A tiny contingent of Duke University graduates opposed pro-Israel comedian Jerry Seinfeld speaking at their commencement in North Carolina on May 12, with about 30 of the 7,000 students leaving their seats and chanting “free Palestine” amid a mix of boos and cheers.

Some waved the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag. Mr. Seinfeld, whose namesake sitcom was one of the most popular in U.S. television history, was there to receive an honorary doctorate from the university.

The stand-up comic turned actor, who stars in the new Netflix movie “Unfrosted,” has publicly supported Israel since it invaded Gaza to dismantle Hamas after the organization attacked the country and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The ensuing war has killed nearly 35,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The small student protest on May 12 at Duke’s graduation in Durham, North Carolina, was emblematic of campus events across the U.S. after weeks of student protests resulted in nearly 2,900 arrests at 57 colleges and universities.

Students at campuses across the U.S. responded this spring by setting up encampments and calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it. Students and others on campuses whom law enforcement authorities have identified as outside agitators have taken part in the protests from Columbia University in New York City to UCLA.

Police escorted graduates’ families past a few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters who tried to block access to May 12 evening’s commencement for Southern California’s Pomona College.

After demonstrators set up an encampment last week on the campus’ ceremony stage, the small liberal arts school moved the event 48 kilometers from Claremont to the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Tickets were required to attend the event, which the school said would include additional security measures.

In April, police wearing riot gear arrested 19 protesters who had occupied the president’s office at the college with about 1,700 undergraduates.

Demonstrator Anwar Mohmed, a 21-year-old Pomona senior, said the school has repeatedly ignored calls to consider divesting its endowment funds from corporations tied to Israel in the war in Gaza. , “We’ve been time and time again ignored by the institution,” Mr. Mohmed said outside the Shrine on May 12. “So today we have to say, it’s not business as usual.”

At the University of California, Berkeley, on May 11, a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved flags and chanted during commencement and were escorted to the back of the stadium, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. There were no major counterprotests, but some attendees voiced frustration.

“I feel like they’re ruining it for those of us who paid for tickets and came to show our pride for our graduates,” said Annie Ramos, whose daughter is a student. “There’s a time and a place, and this is not it.”

This weekend’s commencement events remained largely peaceful.

At Emerson College in Boston, some students took off their graduation robes and left them on stage. Others emblazoned “free Palestine” on their mortar boards. One woman, staring at a camera broadcasting a livestream to the public, unzipped her robe to show a kaffiyeh, the black and white checkered scarf commonly worn by Palestinians, and flashed a watermelon painted on her hand. Both are symbols of solidarity with those living in the occupied territories.

Others displayed messages for a camera situated on stage, but the livestream quickly shifted to a different view, preventing them from being seen for long. Chants during some of the speeches were difficult to decipher.

Protests at Columbia University, where student uprisings inspired others at campuses across the country, led the school to cancel its main graduation ceremony in favor of smaller gatherings.

The University of Southern California told its valedictorian, who publicly backed Palestinians, that she could not deliver her keynote speech at its graduation ceremony because of security concerns. It later canceled its main graduation ceremony.

At DePaul University in Chicago, graduation is more than a month away. But as the academic year closes, school leaders said they had reached an “impasse” with the school’s pro-Palestinian protesters, leaving the future of their encampment on the Chicago campus unclear.

The student-led DePaul Divestment Coalition, which is calling on the university to divest from economic interests tied to Israel, set up the encampment nearly two weeks ago. The group alleged university officials walked away from talks and tried to force students into signing an agreement, according to a student statement late on May 11.

Representational image of police in Paris
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Police in Paris entered France’s prestigious Sciences Po university on May 3 and removed student activists who had occupied its buildings in protest against Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

A Reuters witness saw police go into the buildings and take out many of the 70-odd protesters inside. Unlike in some college campuses across the United States, the French protests have been peaceful and there were no signs of violence as the students were brought out of the buildings.

Sciences Po has become the epicentre of French student protests over the war and academic ties with Israel, which have spread across France but have remained much smaller in scale than those seen in the United States.

The university was closed for the day on May 3, with a heavy police presence around its main building.

Mr. Jack, a Sciences Po student who declined to give his surname, said he was one of around 70 students who spent the night on May 2 occupying one of the university’s main buildings in central Paris.

He told Reuters on May 3 morning that protesters had declined an ultimatum by university officials to clear large parts of the building and restrict their movement to a determined smaller area.

Also read: French police break up pro-Palestinian university protest

A Sciences Po spokesperson, speaking before the police intervention, said the university was seeking a “negotiated solution to end the standoff” with its students, and that some of the its satellite campuses in Reims, Le Havre and Poitiers were also affected by protests.

Sciences Po Lyon, an unaffiliated university in France’s third largest city, was also blocked by protesting students on Friday, as well as the Lille school of journalism, images broadcast by French news channels showed.

Sciences Po’s director Jean Basseres on May 2 rejected demands by protesters to review its relations with Israeli universities, prompting protesters to continue their movement with at least one person entering a hunger strike, according to a student speaking on behalf of the protesters.

Samuel Lejoyeux, who heads the Union of Jewish Students of France, said French student protests had remained more peaceful than those in the United States as there was a greater desire for dialogue in France.

“With the overwhelming majority of students at French universities, including Sciences Po, it is still possible to have a debate. I even think there is an increased hunger for debate,” he told broadcaster BFM TV.

