The events of the past few weeks in the US universities of Columbia and UCLA are reminiscent of the 1960s, but college administrators have not learned from the past.

As anti-war students in late April 1968 occupied buildings at Columbia, they scrawled their goals on the university walls: “Create two, three, many Columbias”. They wanted to encourage students in other universities to expand their double-headed strike: a campaign attacking the wealthy university’s encroachment into Harlem, and to force the university to divest financially from companies providing support to the US military’s campaign in Vietnam.

The reaction of the President, Grayson Kirk, was heavy-handed. He called the NYPD to campus to ‘bust’ the occupation, leading to the arrest of over 700 students in and around Hamilton Hall. Faculty and students turned on Kirk: by August he had resigned.

Seventeen years later, hundreds of Columbia students again blockaded Hamilton Hall and Hartley Hall, with a handful staging a hunger strike to force the university to divest financially from firms connected to the apartheid regime in South Africa. This time, President Michael Sovern – who had himself helped to ease tensions in 1968 as chairman of the faculty executive committee – met with the students for discussions amid a de-escalation of protest. In October 1985, about five months after the blockade began, Columbia became the first US university to commit to total divestment.

In November 2007, as Columbia was already preparing a slate of events to commemorate and reflect on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 events, a small group of students employed the hunger strike tactic again, this time protesting the conservative turn of campus politics, a recent spate of hate crimes, and advocating for a more diverse curriculum, including more money for ethnic studies programmes. This was even more important, protesters said, given the enormous expansion of the campus into Morningside Heights, prompting real social and economic problems associated with gentrification. University staff, worried about students’ wellbeing, set up heaters in the student encampment and invited them to use university buildings to sleep in at night. The protest was small, and largely unsupported amongst the student body, but framed itself within the traditions of free speech and protest – the academic specialism of the university’s president, Lee Bollinger.

Bollinger’s term ended in 2022. His successor, Minouche Shafik, arrived from the LSE (a university with its own history of student agitation) in July 2023. In response to peaceful protests against the war in Gaza, she has suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

And 56 years to the day after Grayson Kirk called in the police against his own students, Shafik did exactly the same. The images are shocking: hundreds of NYPD officers streaming into campus buildings to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters. The organizers of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment – by all accounts a non-violent assembly – have displayed significant historical acumen. Their statements echo the language of the 68-ers; the student coalition supporting them calls itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest, harking back to the 85-ers.

In a statement last night (30 April), a spokesperson said that Shafik regretted “the protesters have chosen to escalate the situation through their actions… We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.” But this is not the case: the escalation has come through the engagement of armed police on campus. One wonders whether such a draconian response at Columbia would have come from Shafik’s predecessor, Lee Bollinger.

While not all students in Columbia will be in support of the pro-Palestinian campaigners, they should be worried at this crackdown on free speech. So too should students in UCLA who are facing similar responses from the university administration. This kind of hardline response was not inevitable: the administration at another Ivy League university, Brown, negotiated with students towards a resolution of protest. Despite claiming to protect students, Shafik’s approach risks doing the opposite. Moreover, it risks galvinizing others to create two, three, many Columbias as students and their allies seek to protect their own rights to free speech, assembly and protest.