Philly colleges are bracing for a potentially volatile fall semester after a year of encampments and resignations

Rutgers University released new guidelines this week explicitly banning encampments. At Swarthmore College, students are preparing for disciplinary hearings over their participation in last academic year’s protests. And Temple University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has already announced the first march of the semester.

Even before fall classes begin, it’s clear that campus rifts over Israel and Gaza are nowhere near healed. Now, students and administrators are preparing for a potentially volatile year, even as they’re unsure exactly what it might bring.

The Israel-Hamas war has continued at a deadly pace in its 11th month, with at least 40,000 people killed in Gaza since its start, according to health officials there. Pro-Palestinian protests have roiled campuses; meanwhile, pro-Israel protests tended to be smaller, without encampments. Many of the pro-Palestinian protests focused on getting colleges to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s military.

But after university crackdowns and a summer break, it’s not clear whether pro-Palestinian students will mount new encampments, or how administrators will respond if they do. At many schools, slow and careful disciplinary procedures are still creaking along, with students frustrated by what they see as trumped-up allegations.

“I don’t think the disciplinary charges have deterred students from protesting,” said Kaliab Tale, 20, a junior at Swarthmore with an upcoming hearing over his involvement in pro-Palestinian rallies last fall. “Our main focus should really be to keep up the momentum from the encampment.”

Many of those facing sanctions at Swarthmore are first-generation college students and people of color, according to a Palestinian student who asked not to be identified because she feared retribution. She and Tale said Swarthmore had hired external investigators to build cases against students, while prohibiting them from bringing their own counsel to hearings.

“It’s very, very clear that this is a tactic of repression to silence students,” said the student, a junior majoring in peace and conflict studies. She spoke with The Inquirer from the West Bank, where she said she was witnessing firsthand the devastating effects of the war on her family and community.

Alisa Giardinelli, a Swarthmore spokesperson, said that the charges had nothing to do with race or identity, but were based solely on alleged misconduct. She said the college hired external investigators “due to the abnormally high volume of potential violations, and to ensure an objective review.” Students can hire attorneys, but “there is no role for an attorney in an administrative process where courtroom procedures do not apply.” Students can choose a campus adviser to work with them through the process, she said.

No students are facing discipline for peaceful protest, including the encampment in front of Parrish Hall last semester, Giardinelli said.

“Peaceful protest and dissent are an important part of the college’s history,” Giardinelli said.

Some college administrators have been rolling out new rules.

After an academic year roiled by protests, the resignation of the college president, and a multi-week encampment, Penn in June passed new temporary guidelines banning encampments.

Rutgers this week unveiled a new “Free Expression on Campus” website, which also explicitly bans encampments. An FAQ on the site says that while Rutgers had a “decades-long tradition of peaceful free expression events in which students set up tents in an approved space,” recent “disruptive events” mean that encampments are no longer allowed.

School officials have not said whether that means they would immediately remove one, and other colleges were reluctant to say, too.

“It’s hard for me to speculate about this,” said John A. Fry, outgoing president of Drexel University who will become Temple’s president this fall, “but I think we had a very good playbook for how we handled those situations last year.” Protesters set up an encampment on Drexel’s Korman Quad in May, and it stood for less than a week. There was no confrontation like the one at Penn: When Drexel police moved in to disband the group, students had already voluntarily begun to leave on their own.

Elsewhere, fallout from the encampments is still playing out. Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers-New Brunswick is calling on the university to name a new Arab Cultural Center after Refaat Alareer, a prominent Palestinian professor and writer who was killed in an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza in December. Students successfully negotiated for the center when they agreed to voluntarily remove a pro-Palestinian encampment last spring.

Rutgers said in a statement that a committee of faculty, staff, and students is working on a proposal for the new center, which is due to administrators by the start of the fall semester. Honorary names not associated with philanthropy will only be considered two years after the honored person has died, according to Rutgers naming policy.

Perhaps complicating matters, Rutgers-New Brunswick in July suspended Students for Justice in Palestine until next summer for violating the terms of their probation by disrupting final exams and university operations, a spokeswoman said. The group is not recognized by the university and can’t participate in campus activities.

Private colleges and universities prize freedom of speech, and are careful about the rules they impose on protests. Yet they have more latitude than public schools when it comes to limiting protests on campus, said Solomon Furious Worlds, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. The ACLU announced last week that it would be representing two Temple students who are facing discipline at their own school for their participation in protests last fall — not on Temple’s campus, but at Penn’s encampment.

As a state-related university, Temple is subject to the First Amendment.

“For my clients, the big thing here is protecting their ability to protest without the fear that their protest, even their off-campus protest, could restrict their educational opportunities, their work opportunities, their housing opportunities,” Furious Worlds said. After the ACLU PA published a strongly worded letter to the university, the hearings were postponed until the end of the month, Furious Worlds said.

Temple said in a statement that its student code of conduct applies in “appropriate circumstance to off campus behavior,” but declined to comment on specific students.

At the University of Pennsylvania, large fences surrounding the College Green only just came down, months after police dismantled a Gaza protest encampment there. Student activists said they’re not sure what the new guidelines will mean — and doubt they’ll prevent protests.

Eliana Atienza, 19, an organizer of Penn’s encampment, was put on a mandatory temporary leave of absence last spring while college officials determined how to handle her case. The absence resulted in her immediate eviction from campus housing. This semester, she is returning to campus for her junior year on disciplinary probation, the terms of which she said she did not fully understand.

She referred to a wall in Penn’s library that shows how major student protests in the past helped to shape the university.

“We joke that it’s only a matter of time before the university co-opts our student movement and touts how proud and supportive they were of it,” Atienza said. “What if we come back 50 years later, and our group photo is on the wall?”