- By Allyson Aleksey | Examiner staff writer |
- May 11, 2024 Updated May 11, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)
As graduates geared up for this weekend’s commencement ceremonies, tents filled with students rallying for a cease-fire in Gaza dotted UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, a focus of the university’s student activism.
Like at many other colleges across the country, students at UC Berkeley are demanding that the University of California divest from companies or institutions that facilitate or profit from the war raging in the Middle East. Activists claim that the UC system owns stock in at least four companies that have profited from the war, including ExxonMobil, Honeywell, General Electric Aerospace and Coca-Cola.
A student at the Berkeley encampment who asked for anonymity said he would camp out on the plaza through the graduation festivities. As he gathered water and snacks provided by others at a nearby tent, the sound of military drones filled the plaza over a loudspeaker.
“We play this because it’s what Gazan citizens hear every day for the past several months,” the student said. “It’s graduation, and it’s a happy time for many, but we’re not forgetting why we’re here.”
UC Berkeley has long been a beacon of student activism and the epicenter of the free-speech movement. Students have led many large-scale and organized protests over several decades, including the 1980s anti-apartheid movement, rallies against the war in Vietnam, and, more recently, the battle over People’s Park.
But unlike some demonstrations elsewhere, pro-Palestinian protests here have remained mostly peaceful and largely out of the headlines.
While several dozen tents dotted Sproul Plaza on Thursday morning, only a handful of students sat or weaved between them. A makeshift library at the center of the encampment, filled with books on various social-justice topics and free-speech pamphlets, was devoid of patrons.
The quiet scene stood in stark contrast to the images of New York City police storming the Columbia University campus or violent clashes between protesters at UCLA within the last month.
Adante Pointer, a Berkeley alum and civil-rights attorney, said the university “has taken a wait-and-see approach.”
“UC Berkeley has protests seemingly weekly, so the university administration is pretty familiar with this type of thing, and it may not be as troubling to them as it might be to other universities,” said Pointer, who said he engaged in protests during his time at Cal.
There are no plans to dispatch more Berkeley cops to address the pro-Palestinian student protests, either.
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin declined an interview with The Examiner, but said in an emailed statement, “I support the right of people to protest peacefully and support an immediate bilateral ceasefire in Gaza and release of all hostages.”
But Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said even a “seemingly peaceful protest” can escalate and pointed to UCLA as an example.
“[Violence] could happen anywhere,” he said. “We’ve been having challenges with most UC schools since Oct. 7. If you were to ask me what UC school would have blown up, it wouldn’t have been UCLA first. So there’s a lot of unpredictability here.”
He also said the makings of a larger conflict over free speech are evident on campus.
Sprawled along Sproul Hall, which once housed the offices of the chancellor and other top administrators, are messages of “Free Palestine” and “All Zionists are nationalists.” Cardboard signs that read “From the river to the sea” — which has become a de facto battle cry of the pro-Palestinian movement — are hung on tents.
Gregory told The Examiner that these words should be considered hate speech.
“To us, ‘from the river to the sea’ signifies the elimination of Israel,” he said. “The rhetoric coming out of these [protests] are more than just pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel war. To us, it feels like it’s crossing the line into antisemitism.”
President Joe Biden, who landed in the Bay Area on Thursday to fundraise, said that vandalism — as well as trespassing, breaking windows or forcing the cancellation of classes — is not peaceful protest and should not be tolerated.
“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest,” he said. “It’s against the law.”
But what constitutes freedom of expression amid these university protests is getting murkier, Pointer said.
“Any speech that incites riot or violence crosses the line from free speech that’s protected to speech that can be punished,” Pointer told The Examiner.
“But that’s also a subjective test — what might be threatening to one might be considered a basic opinion to others.”
Chanting pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated during the Berkeley Law School commencement Friday, while others wore T-shirts that read “UC DIVEST.” Demonstrations continued during Saturday’s campus-wide commencement ceremony at Memorial Stadium.
According to the Daily Californian, the university’s student-run paper, UC Berkeley officials proposed the creation of a task force by the UC Berkeley Foundation to develop “divestment recommendations” for industry-based investments. But direct divestment from the university can only be addressed by the UC Board of Regents — and as of press time, the board had made no commitment to doing so.
Instead, the UC Office of the President released a statement Thursday that said it will support and protect nonviolent and lawful protests.
Many students protesting on college campuses, including locally at San Francisco State University, have said they plan to camp out until a cease-fire is called.
