The police arrived in force at dawn on Saturday with orders to clear “infiltrators” from the Gaza war protest camp at Northeastern University in Boston.
Within an hour, over 100 people, including students and non-students, had been arrested, and many of their tents had been flattened or removed.
A large counter-protest then formed as officers from the state police in tactical gear hauled off their suspects. The scene was one of confrontation and chaos.
Northeastern campus administrators said they had to call police because outsiders’ infiltration “led to a clear escalation in tensions” and an antisemitic slur was heard, which the protesters deny.
As the campus protests stretch into a second week across the US, Northeastern is among many colleges that have now taken the decision to crack down hard and refused calls to divest from companies involved in Israel’s military.
On April 18, Columbia in New York cancelled the first camp, citing “a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.” Since then, they have ignored protester demands and announced suspensions for some students.
The student response has escalated, with dozens occupying and damaging a university building on Tuesday, prompting officials to threaten expulsion. On Tuesday night, police moved onto campus in force at the university’s request to end the occupation.
Other colleges, however, have shown that confrontation, chaos and escalation can be avoided.
Northwestern University, located just outside Chicago, has a completely different story than Northeastern.
Its protest camp appeared on Thursday morning. University administrators responded by banning tents and calling in campus police.
They refrained from calling in state police, and no arrests were made, and the campus officers eventually left.
On Monday, administrators announced a deal: protesters would be allowed to stay until the end of classes on June 1 if they removed their tents and limited participation to students and others affiliated with the university.
They stopped short of agreeing to stop investments in Israeli companies and arms manufacturers, but agreed to restart an investment committee and increase transparency over its approximately $13.7bn (£11bn) endowment.
Northwestern also promised to fund places for two Palestinian faculty members and five Palestinian students.
At the moment, it appears that a truce is in place.
Northwestern and Northeastern are both private colleges located in left-leaning, liberal states. So why were their responses to essentially the same situation and demands so different?
According to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian at the University of New Orleans, pro-Palestine protests have not reached the fever pitch or level of violence seen during anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, when some students called for the US government’s overthrow.
She said that in some cases, however, calling in outside police forces had dramatically raised the stakes.
“Nearly all American universities have campus police who are full-time, uniformed and can make arrests,” she said.
Scenes of police clashes with demonstrators have been widely shared on social media, and outsiders and onlookers may even become involved in the camp closures.
Professors at Emory University in Atlanta, including Noelle McAfee, chair of the philosophy department, were arrested by municipal and state police last week.
Ms McAfee told the BBC that she was observing what she described as a peaceful protest when police started to move in and the protesters began to move.
She began filming police hitting a protester, she said, and noticed chemical irritants in the air.
“It was really disturbing. I started yelling ‘stop it’, and I was trying to take a video. One cop stood up and told me to step back… I froze in place.” She was then arrested.
Hundreds of other arrests have been reported at universities all around the country, even as other disputes have been resolved without law enforcement.
On Tuesday, protesters and administrators reached an agreement at Brown University, similar to Northwestern’s, which promised to hold a vote on divestment from weapons manufacturers in the autumn.
And a camp at the University of California, Berkeley, the epicenter of the 1960s protest movement, has been mostly peaceful and left alone.
Political pressure
According to Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, political pressure, including from high-ranking members of Congress, forced some administrators to make potentially risky moves that, in some cases, backfired.
“Increasingly, college presidents are trying to show Congress and the world that they’re tough enough to be college presidents,” he said. “And that is so reminiscent of the late 60s, with lawmakers threatening college presidents and insisting that they cannot coddle anti-war student protesters.”
The pressure can be more acute on leaders at private universities, he said, because publicly funded universities are obliged to provide students First Amendment protections.
“At private schools, they don’t necessarily have to offer free speech rights,” Mr Paulson said. “So they can’t tell legislators that their hands are tied and they can’t do anything. They have to navigate these protests strictly with their own policies.”
Time may be on the side of campus administrators.
Mr Paulson stated that the majority of students are not involved in the protests and are simply trying to get through the school year, though graduation ceremonies could be another protest target. Some universities have already cancelled commencement ceremonies or are considering doing so.
If history is any guide, said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, “we are going to have an intense next week or two until the spring semester ends”.