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Fear is widespread on American campuses, researcher says

Professor Robert Pape said “the feelings of fear on college campuses are more widespread and more intense than we have known.”

By DAVID COHEN

A University of Chicago professor said Sunday that research shows that students on college campuses are more fearful than ever before.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Professor Robert Pape told host Margaret Brennan: “The big thing we learned is that the feelings of fear on college campuses are more widespread and more intense than we have known.”

The research at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats involved 5,000 students at hundreds of colleges.

“Overall, 56% of Jewish students report feeling in personal danger,” Pape told Brennan. “Close behind, 52% of Muslim students report feeling in personal danger. And 16% of all students who are not Jewish and not Muslim.”

Pape said the students were simply reacting to what they’re seeing on their campuses.

“What they are reporting is,” he said. “observing acts of physical violence and intimidation right in front of them. Jewish students are seeing Jewish buildings attacked. Muslim students are seeing people ... counterattack against Muslims. The students that are not Jewish and not Muslim, they’re just seeing everybody getting, you know, attacked.”

He also cited “protest chants.”

The research was conducted in December-January after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel and the start of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but well before the latest wave of campus protests connected to the Israel-Hamas war. These recent protests have triggered complaints, particularly but not exclusively by Jewish students, about hateful and intimidating rhetoric.

When pressed by Brennan, Pape said that what was needed was an even-handed approach to reducing the ugliness, rather than one-sided political grandstanding by lawmakers.

“You need to have a more thoughtful approach to calming tensions that go beyond crowd control, and that are not simply, one side is right, everybody else is wrong,” said the professor of political science whose books include works delving into terrorism.

He said the Israel-Hamas war clearly caught people in the United States by surprise, so there was no plan really in place to deal with fallout in America.

Americans often associate campus protests with the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, but Pape noted that the era was long enough ago to not offer a playbook for deescalating tensions at the nation’s schools.

“Almost no leader who’s running either our government or university was involved in the 1960s,” he told Brennan. “And the issues we’re dealing with today are new. They’re not completely new, but I would say, like, 90 degrees new, and that is what we have to come to grips with. And not just assume everything was fine before so they will just fade away and they will be fine again.”