At Indiana University, Protests Only Add to a Year Full of Conflicts

The tumult in Bloomington, Ind., where large protests have led to dozens of arrests and calls for university leaders to resign, shows the reach of the protest movement.

Discontent was simmering on Indiana University’s flagship campus long before the first tent went up in Dunn Meadow, the vast green space beside the student union in Bloomington.

Earlier in the academic year, faculty members and graduate students voted no confidence in the university president. The cancellation of a Palestinian artist’s exhibition and the suspension of a pro-Palestinian student organization’s faculty sponsor drew backlash. Some in the Jewish community said they felt increasingly unsafe.

But it was only in the last week, as a national wave of pro-Palestinian encampments reached Indiana, that a year defined by tension erupted into crisis. What came next — the arrests, the dueling accusations of police brutality and hate speech, the blurring of calls for divestment from Israel with those seeking the removal of university leaders — was a one-campus microcosm of how thoroughly the camps had rocked American higher education, and of how uncertain the path forward had become.

“We should put all political problems aside and get rid of this administration that has failed all of us,” said Ahmad Jeddeeni, the president of Indiana’s Graduate and Professional Student Government, who said he had friends on both sides of the protests. “These guys are not able to lead in crisis,” he said of the university’s top leaders. “These guys made the crisis, actually.”

All across the country, at colleges private and public, large and small, in conservative states and liberal ones, administrators have struggled to navigate the moral and political thickets presented by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent campaign in Gaza that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

At Indiana, a highly regarded public university that enrolls more than 40,000 students, tension had been mounting since the fall. By the time pro-Palestinian demonstrators indicated last week that they would set up an encampment, following demonstrations at Columbia University and other colleges, any good will between activists and administrators in Bloomington had already been sapped.