SU chancellor says nationwide demonstrations after Oct. 7 ‘encouraged from Iran’
Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud said nationwide demonstrations following the Oct. 7 attack were "encouraged from Iran." Syverud spoke at an Oct. 28 panel hosted by Alums for Campus Fairness. Joe Zhao | Senior Staff Photographer
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UPDATE: This post was updated at 5:00 p.m. on November 2, 2025.
Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud suggested during an Oct. 28 panel in Washington, D.C., that Iran may have influenced the wave of pro-Palestine protests across college campuses after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the ongoing war in Gaza.
Syverud, who will leave SU at the end of this school year, joined two other university chancellors for the discussion. Hosted by Alums for Campus Fairness, the panel focused on how they’ve worked to combat antisemitism since the start of the Israel-Hamas War.
The chancellor’s remarks centered broadly on how SU administrators handled demonstrations after Oct. 7, including the 16-day Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Syverud also said he believes many of the demonstrators in the GSE weren’t SU students.
“When things happened — that I really believe were encouraged from Iran — it did not have the involvement of very many, if any, of our own students,” Syverud said.
SU’s encampment ran from April 29 to May 15 on Shaw Quadrangle, in the weeks leading up to that year’s commencement. The encampment voluntarily disbanded shortly after administrators responded to demonstrators’ demands, citing existing university policies.
In a Sunday statement to The Daily Orange, Sarah Scalese, SU’s Vice President for Communications, wrote that Syverud’s remarks addressed national trends in on-campus demonstrations and challenges universities face in “balancing free expression with community safety.”
“When he noted that ‘very few’ Syracuse University students were involved, he was referring to the proportion of participants in the encampment relative to the overall student population,” Scalese wrote. “It is true that the encampment on our campus did include individuals from outside the university, including community members, activists and other non-students.”
The panel aimed to contextualize how universities can address rising rates of antisemitism following Oct. 7 and spoke about the nationwide encampments. The guests were broadly critical of the protests that followed the Oct. 7 attack, saying they fueled antisemitic attitudes.
Other administrators in attendance included Chancellor Andrew D. Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Chancellor Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt University. Ben Jacobs, a journalist at Politico, moderated the conversation.
During the panel, Syverud discussed how he approached the GSE and the protests that followed Oct. 7, saying the university had to “deal with new things every step of the way.” He said that, in particular, the administration had to balance students’ rights to free speech with their sense of safety and security.
Syverud said while the encampment movement “took a while” to get to SU, issues regarding the speech of student protestors emerged quickly in the wake of the attack. He said the university restricted speech that created a “hostile environment” for Jewish students, per Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Meghan Hendricks | Daily Orange File Photo
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment gathered on the Shaw Quadrangle for 16 days in May 2024. On Oct. 28, Syverud said the encampment was mostly made up of non-students.
On Dec. 15, 2023, administrators confronted demonstrators conducting a pro-Palestine “study-in” in the Schine Student Center and asked them to take down a poster that read “Globalize the Intifada.”
“What we did have in the early days in Syracuse, and early weeks, was an evolving set of rules of what Title VI meant. What created a hostile environment?” Syverud said. “I was not prepared to decide whether I needed to launch into doing something when people chanted, ‘From the river, to the sea.’”
In this case, Syverud said SU determined that the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” fulfilled the standard for creating a hostile environment, though it did permit “from the river, to the sea.”
Syverud also said that, after the encampment demonstration began, he said some protestors wore masks to “avoid accountability” — also saying many were outside local activists rather than SU students.
After the encampment, seven SU students faced disciplinary action for alleged conduct code violations.
SU did not immediately respond to The Daily Orange’s request for comment.
This story will be updated with additional reporting.
