U.C.L.A. Creates Campus Safety Role as It Prepares to Reopen Classes

After a week of escalating violence involving campus protests over Gaza, the University of California, Los Angeles, said it would resume in-person classes on Monday and had created a new campus security job.

The leader of the newly created office of campus safety will report directly to the chancellor, Gene Block, and manage the U.C.L.A. police department and the office of emergency management, and comes as leaders of the school and other college administrators across the country face a backlash over the way they have handled pro-Palestinian demonstrators on university property.

Last Tuesday, after counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus, the clash went on for hours with no police intervention, and no arrests.

The new office will take over the management of the campus police department from the vice chancellor Michael Beck, who also oversees events, facilities management, transportation and other campus operations. Mr. Beck and the U.C.L.A. police chief, John Thomas, have faced mounting criticism as demonstrations on campus last week between pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters turned increasingly violent.

After the violence on Tuesday, critics said Mr. Thomas was unprepared and failed to protect students. He defended himself over assertions that the university waited too long to intervene and secure backup from the Los Angeles Police Department. The University of California's president announced that it would conduct an independent review of what led to the clash.

The new office of campus safety will be run by Rick Braziel, a former police chief in Sacramento and a well-known expert on policing in California, according to a statement by Mr. Block. Mr. Braziel, who is also a former inspector general for Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, has previously been tapped to review high-profile police actions, including after the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 and the protests and riots in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, among other cases.

Mr. Braziel has long been a sought-out voice on law enforcement for California's Democratic establishment. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed him to an advisory council tasked with improving interactions between law enforcement and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

In a statement, U.C.L.A. told members of the campus to avoid the area around Royce Quad, the site of the protest encampment, and said law enforcement would continue to be stationed around campus "to promote safety."

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

A correction was made on 

May 5, 2024

: 

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the last name of the U.C.L.A. chancellor. He is Gene Block, not Bock.

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— Jonathan Wolfe Reporting from Los Angeles

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At least three dozen history professors at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville signed an open letter on Sunday condemning "the repression of a peaceful protest of our students" by the police, a day after officers in riot gear clashed with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, spraying chemical irritants and arresting at least 25 people.

In the letter, which was particularly scathing toward President Jim Ryan and Ian Baucom, the provost, the professors also demanded answers about the intensity of the police response, who approved it and why, and whether protesters at the school could be guaranteed the ability to protest peacefully.

The letter is the latest example of faculty and staff members at universities across the country stepping into the tense relationship between administrations and students protesting the war in Gaza, keeping watch over encampments, acting as a liaison between the two groups or pushing to protect the free speech rights of their students. Others, including pro-Israel professors, have sought to build other avenues of support for students.

Faculty members at Emory University and Columbia University are among those who have either taken or pushed for no-confidence votes in their school presidents.

Some professors, faculty and staff members have gotten caught in police sweeps and arrested as law enforcement has moved to evict students and their tent encampments from campuses. Videos of their treatment — including one that showed Annelise Orleck, a 65-year-old labor historian at Dartmouth College, taken to the ground by police — have further intensified the debate over the police response.

"What makes the situation unprecedented is the crackdown on student speech — that's what has sort of marked the departure here and that's what has led faculty to speak out," said Erik Linstrum, a University of Virginia professor who helped draft and circulate the letter. He added, "there's just an extremely aggressive and intolerant response to a certain kind of speech."

The professors were careful to note that they spoke as individuals, rather than on behalf of their departments. And in the letter, they did not take a stance on the pro-Palestinian protest, emphasizing that "whatever our divergent views about the cause for which the protesters were advocating, the virtues of inquiry and debate as well as the importance of critical questioning are fundamental."

Asked to comment on the letter, Brian Coy, a spokesman for the university, pointed to a Saturday statement from Mr. Ryan, which the letter had dismissed as "replete with platitudes, half-truths and evasions."

He added that both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Baucom, the provost, "have been deeply engaged in every step of this episode and spent the day yesterday in the university's command post helping to oversee U.Va.'s response."

"Their charge to every official involved in this matter was to do everything possible to protect the rights of the protesters, as well as the rights and safety of the rest of our community," Mr. Coy said of the two men. "This protest endured peacefully for four days before demonstrators began intentionally flouting university policies and resisting efforts to secure their compliance."

