CHICAGO (CN) — University of Chicago police forcefully disbanded a Palestine solidarity encampment on campus early Tuesday morning, with assistance from officers with the Cook County Sheriff's Office.
Student and independent reporters on the ground at the time say police began dismantling the encampment around 4:45 a.m. before facing off against students for several hours.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson‘s office said they knew of the university's plans to break down the encampment early Tuesday morning. The mayor was not involved in the decision, his office said, but had monitored the situation. The Chicago police did not participate in clearing the campus either.
According to university officials, no arrests were made.
"We’ve been let back onto the emptied quad," Eman Abdelhadi, a UChicago assistant professor of comparative human development, said on social media around 8 a.m. after campus police dismantled the encampment. "It was more beautiful before. When it was full of art and free food and music and a commitment to a better world."
The pre-dawn action came days after university officials announced their intent to clear the encampment, amid a breakdown in negotiations between encampment organizers and the UChicago administration.
By the time law enforcement moved on the encampment, it had been operational for eight days.
University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos cited safety concerns as justification for ending the encampment. The university president also accused protesters last week of vandalism, taking up too much space on the school's main quad and destroying a campus-approved installation of Israeli flags.
"The encampment has created systematic disruption of campus. Protesters are monopolizing areas of the Main Quad at the expense of other members of our community. Clear violations of policies have only increased," Alivisatos said May 3.
Calls to divest and disband
Encampment protesters issued a list of demands to the school's administration last week, among them a call for UChicago to cut ties with the Israel Institute, a nonprofit organization that has funded multiple UChicago courses.
The institute's publicly stated mission is to "advance the academic study of modern Israel in partnership with leading universities around the world," but the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine argues it functions as an extension of Israeli state propaganda.
"The Institute explicitly works to justify and legitimize Israeli state violence, and propagandizes students into viewing the Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism through the imperialist trope of 'Arab-Islamic terror,'" the group claimed.
Organizers further demanded that UChicago divest from any military contractors providing weapons to Israel, recognize Israel's siege of Gaza as a genocide and "scholasticide" — referring to Israeli military actions damaging or destroying all 12 of Gaza's universities and killing multiple educators — and create a stakeholder committee of students, faculty and staff to oversee the university's future investments.
The organizers also called for the university to disband its private police force, created in 1968, and to use its budget to fund housing and education programs on Chicago's south side. They also called for the university to halt further campus expansion.
Last year, the university broke ground on a $815 million cancer treatment center, but opponents argued it would further displace Black and low-income south side residents who live in the area.
Complicated past, scaled-back demands
UChicago has a complicated 130-year history with Chicago's south side. While the school acts as an anchor for more than 18,000 students and over 24,000 jobs including medical center staff, its footprint has more than doubled over the last century.
It has also historically pursued covenants barring people of color from buying nearby property, and has faced criticism over its employer-assisted housing program being more accessible to white employees.
A 2017 study of Chicago gentrification trends by UC Berkeley and University of Toronto scholars puts some of the the local area "at risk of becoming exclusive" for high-income residents, while also concluding that residents in other nearby areas at the time were undergoing displacement. A 2021 report from Chicago's DePaul University Institute for Housing Studies made similar findings.
But a draft version of an agreement between encampment negotiators and university officials that leaked on social media Tuesday morning shows the encampment had largely abandoned its demands for the university to change how it operates on a local level.
What remained in the draft agreement included a call for the university to fully sponsor up to eight Palestinian scholars in Gaza for one-year academic appointments, and for more support for students affected by the war in Gaza.
It also called for the university to disclose its endowments to students and faculty, and to re-assess barriers to educational access that partner institutions may impose on Palestinian students — for example, scholarships to study abroad in Israel funded by the Israel Institute.
Despite the scaling back, university president Alivisatos on Tuesday called the protesters' demands "fundamentally incompatible" with the university's institutional neutrality.
"There were areas where we were able to achieve common ground, but ultimately a number of the intractable and inflexible aspects of their demands were fundamentally incompatible with the university’s principled dedication to institutional neutrality," Alivisatos said in a public statement. "As such, we could not come to a resolution."
Peaceful protests on campus continued into Tuesday despite the loss of the encampment, and protests against universities' ties to Israel have continued elsewhere in the city.
Last week Northwestern University students in the Chicago suburb of Evanston agreed voluntarily to disband their encampment in exchange for concessions similar to those outlined in the leaked draft of demands from UChicago protesters.
On Saturday, Chicago police violently cleared a pro-Palestine encampment in front of the Art Institute of Chicago organized by students with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Police arrested nearly 70 people in the clash with protesters.
On Sunday, police also physically separated encampment protesters at DePaul University from a group of Israel supporters who organized a counter-protest. The DePaul encampment, which launched the same day Northwestern organizers voluntarily disbanded theirs, is still operational. Organizers at UChicago also said they planned to continue pressuring the school to divest from Israel.
"For many of us, these past 8 days were a glimpse into a different kind of life. One where we are truly connected to each other, where we share space as human beings not just as positions (student, professor, etc)," Abdelhadi wrote late Tuesday morning. "That feeling is bigger than a tent, and it will guide us forward."
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