As the Fall semester begins across the U.S., many universities and colleges have tightened the rules surrounding campus protests. The changes are the result of administrations’ efforts to curb campus protests that began in the wake of the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7 that killed 1,195 people, and after which 251 people were taken hostage, and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza that has to date killed at least 40,000 Palestinians (see: Lancet July 10, 2024; UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 4 September 2024). The conflict has since expanded to the occupied West Bank, and across the border with Lebanon.
Universities are rightfully concerned with cracking down on hate speech in general, and particularly against any among their student populations. They are responsible for maintaining a safe campus community. However, the change in rules and practices governing protests raise concerns about undemocratic limits on the freedoms of speech and assembly, and punishments for people’s political views.
To better understand the evolution and larger context of the current wave of the pro-Palestine protest movement, I invited Jay Ulfelder to speak with me about his work tracking protests.
Jay is Research Project Manager at the Nonviolent Action Lab, at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Government and Innovation, and part of the research team for The Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.
Bridget Conley: Jay, I first met you through our shared research concerns with ending mass atrocities. At different points each of us also worked on contemporary atrocities with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. You established a reputation in the field as a leader and innovator in using data to track atrocities and develop early warning systems. Can you say a few words about your background and previous work?
Jay Ulfelder: Most of my career has been spent working on early warning on political instability writ large, including, but not limited to, mass atrocities. My academic training is in political science, specifically comparative politics and international relations. For about 10 years after graduate school, I worked as research director for a government-funded project, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). After that, I became a freelancer for a while, but still with a focus on early warning and forecasting issues. In the early 2010s, I worked with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, helping design and set up a mass-killing early-warning system that they’re still using now, with some tweaks and improvements by some other great people. Then I moved to the private sector for a couple of years, and then was unemployed for a spell. In 2020, an Instagram post about being out of work led me to a job working remotely for Erica Chenoweth in the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
Bridget Conley: In your current work, what are you focused on?
Jay Ulfelder: Most of what I’ve been doing at the Lab focuses on U.S. protest activity. I’m primarily working on the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project started in 2017 and still run jointly by Erica and Jeremy Pressman, who’s at the University of Connecticut. My dissertation actually involved making protest event data from Soviet Samizdat in the Baltic republics in the late 1980s, so in a way the stuff I’m doing now is coming full circle, back to some of my early research interests on democratization and social movements. There are a lot of echoes of those themes in contemporary American politics.
My days now are a mix of making protest event data, which often occupies a good chunk of the day, and then thinking about how to do things analytically with that data, whether that’s writing a blog post or reaching out to journalists, other researchers and activists, or more traditional academic research projects. Right now, we’ve got a paper forthcoming in Social Movement Studies about the movements after October 7 in support of both Palestinians and Israel in the US. We’re also working now on a project on the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments on U.S. campuses last spring, looking at variations in what happened and why. And we’re working on a book project on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest wave in the U.S. and the right-wing counter-mobilization in response to it.
I really enjoy getting to spend my attention and energy on things that are all around me, in American politics and the society I inhabit, even though that also can feel overwhelming at times. Watching and listening to people who are trying to draw attention to some of the worst things that are happening, getting caught up in watching that on a daily basis, can get a little overwhelming.
Bridget Conley: I can understand that. You can’t step away from it.
Let me ask a somewhat nerdy, methodological question, but in a general way. What does it mean to track protests? What data are you analyzing and what information are you looking for?
Jay Ulfelder: We have two main streams of sources we’re tracking. One is using a web crawler that looks at thousands of US news websites — TV stations, newspapers, radio stations, etc. — on a daily basis, looking for keywords related to protest, and then gives us back a dump of links and headlines related to those. And the other is social media tracking, mostly using an X/Twitter list that includes hundreds of independent journalists and activists and an Instagram account. There are a lot of independent journalists who still use X (Twitter) and do a lot of reporting on protest activity that you don’t see in regular media. We also examine Telegram a fair amount, because there’s a lot of right-wing activity that you only see there — they’re not as active on Instagram and Twitter. Facebook’s pretty opaque and hard to do research through. Instagram is hard, but you can make it work.
Mostly we do media and social media monitoring to try to catch as many events as we can. When we see relevant reports, we create a record in a spreadsheet. A row in this spreadsheet is an event, a protest event, or rally, or a counter protest if that’s the case. For each one of those events, we note when it occurred, in what town, state, more specific information about location if we have it, how many people were there, what it was about, which, for a long time with the project, was just a coder’s summary. Over the last few years, we started doing a lot of verbatim capture of signs and chants (etc.) to try to give the protesters more of a chance to speak for themselves about what the event was. Now we’ve got this big corpus of protest text, essentially. A really important part of what we’re trying to do is also looking at police response, police activity and protester actions. Specifically, we track what protesters did, if people were hurt, or how police and protesters, or protesters and counter protesters interacted.
