As student protesters on other campuses await potential criminal charges for engaging in unruly demonstrations, at least one university leader is stepping up and offering to — literally — bail out the students arrested on his campus.

At Emerson University at Boston, President Jay Bernhardt is asking the district attorney not to pursue charges against the 118 protesters arrested last week after camping out in tents on his campus for weeks. He said the school will not bring disciplinary charges against the students. 

Emerson will “continue to be supportive in multiple ways,” Mr. Bernhardt said in a campus-wide email, “sending staff to all the precincts and posting bail for arrested students, canceling and modifying classes so our community could process what had occurred, and providing additional care and support for our community to heal.” 

Mr. Bernhardt added that the board of trustees is weighing the protesters’ demands for financial divestment from Israel. The school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine seems to wield some power on campus, as its Instagram account has more than 6,000 followers, while Emerson’s undergraduate enrollment is only about 4,000 students.

Emerson’s statement “capitulates to the most extreme voices and rewards their disruptive conduct,” the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement. He is demanding that Mr. Bernhardt “reverse this decision” and calls upon “the Suffolk district attorney to enforce the law.”

The protection of protesters at Emerson stands in sharp contrast to the crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations by schools like the University of Florida. After an encampment surfaced there, its president, former Senator Ben Sasse, asserted that the school “is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

After student protestors and “outside agitators” participated in violent protests and unlawful conduct at Columbia University and The City College of New York last week, 282 arrests were made by the New York Police Department. It is up to the New York district attorney to determine the next course of action based on the severity of the violation, misdemeanor, or felony committed (like burglary). 

Sources in the police department tell the Sun that 192 summonses were issued, so those individuals have a return date at court to answer to the summons in front of a judge.