But several professors and students have questioned the school's decision to bring in the police to remove the tents set up on Friday, adding that university policy on whether recreational tents were allowed without a permit was unclear as of Saturday morning. (University officials said on Saturday that the school noticed and updated a document "that inaccurately referenced an exemption to the policy.")

The school has also said that police officers were met with "physical confrontation," which protesters and some observers have denied.

"I did not observe anything at all — when I saw that statement, I was shocked," said Laura Goldblatt, an English and global studies assistant professor who did not sign the history professors' letter but was among the faculty members present on Saturday. She added, "everything they're being charged with only happened when police started to aggress upon them."

In the letter, which is still collecting signatures, the professors invoked not only the principles of the university's founder, Thomas Jefferson, but some of their own lessons to students about nonviolent protests.

Mr. Linstrum, whose area of study has focused on British imperialism and decolonization, said he had not been involved in the protests but headed over to the encampment on Saturday when he heard the police were coming. He said the letter came together as colleagues expressed outrage over seeing some of their students caught in the clash and not receiving a response from some administrators when they pleaded for intervention.

"There was a very clear sense from very early on, even as things were happening yesterday, that some response was imperative — that we couldn't let something like this go unanswered," he said.

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The war in Gaza, combined with tensions over student protests in the past several weeks, had an unmistakable presence at some commencement ceremonies on Sunday.

At Fenway Park in Boston, home of the Boston Red Sox, about 4,000 undergraduate students of Northeastern University and nearly 30,000 attendees gathered for a graduation ceremony. It came at a tense time, just over one week after 98 people were arrested — including 29 students and six faculty or staff members — when police cleared out a pro-Palestinian encampment built on campus last Saturday.

Some students painted Palestinian symbols and flags on the top of their graduation caps. The student speaker for the commencement, Rebecca Bamidele, received cheers from some in the audience after highlighting the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. When the president of Northeastern, Joseph E. Aoun, was introduced, several students began booing with scattered pro-Palestinian chants.

At one point, a student wearing a keffiyeh wrapped around his head and a shirt reading "DIVEST" ran up to the stage before being forcibly removed by the police and dragged out of the seating area.

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The dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Kellee Tsai, addressed the interruption, reading off what appeared to be a prepared note.

"We respect your passion and opinions, we respect your right to voice them, in the appropriate setting," Ms. Tsai said. "This event honors our graduates and distinguished guests and is a celebration of their achievements. Out of respect for your community and honored guests, I ask that you let us continue with this event."

There were no disruptions earlier on Sunday, when thousands of students attended Northeastern's graduate student commencement.

At Ohio State University, there were fewer interruptions as an estimated 70,000 people watched 12,000 students graduate at Ohio Stadium in Columbus. Some student groups had called for demonstrations, but the only protests were quiet individual ones: Several students decorated their mortar boards with pro-Palestinian designs, carried the Palestinian flag and wore keffiyehs.

Melissa Shivers, Ohio State's senior vice president for student life, said in her welcoming address that "disruptions will not be permitted," emphasizing the "not." The emphatic warning earned a roar of applause from the crowd.

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After a week of heightened tensions at the University of Chicago, a school that touts itself as a model for free speech, the campus was relatively quiet on Sunday as students and officials privately negotiated the university's demand to take down a pro-Palestinian encampment.

Several dozen tents remained pitched on the quad on Sunday afternoon, despite university President Paul Alivisatos's message to the campus on Friday that the encampment "cannot continue." A few University of Chicago police officers roamed nearby.

On Friday, some pro-Palestinian demonstrators and counterprotesters fought briefly, and the protest drew a significant presence of university and city police officers, but they did not move to forcibly disband the encampment.

The school's administration had initially taken a permissive approach to the pro-Palestinian protests. The university is home to the Chicago statement, which is a framework for free expression adopted in 2015 that has been embraced by other colleges across the country. The policy allows students to widely express their points of view, with the limitation that they cannot infringe on other people's ability to share their beliefs.

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But Dr. Alivisatos, a chemist who became president of the university in 2021, said in his statement on Friday that the encampment had become a disruption on campus. He accused protesters of vandalizing buildings, blocking walkways and destroying an installation of Israeli flags.