Bridget Conley: To recap, because I think this is really important — you spend several hours every day reading about protests that are happening. I’m sure you look at multiple sources on any given one.
Jay Ulfelder: Where available, yes.
Bridget Conley: This research does not just produce a database. You’re also engaged in highly qualitative research on protest movements. You probably know more about them than most people, even those who study them.
Jay Ulfelder: I appreciate your attention to that. A big part of what we do is qualitative in the sense of listening, engaging over time with certain organizations and movements. So while the dataset can capture bits of that — you can assemble one version of a picture out of those bits. There are also things I think you learn by actually engaging with that material itself. Social media posts can be really important for understanding what organizations are putting out themselves. For example, a video of a speech from the event. That’s not something you’ll see if you’re reading the newspaper account of it. You might get a quote, but not the whole feel for what was going on. And that’s one reason why I’m reluctant to cut down on the data-making side of my work, because that immersion with the material gives you a much richer sense of what’s going on. It’s very different from what you get if you just drop into the produced data. That is important to me personally, and I think it’s important to the quality of the work that comes out of it.
Bridget Conley: Yeah, I completely agree. What have you been seeing in terms of protests related to the Hamas attack and Israeli war in Gaza?
Jay Ulfelder: We saw a big burst of activity, both in support of Israel and mourning for people killed or affected by October 7 in the weeks immediately after, and then that really tapered off and went back to not quite pre-October 7, but, you know, much lower levels of sustained activity. With the exception of a few weekly gatherings — starting pretty much in early 2024 on Sundays in a lot of US cities — by chapters of an organization called Run for Their Lives that’s focused on freeing Israeli hostages.
What we saw on the side in support of Palestinians and then against what increasingly became evident as a genocide, mass atrocities, whatever label you want to put on Gaza, was also an initial burst, but then it’s really sustained in a way that is exceptional for movements around, let’s call it a foreign policy issue, even though I know it’s much more complicated than that. You almost never see that level of sustained activism and organizing around international issues. We’re still seeing dozens of events every day across the country, hundreds per week, and I think we’re over like 16 or 17,000 protest events in support of Palestinians and against genocide in Gaza since October 7. We’ve got an interactive dashboard that we update almost daily, which is a good way to understand how widespread the movement has been and how much is going on.
One marker of the staying power of this movement is the prevalence of routinized demonstrations around it. Whether it’s pre-existing organizations that started doing things like weekly demonstrations or vigils at a particular intersection in a town, or organizations that newly formed in the last nine months around this issue, hundreds of repeating protests are now happening across the country every week, all over the place. That’s quite unusual for any social movement. Since I started this work in 2020, the only other time I’ve seen anything like that on this scale was the Black Lives Matter uprising after George Floyd’s murder.
Bridget Conley: Are protests really distributed broadly across the US?
Jay Ulfelder: They’re more concentrated in more populous places, of course. There are a bunch in New York City and Southern California, for example. But you also see them in places like Boise, and Bozeman, and Wichita, and Toledo. There are actually several a week in Toledo, led by the American Muslims for Palestine organization — three or four times a week, they’re out demonstrating. Toledo is not a tiny place, but, you know, you get the point. There was a vigil every weekday in Charlottesville, Virginia, for many months. There’s an encampment near the state capitol in Boise that’s been running now for more than 120 days. It’s not like it’s just DC, New York, LA. The protests are scattered around. Some are led by pre-existing, peace focused organizations that may shift their focus from something like the Iraq war to immigrant detention, and they are now focused on this. But there are also new organizations, which is really unusual.
What we’ve seen on campuses is similar. Many of the groups that have been heavily involved in leading actions on campuses existed before October 7, but now have a renewed focus and energy. I gather from what they’re saying online, there is also a lot of new interest among people who hadn’t been involved with this movement or this issue previously. These organizations are often drawing an explicit connection between what they’re doing now and, for example, the movement against apartheid in South Africa in the ‘80s. They understand that student organizations were a critical part of motivating and mobilizing around that issue. They see themselves as kind of a vanguard for changing politics and the political economy in the US around Palestinian rights.
We also saw a number of student encampments earlier in the year, in the fall of 2023 and then into 2024. They didn’t start in April of last year. There was one at Stanford that ran for four months in the fall and into 2024, also at Vanderbilt, and there were a number of them. But when you had the really aggressive police crackdown on the initial iteration of the encampment at Columbia, that was when we saw this contagion effect. Suddenly, a lot of organizations that hadn’t been doing encampment style actions started doing those all around the country. We tracked more than 140 separate encampments, all of which are now gone. The last of them didn’t disappear until late August. That was at Indiana University, where students stuck it out all the way through the summer. At that point, in part in response to university policy changes, they ended up making a strategic decision to pull up stakes in late August, right before the new policy kicked in.
