HYDE PARK — Dozens of University of Chicago faculty voiced unequivocal support on Monday for student protesters who are camping out on the university’s main quad as the encampment enters its second week.
About 50 educators with University of Chicago Faculty for Justice in Palestine gathered Monday morning near the encampment, 1100 E. 58th St. They rallied in support of students’ demands for university leaders to “divest, disclose and repair” from harms the university has caused in Palestine and on the South Side, they said.
The encampment, named “UChicago Popular University for Gaza,” was set up last Monday in solidarity with Palestinians abroad and in the United States who are demanding an end to Israeli military action in Gaza.
Tensions at the camp escalated Friday, as pro-Israel counter protesters marched on the campus and as University President Paul Alivisatos said he was ready to “intervene” to remove student protesters, citing “systemic disruption.”
Despite Alivisatos’ statements, negotiations between protesters and university officials continued through the weekend before “university administrators suspended negotiations with student protesters” on Sunday, associate humanities professor Allyson Nadia Field said.
Protesters remained peacefully in place as of 11 a.m. Monday, though they were on alert after a promise by officials not to clear the encampment expired at midnight Monday, said Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and sociologist.
“Students have been productively engaging in negotiations with the university over the last week, while the university has continued in bad faith to escalate by repeatedly threatening police action,” said Elham Mireshghi, an assistant instructional professor in the College and Divinity School.
Universities and police have cracked down on student and faculty protesters at campuses across the U.S. in recent weeks with “brutal repression,” said Anton Ford, an associate philosophy professor and member of UChicago’s faculty council.
“When all of this is over, the University of Chicago will have to answer for its principles,” Ford said. “Is what happened at Columbia and at Emory what [UChicago’s] principles look like in practice? Faculty at this university are worried about how President Alivisatos proposes to answer that question.”
“As faculty members, we will protect the safety of our students if the administration attempts to violently remove them, even if that means arrest and detention,” Mireshghi said.
Academic deans and other university leaders have met with student and faculty protesters, but discussions were suspended because “the requests of the protesters were inconsistent with the University’s principles,” officials said in a statement Sunday.
Hamas, the group that controls the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip, launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 when militants killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 hostages. The Israeli military launched a full-scale attack in response, with months of airstrikes, raids and other military actions in Gaza.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 34,650 people in Gaza have been killed, CNN reported Sunday. Despite pressure from allies like President Joe Biden not to begin a ground assault on Rafah, the Israeli army is expected to do so and on Monday ordered Palestinians to evacuate parts of the southern Gazan city, according to the Associated Press.
Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah after fleeing Israeli military violence in other areas of Gaza, according to the United Nations.
“I cannot, as a human, even imagine [or] sleep thinking about the atrocity that is going on in Gaza — all the children and women, their starvation, their fear, the horror, the bombing,” said Mehrnoush Soroush, an assistant humanities professor.
For nearly the entire seven months of war, pro-Palestine UChicago students have organized on campus to demand the university acknowledge genocide in Gaza, cut ties with Israeli companies and the Israel Institute, publicize its investments in weapons manufacturers and commit to a program of reparations “from Palestine to the South Side,” among other demands.
Past student actions include a November sit-in at Rosenwald Hall, during which police arrested 26 students and two faculty members before prosecutors dropped charges, according to the Chicago Maroon. Organizers also gathered daily in the quad starting last fall, giving passersby context on the war that centered on Palestinians.
As the encampment launched last Monday, Alivisatos urged protesters to consider other methods to make their points, saying the protest “clearly violates policies against building structures on campus without prior approval and against overnight sleeping on campus.”
DePaul University students also set up a pro-Palestinian encampment last week in a protest that has remained mostly peaceful. Northwestern University students formed a similar encampment on the Evanston campus, though some of that protest has been scaled back after students reached an agreement with administrators.
Police arrested 68 protesters outside the Art Institute of Chicago Saturday after the museum asked police to clear the encampment that students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago set up that morning in the museum’s North Garden.
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