The DNC didn’t appease pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and neither should universities

As students return to campus for the fall semester, universities can learn from the Democratic National Convention about how to handle the return of disruptive pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Pro-Palestinian groups had threatened huge, confrontational demonstrations at last week’s convention. The DNC’s organizers, rejecting an appeasement approach, erected a massive metal barricade that kept protesters, who had vowed to march on the convention site without permits, blocks away. When some protesters broke down part of a barrier, the Chicago Police Department quickly arrested them.

The DNC did not allow a Palestinian-American speaker to address the convention, which deprived the protesters of media oxygen. Chicago 1968 it wasn’t.

The DNC was helped by a low pro-Palestinian turnout, and the DNC made small concessions, such as allowing a forum on Palestinian grievances off the main stage.

Not all of the DNC’s tactics from a four-day convention can be easily emulated by universities. They cannot erect metal barricades around sites of possible tent encampments for entire semesters.

But a no-appeasement policy should be the guiding principle for how, going forward, universities deal with disruptive, sometimes antisemitic pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, appeasement-based tactics so convulsed elite universities that three Ivy League presidents lost their jobs.

Several recent court decisions vividly describe the harm done to Jewish students by the appeasement approach. In two of the cases, Jewish students brought separate lawsuits against MIT and Harvard alleging that the universities had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by their “deliberate indifference” to the hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students following the Hamas Oct. 7 attack.

Federal District Judge Richard G. Stearns presided in both cases. He denied Harvard’s motion to dismiss the central allegations of the complaint because — assuming at this early procedural stage that they were true (they remain to be proven) — "Harvard’s response has been not just simply inadequate but skewed in its bias.” He cited, among many allegations, that Harvard tolerated tent encampments hostile to Jewish students and refused to permit Jewish students to hold a demonstration in a student lounge but allowed pro-Palestinian groups to hold protests there throughout the semester.

Harvard required a campus Hasidic Jewish community center to remove its Hanukkah menorah each night to prevent its being vandalized “but it provided 24/7 security” to a Palestinian group’s “Wall of Resistance.” Harvard allegedly allowed a law school student and teaching fellow to remain in his teaching position after he assaulted a Jewish student at a “die in.” Judge Stearns pointedly observed that “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.”

By contrast, Judge Stearns dismissed the complaint against MIT because the allegations showed that the university, “far from sitting on its hands,” in fact had suspended “the most undisciplined” pro-Palestinian groups, suspended other student protesters from nonacademic activities and immediately warned and then arrested “trespassing” students who had set up lawn encampments.

In a case against UCLA, Jewish students alleged that the university had for weeks tolerated pro-Palestinian encampments astride a major campus thoroughfare that created an effective “Jew Exclusion Zone” that admitted only those who had pledged allegiance to the protesters’ anti-Zionist views. The students alleged that, as a result, they could not access university buildings without disavowing Israel or their religion.

Federal District Judge Mark C. Scarsi expressed shock that, in America, Jewish students had been excluded from a university campus because “they refused to denounce their faith.” He ordered UCLA to take specific steps to protect Jewish students.

Appeasement-minded universities, beware. The judges are angry.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”