The campus protest movement, one year later
On refusing to be an outsider
Marking a year since the 2024 student-led “infitada” — as one member of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce memorably mispronounced the Arabic word for uprising — the new documentary The Encampments tells the story of the movement’s rise and repression. The film, which was directed by Michael Workman and Kei Pritsker, presents exclusive footage from the site of the Columbia University encampment, where Pritsker set up a tent during its two-week existence. (The Encampments also features protests at other schools, particularly UCLA.)
As I taught Columbia’s historic Contemporary Civilization course last year, my task of preparing students to “confront the insistent problems of the present,” one of the curriculum’s goals, was aided by the events unfolding on campus. We saw history in the making right outside our classroom door, in a moment many are evidently eager to relive. The film’s record-breaking New York release packed the Angelika Film Center with hundreds of people — perhaps many whose lives, like mine, were touched by one of the encampments at Fordham University, Fashion Institute of Technology, the New School for Social Research, New York University, the City University of New York (CUNY), or Columbia.
The documentary’s message is clear, commendable, and true to what I witnessed: Columbia’s student protesters were not motivated by antisemitism. On the contrary, they were led into action by moral conviction in the face of the genocide in Gaza, and they exercised their right to dissent peacefully despite provocations that came in the form of counterprotests, doxxing, and verbal threats. The masses of campers depicted in The Encampments lead multi-faith prayer sessions, conduct a Passover seder, sing, recite poetry, and distribute food. Their representatives — Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat, the subjects of extended interviews in the film — negotiate with university administrators, demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers and companies complicit in violations of international law; financial transparency; and amnesty for student activists. These students protested, the film tells us, the right way.
In making this case, The Encampments successfully challenges some of the most slanderous charges lobbed at the student movement. But it is less effective at combating a more insidious lie sold to large sections of the public last year: that peaceful student protests across the nation were hijacked by “outside agitators” hell-bent on “co-opting” their action (to use Eric Adams’s words). Columbia loomed large in this narrative; the NYPD displayed books on terrorism allegedly found in Hamilton Hall as proof that professional troublemakers had taken over.
This story served two functions. It constructed an ideal image of the student protester, one whose political speech was placid rather than agitational. It also built fences around the university, and consequently the student movement, in defining the contours of legitimate protest. In effect, it implied that there was something inherently improper or even menacing about nonstudents (even other members of the university) participating. A viewer who has internalized this narrative could accept everything that is shown in The Encampments, while still believing that the eventual interruption of outside agitators unfortunately made it necessary for the NYPD to intervene. In reality, protest is a universal right, not merely a collegiate affectation. There is a direct line from the criminalization of protest on campuses last spring to the Trump administration’s escalating war on civil liberties — one that will affect all of us, even if it began by targeting students. As of this writing, Khalil (a green card holder) is still being detained at an ICE facility in Louisiana. Mohsen Mahdawi, also a green card holder, Columbia student, and participant in last year’s protests, was arrested this week. Like Khalil, he has not been accused of a crime.
Pritsker’s camera spends the majority of its time on the manicured lawns of Columbia’s main quad. Because of the university’s near total control (beginning in October 2023) over who passed through its gates, viewers get to imagine they are meeting the right kind of protesters: not just students, but elite students and future leaders.
After I saw the movie, I met up with a friend who was teaching at City College — the flagship campus of the CUNY system, and the first free public university in the United States — while I was teaching at Columbia. “Columbia and City College are both on hills,” my friend reminded me. “So that night, we literally watched the cops descend one hill, and then climb the other.” She was referring to the early hours of Tuesday, April 30, 2024, when NYPD forces stormed both schools, arresting 282 protesters.
I remembered that night vividly. After faculty were told to leave campus, I listened from home as the intrepid student reporters of WKCR narrated the horrific police response at Columbia. I also watched the story unfold on Twitter, where police messages leaked: “Thought we fucking shot someone,” a member of the NYPD texted. (District Attorney Alvin Bragg later confirmed that an officer fired a gun during the raid.)
The gates of City College remained open until around 8 p.m. that night, and although reporters from what felt like every outlet imaginable had descended on Columbia, City College’s campus attracted less attention from major media institutions. Police brutality at Columbia was a scandal; at City College, it was less remarkable. Police at both institutions used batons and pepper spray, but at CUNY, according to students, they also broke two protesters’ teeth and one protester’s ankle.
The directors of The Encampments omit City College from their retelling of April 30, even though in the weeks that followed, the official narrative of what happened there helped justify heightened surveillance, disciplinary action, and the use of police force to curb student dissent nationwide. City officials and university administrators alike began to focus obsessively on the presence of “outside agitators.” Unlike at Columbia, where arrests targeted primarily those inside Hamilton Hall, the administrative building students were occupying, arrests at City College were initially made outside the gates, where local residents had rushed to campus to support students. The NYPD kettled protesters to keep them away and arrested anyone who didn’t move fast enough. The presence of these protesters became twisted into evidence of the movement’s corruption rather than of its popular support. The media presented the City College encampment as somehow not an authentic student protest, and some of those arrested at City College were given felony charges, while those arrested at Columbia were only given misdemeanor charges. (The district attorney’s office said that the discrepancy was because there was more evidence against the former, but many of the charges — against protesters at both schools — have since been dropped.)
The Encampments portrays the courage of the students as exceptional. In a sense, that vision is right: millions of Americans who oppose sending aid to Israel have failed to join in, protests outside the university have dwindled, and labor unions that once demanded a ceasefire haven’t escalated their actions. But the idea that these students and their protest are outside of the norm is now helping to fuel a crackdown that should alarm everyone. Expressions of free speech as basic as writing op-eds are being punished. Rümeysa Öztürk’s detention is a case in point: the Tufts student, who cowrote an opinion piece in her student newspaper, was abducted by ICE despite the fact that, as the Washington Post reported, the State Department itself determined that the Trump administration’s allegations of her ties to antisemitism or terrorism lacked any evidence. To date, over a thousand students across the country have had their visas terminated.
The last time I felt hopeful was midnight on April 30, when the Columbia students began their occupation of what they renamed “Hind’s Hall,” after a Palestinian six-year-old killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024. They dropped one banner after another from the windows of this building — the same one where I had taught my first class at the university — linking their actions to a history of protests and occupations on campus since 1968 and mobilizing over a thousand people to march with them.
In the months that followed, I saw group chats that coordinated support for the encampment get smaller and divisions over strategy rock the coalitions that had formed. I held a summit of sorts with other faculty across New York’s universities. We all had the same question: how could we convince our colleagues to organize as part of a united front? The moment of large-scale mobilization had passed, and we were worried that those who showed up when the movement’s energy was at its peak wouldn’t develop into engaged political actors in the long run.
These worries have only deepened as I’ve watched the Trump administration’s assault on higher education and baseless arrests of students — and nonstudent immigrants. And these worries were behind the strange feeling I had when I read the closing credits of The Encampments, which proudly declared, “Rather than stopping the movement for Palestine, the repression reignited it” (sorry for the spoiler). Anyone who has attended a protest in the last month will know that the hope this sentence expresses has not been reflected in the wider populace. Our numbers have not grown; they have shrunk. Admiration for the students cannot excuse the woefully inadequate response of the public at large, or the administrators tasked with protecting their students. Reigniting the movement for Palestinian liberation — not to mention preserving our rights to free speech and protest — is not a duty we can offload to anyone else.
Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher and a contributor to The Drift.
This film sounds fascinating. How can it be accessed?