Gaza campus protests: why understanding 1960s student demonstrations and police reaction is relevant today

For anybody interested in the history of the 1960s, the ongoing protests at US universities have a peculiar resonance.

In the past weeks, riot police have entered several college campuses at the behest of administrators to break up unauthorised encampments of students protesting the war in Gaza and calling on their universities to divest from companies supporting Israel.

The scenes of police arresting hundreds of students at Columbia University and UCLA are reminiscent of police and National Guard actions against students protesting the Vietnam war in the late 1960s.

It is tempting to draw easy parallels with the worst examples of overreach against those anti-war students in the 1960s. Just over 54 years ago, on May 4 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of anti-war protesters on the campus of Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine. Eleven days later, city and state police fired on protesters at Jackson State College, Mississippi, killing two students.

The violence in the way those events were handled galvanised public support for students, and opposition to Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia. While public support for the students remained quite low, a massive student strike followed.

Photographs of the aftermath of the Kent State shooting captured public attention, and were at least part of the reason why some members of Congress sought to rein in Nixon’s powers , by passing a law limiting the scope of the president to declare war without congressional approval.

But what are the similarities between then and now? What lessons have been learned, and ignored, from past experiences?

In UCLA, Columbia and Kent State, campus administrators claimed that calling in the police was to keep students safe. Most American universities have their own campus police, so inviting external law enforcement onto campus is an extraordinary step. However, it is not clear that police actions are always proportionate or effective, if their purpose is to keep all students safe.

For example, there have been accusations that police on the UCLA campus used tear gas and fired rubber bullets at protesters and counter-protesters, including one man being shot in the chest at very close range, as they sought to clear the pro-Palestinian encampment on May 2. The Los Angles Police Department (LAPD) said it did not fire rubber bullets or other less-lethal rounds during this incident.

However, this is not the first time that the LAPD have been accused of misusing rubber bullets. In 2023, a man was awarded US$375,000 (£298,000) after an LAPD officer shot him with a rubber bullet during a protest over George Floyd’s death.

Despite the high profile nature of the protests, the majority of today’s students have been opposed to the disruptive encampments. According to the recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey of Young Americans, only 2% of young Americans cite the Israel-Palestine conflict as the issue that concerns them the most. It is possible that images of injured students in zip-tie handcuffs may change that, but it is unlikely.

Learning from the past

In the aftermath of Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton chaired a President’s Commission on campus unrest. Much of the commission’s report was underwhelming, and its central conclusion – that there was a fundamental crisis of understanding between the older and younger generations – is trite and quite pedestrian. Significantly though, the report debunked the idea that “outside agitators” were to blame for escalated violence. This trope has been much repeated by critics of today’s protests, including the New York mayor Eric Adams and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Perhaps more importantly, the 1970 commission claimed that the root of campus unrest lay with the university’s faltering moral authority – or what protesting some students at the University of Chicago today see as hypocrisy. Then, as now, university authorities have found it very difficult to balance competing interests: freedom of speech, different constituencies of students and student activists, donors, and politicisation of higher education, including congressional interference even in private university spaces.

Some universities have handled protesters better than others. Brown University in Rhode Island – like Columbia, an Ivy League institution – negotiated an agreement that ended the unauthorised encampment there. Several other universities have taken a similar approach. Indeed, Columbia itself negotiated a settlement with the anti-apartheid students of 1985, so it is not unreasonable to expect an alternative path could have been followed to defuse the current situation.

Looking back to the protests of the 1960s, it’s clear the campus shootings at Kent State and Jackson State were avoidable, and police and state responses did not need to be so draconian. Something that law enforcement should be keeping in mind today.

Can we look to the Scranton report for lessons to inform the present day? Perhaps. The commission’s final conclusions may be even more useful now than they were in 1970: “The university must pull itself together… Any academic institution worthy of the name must protect the right of its students and faculty to express themselves freely – outrageously as well as responsibly.”