Bridget Conley: What were some of the themes of slogans at these protests?
Jay Ulfelder: If I had to boil it down into a single thing, it would be: stop killing kids. And if you made it a little bigger, it would be: stop killing kids with our taxes. That is probably the lowest common denominator across all these events. A lot of the off-campus activism is less radical in terms of their specific claims or demands. It’s really a focus on stopping killing people, especially kids. I think a really important part of why this mobilization grew so broad, and why it’s had so much staying power, is that people are viewing it that way. Certainly, there are some elements of the movement that are much more specific, but that’s the lowest common denominator theme. The next layer up would be “free Palestine,” with a lot of diversity in terms of what that means. You get everything from organizations advocating for a single secular state on that territory, sometimes explicitly saying complete removal of institutions associated with Israel, to things like end the siege, let humanitarian aid in, end the occupation, end apartheid, or just calling for human rights and justice in a broader or vaguer sense.
Bridget Conley: What about pushing for a ceasefire? I feel like that is the one I’ve seen a lot of.
Jay Ulfelder: I would say it went from that being the focal point, and then a period of tension around not just ceasefire, but permanent ceasefire. And some organizations were saying, yes, ceasefire, but this is just a step. You stop killing and then you liberate Palestine, versus others that were just focused on a ceasefire. Over the last couple of months, the energy has shifted away from talking about a ceasefire per se to calling more specifically for an arms embargo in Israel. Obviously, some people throughout were talking about stop sending weapons to Israel, stop giving any kind of aid to Israel. But calls for an arms embargo have become much more prominent in the last couple of months, and have really superseded talk about a ceasefire, I think.
Bridget Conley: What is the difference between mainstream media narratives and what you’re seeing at this more fine-grain level of watching protests?
Jay Ulfelder: Where to start? A big one is the near-absence of these protests from the mainstream media. The campus activity drew a lot of attention, but many protests had been happening before and are continuing to happen off campus, and they didn’t draw as much attention unless it was, like, disrupting traffic, people doing a sit-in maybe in the Capitol, or those kinds of disruptive actions. There seems to be very little awareness of just how sustained and broad this movement is. The idea is that it’s students, or that it’s “Iranian funded” students, or this or that, and then you look at the actual protests and it’s families, grandmothers, kids. It’s local Muslims, and Palestinian Americans, but it’s also Jewish Americans and Black Americans and Latino Americans. For example, there’s a group in Ontario, California, that does a weekly demonstration, and maybe half their signs are in Spanish, because Spanish is the primary language for a fair number of the people in the area, and probably in the group. That diversity and variety in both the people participating and the kinds of things they’re doing is not something you’re really hearing about in the mainstream media.
There is a long tradition of leftist mutual solidarity across movements of all sorts. The movement for Palestinian liberation is not a new thing, and neither is leftist solidarity with it, but you do see that a lot of groups that usually focus on things like anti-Black racism or Indigenous people’s sovereignty are out mobilizing around this issue now, either showing up at other people’s things or organizing ones themselves. You don’t see much reporting on the participation of so many queer groups, or feminist groups, on and on…and that’s just a very different picture. Mainstream media treats it as some nutty students at rich universities. Even the university part…there was a publication that took our data and looked at the public versus private schools. They found that most of the activism was at public schools last spring. That’s not what the narrative was. The news implied that it was Columbia and Harvard and rich kids who are spoiled so they can live in tents. And that’s not what’s happening.
Bridget Conley: What about violence at the protests?
Jay Ulfelder: In our project, we don’t categorize events as violent or not. We do record if people did things, including property damage, or if they attacked people. What we’ve seen is very few events with property damage, a minuscule fraction, including the ones on campuses. Most of the property damage we’ve seen has been graffiti or broken windows or the like. Sometimes there have been direct actions targeting, for example, weapons manufacturers with ties to Israel, where the vandalism has been more extensive. Our project doesn’t track cases where someone or a group just went out and grabbed or assaulted someone in a targeted attack. We do track where there’s a rally or something and somebody shows up and gets in a fight. That said, we’ve seen virtually no interpersonal violence. The rare cases where people have gotten in fights, or somebody’s gotten hurt, or a couple of cases where people were killed, were when counter protesters showed up and confronted rally goers, protesters, demonstrators.
Bridget Conley: There have been deaths?