A cause celebre is ringing out across Harvard Yard, Columbia’s South Lawn, Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza: Disclose and divest.

And university students say they won’t stop protesting against Israel until that demand is met.

“We’re willing to risk suspension, expulsion and arrest, and I think that that will put pressure,” said Malak Afaneh, a law student at University of California, Berkeley, and a protest organizer.

She and her fellow pro-Palestinian demonstrators want universities to cut their investments in everything tied to Israel and weapons that fuel the war in Gaza. That means funds run by BlackRock, Google as well as Amazon’s cloud service, Lockheed Martin and even Airbnb.

It’s a long-shot demand – university administrators and lawmakers have for decades rejected the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel, viewing it as antisemitic because it calls into question the legitimacy of the Jewish state and singles out the policies of one country.

It’s fiercely opposed by many donors and alumni, and what’s more, acting on the BDS concept is discouraged by laws in more than half of US states, including New York and California. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

“I have consistently opposed all forms of antisemitism, including discrimination against and demonization of the people of Israel through the BDS movement,” said California Assembly Democratic Caucus Chair Rick Chavez Zbur. “I would strongly oppose any attempts to change laws protecting against such discrimination.”

Yet it’s gaining proponents, especially among students at elite universities since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and sparked the conflict in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

They’re chanting on college grounds, waving Palestinian flags, wearing keffiyehs and beating drums. Encampments have sprouted on campuses, including at Harvard where about 30 tents currently stand in front of the John Harvard statue, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Some protesters, including at Columbia and Berkeley, have threatened Jewish students and expressed support for Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the US.

All that has left universities struggling to balance the right to free speech with the need for maintaining order and ensuring the safety of students. But on the question of divestment, they are unmoved.

Harvard, which has the largest US endowment at almost $51 billion, made clear this month it “opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions.” Brown refused to acknowledge BDS demands while students led an eight-day hunger strike. Yale this week wouldn’t even consider a proposal to divest from weapons makers and instead police rounded up protesters outside of the Schwarzman Center, arresting more than 40 students.

BDS supporters take inspiration from the drive to isolate South Africa during the apartheid era – including actions taken at the time by Columbia, Michigan State and California universities – and recent pushes for colleges to address fossil fuel holdings.

This time at Michigan State, where groups of students are camped in tents in People’s Park, there’s no appetite for severing ties with Israel.

“Divestment would conflict with stewarding the institution’s financial health, would increase investment risks, and limit returns and jeopardize the assurance resources will continue to be available now and for future generations,” said Sandy Pierce, chair of Michigan State University’s board, speaking earlier this month at a Board of Trustees meeting.

Columbia in February declined a proposal to withdraw financial support from Israel, months before students set up tents on the Morningside Heights campus and created a standoff with the university that resulted in more than 100 arrests.

Ray Guerrero, 27, who’s studying for a masters in public health, helped pen the divestment proposal for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition. The group has a litany of demands, including cutting ties to Israeli academic institutions, defunding public safety and reparations for the indigenous people of New York. Guerrero understands the goals are lofty for the immediate term, but stresses the main focus for now is disclosure and divestment around Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment.

Layla Saliba, a 24-year-old studying for a masters in social work, is part of CUAD’s research team, which she said has been studying the school’s financial disclosures, including its tax forms and 13Fs disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We were only able to get about 0.6% of their investments as public information,” she said.

The latest 13F discloses just $47 million of its holdings, with the vast majority stock in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. That leaves billions of dollars undisclosed.

“That’s really concerning because our endowment, yes, it’s funded by benefactors, it’s funded by donors, but a portion of that is also funded with our tuition dollars,” Saliba said. “And we feel that as students, we need to have more transparency on that.”

Universities say the protesters’ claims aren’t accurate.  

The University of California, which opposes any boycott of Israel, said in a statement that tuition fees are not used for investments. College endowments are almost always funded with donations and investment gains. What’s more, they fund financial aid for students and other operating expenses such as teacher salaries.

And the challenge isn’t just ideological. Endowments typically don’t hold large concentrations of single stocks as they used to decades ago, when activists targeted companies operating in South Africa.

Endowments have long relied on external managers, including private equity firms and hedge funds. Almost 700 institutions hold about $840 billion in endowment assets. They also use ETFs, index funds or mutual funds that pool hundreds of stocks and bonds.

With private equity, a school’s money may be locked up for several years, without an option to withdraw, while hedge fund managers can rapidly move in and out of securities without disclosing their trades to investors.

“These active strategies are not buying stocks to hold on for the long term,” said Philip Zecher, chief investment officer of Michigan State University’s $4 billion fund. “They’re looking to make money off trading. It’s not like your grandmother buying AT&T stock and sitting on it for 50 years.”

The fight against fossil fuel investment, a cause championed by students for decades, also shows how hard it can be to implement divestment. Universities largely haven’t switched strategies to sell holdings, which are frequently tied up in long-term private equity funds, even as they’ve committed to policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on campuses.

Despite the setbacks and opposition, some pro-Palestine protesters are undeterred.

“It seems like a no for now, but students will keep pushing,” said Lumisa Bista, a junior studying astrophysics at Yale, who was among protesters at the university who slept overnight at Beinecke Plaza this week. “I’ll keep pushing.” 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)