Three dozen pro-Palestine protesters arrested at Ohio State

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Ohio State University police and the Ohio State Highway Patrol arrested three dozen people Thursday night for staging a pro-Palestine encampment on campus – carrying out what is likely the highest number of protest-related arrests there since the Vietnam War. 

After hours of peaceful protest on the South Oval behind the Ohio Union, dozens of officers clad in riot gear descended on the crowd, handcuffing protesters and carrying them to Franklin County sheriff’s buses parked nearby. Several protesters were arrested earlier in the day for pitching tents on campus, but police watched for hours – occasionally issuing threats of arrest – when hundreds of protesters returned in the evening.

The protesters, led by student activist groups, staged the encampment as both a solidarity measure with other pro-Palestinian campus encampments across the country and as a call on the university to disclose – and divest – its investments in Israeli companies amid Israel’s war in Gaza. Ohio State has repeatedly said state law prevents it from divesting in Israeli assets and has declined to disclose its level of investments. 

Both Ohio State police and President Ted Carter requested the state patrol’s assistance Thursday night, university spokesperson Ben Johnson said. University police had been coordinating with state police before Carter requested the reinforcements.

Since Tuesday, about 40 people, including students and faculty, have been arrested on Ohio State’s campus while participating in pro-Palestine protests. Ohio State has cited rules prohibiting camping, overnight events, and disruption to university business as reasons for the arrests. The university released a statement shortly after midnight saying that protesters “exercised their First Amendment rights for several hours” before being told to leave. 

“Individuals who refused to leave after multiple warnings were arrested and charged with criminal trespass,” the statement read. “Arrests are not an action that we take lightly, and we appreciate the support of all of our law enforcement partners to disperse the encampment for the safety of our university community. We have always, and always will, take the action that is in the best interest of our community.”

Thirty-six people -- including 16 students -- were charged related to the Thursday night protest, Johnson confirmed Friday afternoon. Franklin County Municipal Court personnel said they will be released without needing to post bail and arraigned in the coming days.

Between chants to “Free Palestine” and demands that Ohio State divest from Israeli assets, many protesters took to the middle of the group to pray. Videos from reporters and protest attendees showed officers close in on the crowd, struggling to break through layers of protesters to get to rip apart the tents in the middle.

Saphia Abdelsalam is an Ohio State student whose family is in Gaza. She told NBC4 that the protest was peaceful and did not warrant the level of law enforcement response.

“We just wanted to be peaceful and stand our ground, and then they made it not peaceful,” Abdelsalam said. “They started attacking and started arresting.”

As Johnson acknowledged on behalf of the university on Wednesday, protests happen regularly at Ohio State. He said protests happening amid finals and close to academic spaces are treated differently than other protests on campus.

But Jill Galvan, an associate professor of English at Ohio State, said it was shocking all the same to see protesters arrested on university grounds.

“I've been here for a very long time,” Galvan said. “This is more horrifying than anything I've ever seen here."

A handful of protesters have been arrested on Ohio State’s campus in recent decades, according to an archival review of The Lantern, Ohio State’s student newspaper, and other university publications. But the last time protesters were arrested en masse appears to have happened more than 50 years ago.

In April 1970, a 2,000-person protest against racism at Ohio State ended in 1,200 members of the National Guard being deployed to campus. Nearly 50 arrests and as many injuries were reported in an April 1970 Lantern article.

Before that, in 1968, 34 students were arrested -- and expelled by Ohio State -- after hundreds of students protested against racist university policies and policing inside the main administration building. Ohio State invited several of the former students, many of whom were leaders of the Black Student Union, to campus in 2018 to commemorate the protest.

Around the same time in 1968, about two dozen anti-Vietnam War protesters were arrested at two on-campus Navy recruitment events days apart. Nearly all were charged with criminal trespass. 

After the arrests, then-President Novice Fawcett released a statement that said the police action was appropriate and in line with university policy.

“Numerous times during the past year the University has announced that whereas peaceful and orderly demonstrating on the campus would be permitted, under no circumstances would interference with the operation of the University be tolerated,” Fawcett’s statement read, according to a March 1968 edition of Ohio State University Monthly magazine.

Bern Anderson was a graduate student in philosophy when he and 10 others were arrested for protesting military recruiters in Hitchcock Hall. In May 1968, he told The Lantern the arrests were “A clear-cut case of the University acting in bad faith.”

“An Administration which claims to be sensitive to the needs and desires of the students and then cries student irresponsibility after students protest is not setting a good example and does not speak well for future student-administration relations,” Anderson said.