A year ago, when masked pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, the sole public safety officer who was present left the scene after notifying her supervisor. On Wednesday, demonstrators who swarmed into the main library on campus were met with a far different response.
The roughly four-hour occupation of Butler Library showed how much has changed about the way Columbia, and schools across the nation, are dealing with disruptive pro-Palestinian protests. This time, unlike during the occupation a year earlier, Columbia’s public safety officers intervened aggressively, pushing some demonstrators to the ground, as they worked to keep the occupation under control and end it, video posted on social media showed.
The officers blocked dozens of protesters from leaving one room at the library and locked the front doors of the imposing building with handcuffs to keep others from shoving their way in. Using powers newly granted to them, they arrested several demonstrators before the New York police arrived to finish the arrests.
But it wasn’t only Columbia officials who had adopted a tougher posture. The group at the heart of demonstrations during the past year, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has grown smaller but more hard-line in its rhetoric.
The university’s newly assertive response satisfied many of those who were harshly critical of Columbia’s management of last year’s protests, including the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, which has cut more than $400 million in research funding from Columbia, citing what it called the university’s failure to protect Jewish students. Columbia is negotiating with the task force in hopes of having the federal dollars restored.
The task force said it was “encouraged” by the way Claire Shipman, who has been Columbia’s acting president for less than two months, handled the occupation and called in the police, a rare occurrence on the campus before city police officers were summoned to end pro-Palestinian encampments and the Hamilton Hall occupation.
“She has stepped in to lead Columbia at a critical juncture and has met the moment with fortitude and conviction,” the task force wrote .
But the university’s forceful response disturbed those who felt that unarmed demonstrators should not be met with aggression. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which organized the occupation, sent out messages during the action saying that despite physical aggression by public safety officers, they had not wavered.
“We refuse to show our IDs under militarized arrest,” they wrote. “We refuse to go down quietly.”
Two public safety officers were injured in a crowd surge during the afternoon, Ms. Shipman said in a statement, praising the officers’ efforts. Several protesters were also injured, student activists said.
“Suppressing peaceful protests, like sit-ins at the library aimed at ending complicity in the ongoing massacres of Palestinians, is immoral and flaunts the erosion of civil liberties in our country,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of CAIR-NY, a group that advocates for Muslims.
The police said Thursday that they had been called in by Columbia to clear trespassers from the building and had arrested about 80 people during the operation to clear the library. It was not immediately clear how many were students, nor what charges they would face.
Demonstrators vandalized the library with graffiti on walls and furniture, including slogans like “Learn from Palestine” and “Columbia will burn for the martyrs,” according to social media posts from alumni. Facilities workers labored through the night to repair it. The building was reopened on Thursday morning to allow students to study for final exams.
In the past year, the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia has splintered, under pressure from administrators and federal officials.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest last year attracted an array of antiwar protesters to a nearly two-week-long encampment that, while disruptive, held dance classes and a Passover Seder in addition to revolutionary talks. Some Jewish students, however, said they were blocked from entering the encampment and felt threatened by the demonstrators.
The group has since become more extreme in its rhetoric. Its leaders, who do not publicize their identities, now publish manifestoes supporting armed resistance by groups that the U.S. authorities consider terrorist organizations.
Demonstrators renamed the library on Wednesday for Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist who was accused by Israel of planning a large-scale attack and was killed by Israeli forces in 2017. In contrast, the Hamilton Hall demonstrators, who were an autonomous offshoot of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, named that building after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Ms. Shipman, who was in Butler Library when the police arrived, wrote that she felt Wednesday’s demonstrators had crossed a clear line “between legitimate protest and actions that endanger others and disrupt the fundamental work of the university.” She said she expected that Columbia’s disciplinary procedures would reflect the severity of the actions.
Columbia is moving the judicial board that oversees protest discipline from the supervision of the university senate, a faculty-led body, to the provost’s office. This is in part to meet a demand from the Trump administration to tighten control of discipline.
The university took nearly 11 months to expel some of the students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation, putting it in the cross-hairs of the Trump administration. Whether the judicial process will move more quickly under the provost’s supervision is not clear.
The stakes are also higher for international students involved in protest activity, who now risk not only suspension but possible deportation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on social media Wednesday night that the State Department would “review the visa status of the trespassers and vandals who took over Columbia University’s library.”
“Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation,” he added.
But such a step would require information sharing between the New York Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is limited by city rules. Columbia says it has also sought to protect student information from ICE.
The demonstrators who took over the library Wednesday made different tactical choices from the protesters who took over Hamilton Hall. Unlike last year, when the takeover happened near midnight, the protesters this year pushed their way into a library full of hundreds of students studying, with plenty of security on hand.
Security officers were able to isolate most of the protesters in Butler’s soaring main reading room and asked them repeatedly to show their identification if they wanted to leave the room and avoid arrest. Most of them refused, Ms. Shipman wrote, even after professors tried to diffuse the situation.
Joseph Howley, a member of the university senate who has been highly critical of Columbia’s response to past protests, said that the clear implementation of a rule already on the books at Columbia requiring protesters to identify themselves when asked seemed a “perfectly reasonable implementation of that policy.”
“There’s a lot that happened last night that I’m not happy about,” he said, particularly the physical force used by security officers, “but that seems to me to be pretty straightforward.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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