"Protesters are monopolizing areas of the Main Quad at the expense of other members of our community," he said. "Clear violations of policies have only increased."

The university and students have been negotiating in private, and student leaders said the university's compromises have not been acceptable. Christopher Iacovetti, a student who has participated in negotiations, said on Friday in a statement that UChicago United for Palestine "refuses to accept President Alivisatos's repeated condescending offer of a public forum to discuss 'diverse viewpoints' on the genocide, as this is clearly a poor attempt at saving face without material change."

A university spokesman, Gerald McSwiggan, referred on Sunday to a statement from Saturday that said "substantive negotiations with organizers were ongoing."

While the protesters were quiet on Sunday, they were blocking others from walking along a path in the middle of the quad, asking passers-by to walk around instead. They held "teach-ins" on subjects including knowing your rights and the history of the Gaza conflict.

The encampment was almost entirely surrounded by a variety of barriers, including caution tape, plastic mesh barriers, signs on wooden boards and wire fencing.

Also in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute's campus was quiet on Sunday, and there were no signs of protesters. Police said they arrested 68 protesters on Saturday after they refused to move their protest site to a different location.

Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Chicago.

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Los Angeles Police Clear Pro-Palestinian Encampment at U.S.C.

Several dozen people were pushed out of the campus gates of the University of Southern California by police officers in riot gear.

Officer: "Keep going. Keep going. Keep going." Protester: "Who do you protect?" Crowd chanting: "Who will you protect? Who do you protect? Who will you protect? Who do you protect?"

The Los Angeles Police Department and campus police removed a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Southern California early Sunday morning, pushing several dozen people out of the campus gates in the latest crackdown on student protesters there.

The encampment had sprouted up nearly two weeks ago in Alumni Park, a central quad on U.S.C.'s campus in Los Angeles. Shortly after it did, the university called the police to the campus, where they arrested 93 people, but the protest returned soon after. Los Angeles police said on Sunday morning that they had made no arrests while clearing the encampment for the second time.

The university has been in turmoil for several weeks following its decision not to allow its valedictorian, who is Muslim, to speak at graduation. The university cited security concerns, but the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, said she believed she was being silenced. A group that supports the U.S.-Israel relationship had said Ms. Tabassum "openly traffics antisemitic" rhetoric. U.S.C. later canceled its main graduation ceremony altogether, though it will hold a modified celebration this week.

On Sunday, police officers in riot gear entered the campus before dawn, pushing about 25 protesters out of the campus's metal gates. After the police sweep, the quad was littered with blankets, sweatshirts, coolers, snacks and overturned canopies.

Only a few of the tents were still standing, barricaded by wooden pallets and decorated with messages and Palestinian flags. Signs taped to trees carried messages such as, "every Palestinian has a right to live just like you and I," and "disclose, divest, defend."

In recent days, officials had tightened security around the private campus, allowing in only those with a university I.D.

Carol Folt, the U.S.C. president, said in a message to students and others on Friday that "there must be consequences" when people flout campus rules. She said the university had started the disciplinary process for people who had violated laws or campus policies.

Ms. Folt said that although the university valued freedom of expression, the protest had reached a tipping point.

"Free speech and assembly do not include the right to obstruct equal access to campus, damage property, or foment harassment, violence and threats," Ms. Folt wrote. "Nor is anyone entitled to obstruct the normal functions of our university, including commencement."

Protesters viewed the police operation on Sunday as an unnecessary escalation. Among the demonstrators' demands are that the university call for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas, detail its investments and divest from companies that they view as enabling "Israel and U.S. colonialism, apartheid, genocide and violence."

U.S.C.'s move to clear the protest encampment comes as the University of California, Los Angeles, continues to face scrutiny over its handling of protests. Police officers did not intervene for hours at that campus last week as a group of counterprotesters — many of whom wore pro-Israel slogans on their clothing — attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment. The next night, the police arrested about 200 people at the protest there.

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Officers and Pro-Palestinian Protesters Clash at the Art Institute of Chicago

Sixty-eight people were arrested and charged with trespassing by the Chicago police after the museum requested that the demonstrators and their encampment be removed.

