On the morning of 3 May, the Swarthmore borough police department disbanded a four-day pro-Palestinian encampment on Swarthmore College’s campus and arrested nine activists.
The demonstration calling on the college to divest from the tech company Cisco due to its ties to the Israeli government was a rare uprising in an academic year where higher-education institutions have been quick to quash them. One current and one former Swarthmore College student were among those arrested, while the rest were from outside the college community, the college’s president, Valerie Smith, said in a statement.
“With rising concerns about safety and security on campus, a continued and growing presence of individuals unaffiliated with the college, warnings from outside law enforcement agencies and no signs that protestors were willing to engage in conversation that would bring the encampment to an end,” Smith said, “I felt we had no choice but to seek outside assistance from local law enforcement.”
Around 7.30am on 3 May, Q, a Temple University student who is using a pseudonym out of fear of legal repercussions, was outside his tent at a Swarthmore College pro-Palestinian encampment in Pennsylvania when he said that he received a call from Swarthmore College students.
They told him that they had seen dozens of police cars approaching the campus entrance in the distance and that a sweep of the encampment was imminent. Q started filming the sweep on his phone as about 40 officers swarmed the campus. As nine students stood with their arms linked together, he said, he watched law enforcement grab the activists and pin them to the ground.
“There’s a bunch of people all filming,” Q, who was not arrested, told the Guardian, “watching the police do this insane thing that has never happened in most people’s memory.”
A member of the Philadelphia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Q said that he had been informed of the encampment through the chapter’s network and helped organize the protest. During the few days the encampment existed, Q said that activists hosted reading circles and taught each other political education: “It was crazy to see how admin was responding by threatening repeatedly.”
In a 1 May statement to the campus community, Smith said that the protesters had vandalized campus property. “Should they continue to fail to disperse and violate the college’s policies and the law,” Smith said, “we will have no choice but to escalate our response as we consider all actions to bring the encampment to an end.”
The sweep of Swarthmore College’s encampment comes as a total of nine Swarthmore College students – eight current and one former – were given notices of their interim suspension beginning on Thursday for erecting the encampment earlier in the week. Students on leave of absences are considered former students and the interim suspension could affect their eligibility to resume their enrollment, Swarthmore College spokesperson Alisa Giardinelli said in an email. The students in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, were suspended without due process and were told to evacuate from campus, said Swarthmore’s SJP in a 2 May statement.
The interim suspension bans students from campus, Giardinelli said, and they must complete a student-conduct process before being allowed to return or access the school’s resources and services. It is up to the discretion of a student’s faculty members whether they can continue their work remotely. “Due process exists in legal proceedings,” Giardinelli said. “Swarthmore’s student-conduct process, like those of many universities, is administrative in nature.”
Spade, a Swarthmore College student who is using a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, said that he took a break from the demonstration to shower in his dorm room when he received an email from the college’s dean of student conduct. The email stated that he was now on interim suspension, meaning that he was ineligible from taking classes and being involved in college social activities or sports, pending an investigation. He had three hours to pack up his belongings and vacate the campus, which he did, moving into a friend’s apartment in Philadelphia.
“I was obviously feeling quite surveilled, kind of shocked and then quite angry,” Spade said, “because the school was suspending students for protesting.”
SJP had used social media to encourage activists outside of the college to join the encampment, Smith said, and they ignored repeated requests to vacate Trotter Lawn, where they erected the camp. “We informed students multiple times, both verbally and in writing, that they were violating several policies in the student code of conduct. Students were instructed to disband the encampment and leave Trotter Lawn, and repeatedly warned that failure to do so would lead to interim suspensions.”
Swarthmore College is one of 60 schools under investigation for what the Trump administration considers antisemitic harassment on campus.
Protesters at a handful of higher-education institutions have started campus encampments this spring in a revival of last year’s pro-Palestinian movement in opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza, where at least 62,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October 2023, when roughly 1,100 Israelis were killed. But this year, pro-Palestinian campus protests have been dampened by crackdowns and punitive measures from the Trump administration.
On Yale University’s campus in late April, hundreds of student protesters set up an encampment that dispersed within a couple of hours. Some of them are facing disciplinary action from the university. And at Tulane University, seven students are facing punitive measures including suspension or expulsion for attending an off-campus protest in New Orleans demanding the release of the pro-Palestinian former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil.
For Spade, his future at Swarthmore College remains in limbo as he awaits the results of an investigation. He’s concerned that the disciplinary action could jeopardize funding for research projects that he’s working on at the school, the ability for him to study abroad in the future, or even him being allowed to return to the campus in the fall.
Still, Spade said that reflecting on the destroyed higher-education institutions in Palestine helps put his interim suspension into perspective. “Any repression we face here is completely minuscule compared to what we’re actually fighting for,” Spade said, “which is an end to the genocide.”
• This article was amended on 3 May 2025 to correct an inaccurately referenced 2024 Yale encampment.
