How are schools responding to protests?

By John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama at Birmingham NYPD police officers march onto Columbia University’s campus in New York City on April 30, 2024. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images A two-week standoff between Columbia University administration and student protesters who advocated for the school to divest from companies that work in or support Israel culminated on April 30, 2024, one day after a group of students occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. New York police arrested 109 demonstrators at Columbia and 173 other demonstrators at City College, in uptown Manhattan, on April 30. The Conversation U.S. politics and society editor Amy Lieberman spoke with John J. Sloan III, a scholar of crime and police on college campuses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to better understand the different roles that police play on university and college campuses. NYPD officers on April 30, 2024, enter a building at Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian students barricaded themselves and set up an encampment. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images How do universities differ in working with police? The first documented appearance of a sworn police officer patrolling a college campus was in 1894 at Yale University. Generally, there have been two approaches...