Crowd chanting: "We will free Palestine, within our lifetime." "Leave them alone, leave them alone." [expletives] [expletives] [expletives]

The police forcibly dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment at the Art Institute of Chicago museum on Saturday and arrested dozens of protesters, hours after demonstrators had gathered in a garden at the institute and set up tents.

Some of the demonstrators were students at the affiliated School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the museum said in a statement.

The Chicago police said on social media that officers had removed the protesters at the school's request. A Chicago Police spokesman said Sunday that 68 people had been arrested and charged with trespassing.

The protesters set up the encampment in the North Garden, which is part of the Art Institute of Chicago museum, at about 11 a.m. on Saturday, the police said. While encampments at some other U.S. schools during the recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests have stood for days or even weeks before police action, in this case the police said that officers "immediately responded" to maintain the safety of the protesters and the public.

The People's Art Institute, the organizers of the protest, said on social media that the demonstrators' demands included that the institute formally condemn Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, remove any programs that legitimize the "occupation of Palestine" and divest from any individuals or entities that support Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Photos that the group uploaded to social media showed a sign in the encampment that read "Hind's Garden," a reference to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed this year in Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.

The museum said that it had offered protesters an alternate venue and that the school promised students that they would not face academic sanctions or charges if they relocated there.

The statement added that some protesters "surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates."

After about two hours of negotiations, the museum asked officers to remove the protesters, the police said. Officers issued warnings and eventually removed and arrested protesters, the police said.

Videos posted by the organizers showed police forcibly pulling demonstrators out of the human chain they had formed outside the garden while some of the protesters chanted, "Who do you protect? Who do you serve?"

A correction was made on 

May 5, 2024

: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the entity that released a statement about the protest. It was the Art Institute of Chicago museum, not the affiliated School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Pro-Palestinian protesters dismantled their encampment at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Saturday after reaching an agreement with the institution that requires administrators to review a divestment proposal.

Student demonstrators pitched dozens of tents on Vassar's campus, starting on Tuesday. The liberal arts college is a bastion of progressive ideas with a long history of student protest, and Vassar's president said in a statement this week that she hoped to resolve the current disagreement with pro-Palestinian demonstrators peacefully.

In the agreement reached on Saturday, Vassar officials agreed to review a proposal to divest funds from "defense-related investments, such as militarized surveillance and arms production," and to support student fund-raising efforts in support of refugees, according to a statement by the president, Elizabeth H. Bradley.

The divestment language did not mention Israel or the war in the Gaza Strip, as the protesters had in their demands.

But Dr. Bradley said administrators had also agreed to "recruit and support Palestinian students and scholars-at-risk, who have lost educational and professional opportunities" since Oct. 7, a reference to the attacks in Israel by Hamas and its allies that prompted Israel's war in Gaza.

"With these commitments, the college will work to improve our understanding, dialogue about, and educational programming concerning peace and conflict, with focus on Gaza and the Middle East," she said.

The Vassar agreement is one of several in which student protesters have agreed to clear camps in exchange for commitments to discuss institutional investment policies around Israel. Students for Justice in Palestine at Vassar, the group that organized the encampment and negotiated with administrators, said in a statement on social media that it did not feel like a victory.

"We are not happy about the concessions we've made, but our work is not done," the group said in the statement, adding that the administration had not agreed to all of the demands laid out by protesters when they launched the encampment. Those demands included calls for the Vassar administration to release a public statement calling for "an immediate end to Israel's siege on Gaza and an end to U.S. aid for Israel," and to completely boycott Israeli academic institutions, including Vassar-sponsored study abroad programs in Israel.

"At this time, we believe this is the most strategic decision we can make in order to further our efforts for divestment and Palestinian liberation," the students said of the agreement.

They said they would donate the roughly $7,000 they had raised since launching their encampment to families in Gaza, and redistribute any donated supplies to people and organizations in Poughkeepsie.

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Dozens of students walked out of Indiana University's graduation ceremony on Saturday in protest of the war in Gaza, moving instead to a green space on campus where students had been demonstrating for weeks.

More than 6,700 graduates filed into Memorial Stadium in Bloomington, Ind., to receive their diplomas. There were more than 40,000 people in attendance, according to the university. Outside the stadium, the police presence was heavy. Above it, a plane circled towing a banner that said, "let Gaza live."

