The interim president and provost of the University of Pennsylvania will host a “community listening session” on campus Thursday as encampments and protests over Israel’s treatment of Gaza have surfaced on college campuses elsewhere, resulting in arrests.

“Our campus is deeply impacted by external events, as the past months have demonstrated all too clearly,” interim president J. Larry Jameson wrote in a message to the campus community Monday evening. “We are and must continue taking action that brings us together to meet the challenges of this time and to remain true to our educational purpose.”

The hour-long campus listening session is not open to the public or press, Penn said. Attendees need a Penn ID to attend, Jameson wrote.

Students, faculty, and staff will be invited “to share their thoughts on the impacts of the conflict in the Middle East on our campus,” Jameson wrote.

So far Penn and other local campuses including Temple, Rutgers, and Haverford are not experiencing disruptive protests, arrests, and encampments, similar to those at Columbia, Yale, and other colleges in the last week.

At Swarthmore College, a group of students led by its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Swarthmore Palestine Coalition set up several tents on Parrish Beach by Clothier Hall, according to an email sent to the campus Tuesday afternoon by acting co-presidents Tomoko Sakomura and Rob Goldberg. (President Valerie Smith is on sabbatical this semester.)

“We will work with the student organizers of this latest act of protest to try to bring the situation to a peaceful conclusion, but this may take some time to resolve,” they wrote. “In the meantime, we expect that students and their allies will protest peacefully and be mindful of how their actions might affect other members of our community.”

About 20 tents were up by Tuesday night with about 25 students. Ragad, 20, a sophomore peace and conflict studies major from Philadelphia, who is Palestinian, said the number of students protesting has fluctuated throughout the day with the peak at about 200.

“We won’t move until our demands are met,” said Ragad, who asked that her last name not be used because of concerns about harassment. Among the demands is a call for Swarthmore to “divest” from Israeli investments, as students on other campuses have insisted. Workshops and teach-ins will be held at the encampment, she said. Some professors have visited the encampment, too, Ragad said.

“We’re all in this together,” she said.

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