Gaza protests

Thursday

Ella Johnson

Why the conflict in Gaza matters less to poor students

Pro-Palestinian protests have disproportionately taken place at elite colleges, according to number-crunching by Washington Monthly. Their analysts used data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium with news reports of encampments and then matched that data to the percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants. Protests and encampments have been rare among colleges with high percentages of Pell students (which are mostly from moderate and low-income families). For some reason, poor students do not appear to care about Gaza as much as elite students do. One of the more recent examples took place on Monday when a group of pro-Palestinian students at Princeton University attempted to stop a Memorial Day parade.

Friday

David Christopher Kaufman

Why students at historically black colleges aren’t protesting

Earlier this week, the New York Times asked an intriguing and surprisingly overlooked question: why aren’t black students on historically black college campuses protesting against Israel and marching for Palestine? It’s an important query — made all the more urgent by President Biden’s commencement address this coming weekend at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities.   Considering the seemingly endless ways African Americans have pledged their allegiances to the suffering in Gaza — and Palestinians in general — America’s 107 HBCUs should be exploding with anti-Israel rancor.

campus protests hbcus protesting

Wednesday

Daniel McCarthy

Biden’s base rebels over Gaza

Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is a multifront war. Unfortunately for him, the youngest soldiers in his coalition would rather fight Israel than Donald Trump. Biden was elected in the first place as the anti-Trump. In 2020 Democrats were desperate, and the ex-vice president was the most prestigious figure they had to field. He didn’t have to be inspiring or energetic — Trump would provide all the inspiration and energy Biden voters needed. What inspires the voting-age activists on America’s campuses today, though, isn’t aversion to Trump, and it certainly isn’t love for Joe Biden: it’s outrage at Israel. Four years ago, George Floyd became a symbol of injustice that spurred progressives to take to the streets and take back the country at the ballot box.

Biden