Jay Ulfelder: There have been two, I think. There was a guy in Thousand Oaks, California, who showed up with a few other people to counter protest a pro-Palestinian demonstration. He was part of a right wing group. There is a whole social media trail about this, their whole point was to go instigate at these protests. They did that, and he got in a scuffle with a guy, and he fell and died. There’s not clear video of what happened, so I’m not going to try to characterize it, but the other person who was involved in that scuffle is being prosecuted criminally. In Phoenix, there was another death. A group of regular demonstrators came out on the Fourth of July, and this guy came and repeatedly confronted them. At one point, the counter-protester pulled out a knife and stabbed one of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the chest. Somebody in the group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had a gun, and pulled it out and shot the counter-protester with a knife, and he died. That person was not prosecuted. The police, I guess, decided it was self-defense.
Given that there been so many more pro-Palestinian demonstrations, we’ve also seen a larger number of pro-Israel counter protests, and some of those have been fairly confrontational. People have attacked the demonstrators, pepper sprayed them, punched them, shot at them, waved guns at them, waved knives at them, driven cars into the crowds of them. To the extent that we have seen violence, a substantially larger number of instances, it’s been counter protesters coming at the pro-Palestinian groups. For example, in one case, families and kids were on the steps of a state building, and a guy rolls up and gets out of his car with a gun. That kind of stuff.
To the extent that people have gotten hurt, it’s typically been because police have gotten aggressive with trying to control what the crowd’s doing or where it’s going and that kind of thing. Not people attacking police without provocation. We’ve seen virtually none of that. And again, this is not unlike other movements that are leftist, coded as anti-police. You’ll often see reports in the news of police “clashing” with protesters, or protests “turning violent,” but if you watch a lot of video from the events, what you see is people are marching or walking on the sidewalk and in the street, and then the police tell them to get off the street, and people are sort of trying to do that or not. And then the police get aggressive and start tackling people or something, and that gets called “clashes” in newspapers.
Bridget Conley: As we come back to think about what’s happening at this particular point in time, especially as someone who works on a university campus, what are you seeing? I mean, the New York Times recently had an article suggesting that the movement was dying down or slowing down. What are you seeing in terms of protest movements as students are coming back?
Jay Ulfelder: I wouldn’t call it quite a wave yet, but there is a significant jump in activism on campuses around this issue again this fall. At this point, it’s exceptional if a university or college didn’t change their rules around protest activity over the summer. Just about every campus did this, and the new rules are very specifically tailored around the protest modalities that students were using in the spring. For example, at Harvard, the new campus policy, in addition to more explicit restrictions on camping on campus, imposed new restrictions on chalking on campus. It is really specific to what students were doing around encampments last spring.
I’d say we’re now seeing students trying to probe the limits of those new boundaries — not necessarily ignoring them completely and doing the same things they were doing last spring, but trying to probe what the limits are in some way that’s constructive to sustaining the movement.
For example, there was a group that had organized at the University of Houston last spring. They gathered every day for many hours in the student center on campus. Now, there are all these new restrictions on where you could hang signs, if you could hang signs, and that you needed to be in a room. They ignored the room restriction, and then were trying to comply with the sign restriction, but were holding up laptops with what were effectively signs on them. The police were coming and telling them they couldn’t do this or that, and they were kind of trying to figure out how to navigate that space while continuing to meet, talk about the issues, and spread that message to other students who were passing by. They’re probing the limits in a strategic way.
The other thing that’s a little different is more protest activity around the limits on speech themselves. There have been a number of cases, even if the people at these events aren’t talking about Israel, Palestine, they are pushing back against these restrictions. The outcome of those fights will obviously have implications for the students mobilizing around Palestine and Gaza as well. We saw this at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, University of Oregon, a number of places. Sometimes it’s the same group that is saying “divest from Israel and lift these speech restrictions.” Sometimes it’s just the “lift the speech restrictions.” Sometimes it’s just “divest from Israel.” But they’re getting entangled, and again, we’re seeing more activism around those limits as its own new issue on campuses.
Bridget Conley: Has anything surprised you about this tracking endeavor?
Jay Ulfelder: I’m surprised all the time, in so many ways.
One thing that has surprised me is how much protest activity is really about building and sustaining community. Coming at it from an academic perspective, you tend to think about protests in a very goal-oriented way, focusing on specific changes in policies or institutions or leaders. Asking stuff like, “Did it succeed?” Did the George Floyd uprising “win” or not? And so much more of it, when you’re watching people move and organize and so on in this space for years…so much of it is really about building and sustaining those connections, that sense of community, maybe even alternative institutions for people who are more ambitious, whether that’s mutual aid or in other forms. I’ve been surprised by how different that picture is from what I had in my head. My assumptions were that movements are about trying to accomplish specific policy goals, the political science perspective. I know anthropologists and sociologists are smarter about this part than political scientists are, so it was more surprising to me than it would have been to them. But it’s been an education.
Bridget Conley: Jay, thank you. This has been so interesting. Thank you for talking with me.
Jay Ulfelder: Thank you. Appreciate it.
