use of tents and time limits on demonstrations at some universities.
Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow at Palestine Legal, an advocacy group defending pro-Palestine speech, says the cumulative effect has been a silencing of the protests.
“There are so many people who are saying the protests have died down, but I would say students are reacting to what the university administrations have imposed on them,” Falaneh says.
“We’re seeing so many new policies put in place, so many different restrictions that limit the ability to speak on campuses.”
But the pressure on the universities to tamp down campus protests has come from the highest levels of government.
In January, President Donald Trump, a Republican, was sworn in for a second term. Less than two weeks later, on January 29, he signed an executive order denouncing an “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence” on US campuses.
In an accompanying fact sheet, Trump pledged to take “immediate action” to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities”, including by cancelling student visas.
“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said, addressing the foreign students involved in the protests. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Palestine Legal has begun to train lawyers volunteering to help students navigate the maze of university policies and procedures that have been implemented in recent months.
But Falaneh notes that the high stakes and heavy punishments already account for a muted response to Trump’s policies, with few campus protests erupting against his immigration crackdown or his attacks on the US education system.
“Schools tried so hard to silence student advocacy for Palestine, and they’ve inadvertently also silenced student speech when it comes to vocalising opposition to Trump,” Falaneh says. “It’s kind of biting them back.”