The students walked out in two groups. The first briefly interrupted the ceremony, leaving and chanting "Shut it down" and "Free, free Palestine" as the school's embattled president, Pamela Whitten, opened the program. The beginning of her remarks was largely drowned out by jeers, but she continued without pausing.

"We have been looking forward to celebrating this moment with you," she said at one point in her brief remarks. She made no mention of the protests.

The second batch of protesters walked out during a speech by the commencement speaker, the tech entrepreneur Scott Dorsey. Protesters chanted "Free, free Palestine" as they filed out. They were drowned out by boos.

Lauren Ulrich, 21, of Rolla, Mo., graduated on Saturday with degrees in journalism and environmental studies. But she did not stay at the commencement ceremony long enough to turn her tassel. Her decision to walk out was one that Ms. Ulrich said she had not made lightly.

"I think sometimes it is scary to do the right thing," she said. "I was scared. But people are dying and there's no way I could not do something about it."

After months of participating in protests and the school's encampment, Ms. Ulrich said she planned to leave campus the day after graduation. She said she was "incredibly sad" but felt that the protest movement had enough supporters to keep up momentum over the summer.

"I think they will get creative in how they will continue it," Ms. Ulrich said.

Liz Capp, 22, of Indianapolis, graduated on Saturday with a degree in therapy and did not participate in the protest. Before the ceremony, she anticipated that there would be some kind of demonstration. But it had not concerned her.

"Everyone has the right to peacefully protest," she said.

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Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered at Kent State University in Ohio on Saturday to protest the war in Gaza, exactly 54 years after a similar campus demonstration ended in four student deaths.

The activists were silent but impossible to miss. They assembled in a semicircle around a stage on Kent State's commons where speakers were commemorating the events of May 4, 1970: James Rhodes, then the governor of Ohio, had called in the National Guard to quell a demonstration against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The troops opened fire. Four people — Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer and Jeffrey Miller — were killed. Several others were wounded.

The campus still bears the scars of the 1970 shooting. Illuminated columns mark the precise spots where the four students were killed, and the tragedy was immortalized in the song "Ohio" performed by the folk-rock quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

In a speech on Saturday to honor the victims, Sophia Swengel, a sophomore and the president of the May 4 Task Force, a group formed in 1975 to keep the students' legacy alive, also acknowledged the protesters. Many of them were hoisting signs calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and military contractors.

"Once again students are taking a stand against bloodshed abroad," she said, referring to Israel's assault on Gaza, which followed the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7. "Much like they did against the Vietnam War back in the '60s," Ms. Swengel added.

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Among the student demands in 1970 were abolishing the R.O.T.C. program, ending the university's ties with police training programs and halting the research and development of the liquid crystal used in heat detectors that guided bombs dropped on Cambodia.

Today, demonstrators at Kent State are asking the university to divest its portfolio of instruments of war. "The university is profiting from war, and they were arguing in '69 and '70 that the university was also profiting from war," said Camille Tinnin, a 31-year-old Ph.D. student studying political science who has met with the school's administration to discuss divestiture.

While Kent State cannot end the war in Gaza, "what the university can control is its own investment portfolio," said Yaseen Shaikh, 19, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine who is about to graduate with a degree in computer science.

Ms. Tinnin and Mr. Shaikh, along with two other students, met with Mark Polatajko, senior vice president for finance and administration for Kent State, on Dec. 4, a meeting confirmed in a statement from Rebecca Murphy, a Kent State spokeswoman. Mr. Polatajko shared the university's investment portfolio with the four activists during the meeting, Ms. Tinnin said in an interview before Saturday's protest. She said activists who scrutinized the portfolio found that it included investments in weapons manufacturers.

On Saturday, in a nod to nationwide student demonstrations against the war in Gaza, Ms. Swengel said that encampments and demonstrations "stand as living, breathing monuments of the willingness of students to stand up against genocide and for what they believe in."

In a statement emailed to reporters, Ms. Murphy said the university "upholds the First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly for all."

"Consistent with our core values, we encourage open dialogue and respectful civil discourse in an inclusive environment," she added.

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Pro-Palestinian Encampment Cleared at the University of Virginia

Hundreds of protesters were met with police in riot gear on the campus in Charlottesville, Va., and some were arrested.

Crowd: "Shame on you!" Officer: "Do not touch her!" "Turn around and walk that way."

The police arrested at least 25 pro-Palestinian protesters on Saturday at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville after aggressively clearing demonstrators off a university lawn and at one point using chemical irritants on dozens of people.

Like hundreds of students, faculty and staff across the country, students in Charlottesville protested this week in the heart of their campus, calling for the university to divest from Israel, weapons manufacturers and companies with ties to Israeli institutions, and to pledge to protect students' right to peacefully protest. Tents were set up Friday, but cleared the next day.

In a news release, the university said the protesters had violated school policy on Friday by setting up tents on the lawn and by using megaphones. But the encampment was not forcibly removed then, the statement read, "given continued peaceful behavior and the presence of young children at the demonstration site, and due to heavy rain Friday night."

Jim Ryan, the university president, wrote in a letter to the campus, "I sincerely wish it were otherwise, but this repeated and intentional refusal to comply with reasonable rules intended to secure the safety, operations and rights of the entire university community left us with no other choice than to uphold the neutral application and enforcement of those rules."

By Saturday afternoon, protesters were met with police officers in riot gear. At one point, the police used chemical irritants against the crowd to get people to disperse.

The university said it was not immediately clear how many of the 25 who were arrested were affiliated with the school. All were charged with trespassing, according to a police official.

"Shame on you, shame on you!" chanted a crowd of hundreds of students and Charlottesville locals as a combined force of dozens of officers from at least three law enforcement agencies pushed them into the street in front of the university's Rotunda building.

"This is absolutely obscene," said Colden Dorfman, a third-year student majoring in computer science, who faced down the cordon as the police sprayed chemical irritants. "This is insanity. Everyone came here with peaceful intentions. I'm ashamed that this is what our police force is being used for."

Some protesters and their supporters directly questioned the magnitude of the police response, particularly compared with the school's response in 2017 to hundreds of white nationalists marching on campus with torches.

"What did you do when the K.K.K. came to town?" protesters could be heard yelling, as the police moved to push them into University Avenue, which had been blocked off to traffic.

Even as it began to rain, hundreds of people remained for hours before dispersing. Some people headed to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, where a new protest was forming.

— Jackson Landers, Hawes Spencer and Emily Cochrane Jackson Landers and Hawes Spencer reported from Charlottesville, Va.

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The University of Mississippi is investigating the conduct of at least one student after counterprotesters directed racist taunts at pro-Palestinian protesters this week, school officials said.

In a letter to students, faculty and staff members on Friday evening, Glenn F. Boyce, the university chancellor, said the school had begun to investigate one student and may look at more.

"From yesterday's demonstration, university leaders are aware that some statements made were offensive, hurtful and unacceptable, including actions that conveyed hostility and racist overtones," Mr. Boyce wrote. He did not identify the student, citing privacy law.

He added, "To be clear, people who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus."

Video captured by the Mississippi Free Press and the Daily Mississippian showed a crowd of white male students jeering and taunting a lone Black woman standing in front of the protest on campus, with one man making monkey gestures and hooting at her. Another video compilation showed the men yelling profane and derogatory insults.

The few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters appeared widely outnumbered by the crowd of counterdemonstrators, though university officials said no one was arrested or injured.

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican, approvingly captioned a separate video of the demonstrations that showed the counterprotesters singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" over the protest chants, though he made no mention of the other video clips that soon circulated. And former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, also shared a separate video on social media from the protests where the men could be heard chanting "we want Trump."

The university has a painful history of racist episodes, and, for some, the videos evoked the mob and deadly riots that sought to stop the enrollment of James Meredith, the first Black student at the school, in 1962. And while the school has shed some of its Confederate imagery, in 2012, two students were arrested after racial slurs were chanted at a protest over former President Barack Obama's re-election. In 2014, a noose was placed around a statue of Mr. Meredith.

"It is important to acknowledge our challenging history, and incidents like this can set us back," Mr. Boyce wrote. "It is one reason why we do not take this lightly and cannot let the unacceptable behavior of a few speak for our institution or define us."