(NewsNation) — Pro-Palestinian protests continued at colleges around the country Tuesday, as university officials attempt to defuse what they say is growing tension on their campuses.
Columbia University announced Tuesday that most classes will be held in a hybrid manner for the rest of the spring semester, and it upped security amid the demonstrations, NewsNation local affiliate PIX11 writes. The campus locked its gate to anyone without a school ID.
“Safety is our highest priority as we strive to support our students’ learning and all the required academic operations,” the university’s provost, Angela V. Olinto, and chief operating officer, Cas Holloway, said in a statement late Monday, per PIX11.
Student protesters set up tent encampments at Columbia to protest Israel’s military action in Gaza and demand the school divest from companies that they say “profit from Israeli apartheid.” Over 100 people were arrested last Thursday, sparking protests at other colleges in solidarity.
On Monday, over 150 people were arrested in connection to demonstrations at New York University. NYPD officers stepped in, the department told PIX11, after the university had sent them a written request. An NYU spokesperson claimed that protesters behaved in a “disorderly, disruptive and antagonizing manner.”
One student who said he supports peaceful protests is sad to see what’s happening.
“The people who were protesting were students and also faculty,” he told PIX11. “Protests are part of college culture. Ever since the 1960s… It’s all part of college culture, so I think it’s very important that we stand up for our rights.”
Some faculty and university staff at NYU stood in front of demonstrators to safeguard them from police. That morning, a similar scene at Yale University in Connecticut took place, with 45 protesters arrested after three days of demonstrations.
“People have a First Amendment right to free speech and to protest, and New Haven has a long history of supporting people’s ability to peacefully express their views,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said in a statement after the arrests. “However, it’s also important that protests are conducted in a safe and orderly manner — and, in this situation, that Yale University students protest in a manner and place that is also respectful of New Haven residents.”
Hundreds of NYU students on Tuesday took part in a planned walkout.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, at an afternoon press conference, said he’s meeting with heads of universities in the state to help de-escalate the situation, adding that he’s concerned about the influence of “outside agitators” coming in to inflame the situation.
Encampments could also be seen throughout the week at the University of California at Berkeley; California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Michigan; Emerson College and Tufts University.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, administrators decided to close the campus through Wednesday, while Berkeley put out a statement saying that with three weeks left in the current semester, it has no plans to change the school’s investment policies.
Some students have said they have concerns over the protests, arguing that some criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitism. Protesters have said, though, that those being antisemitic do not represent them and pointed out that many Jewish students are joining them in their cause. Some student demonstrators held signs saying “Jews for Free Palestine” or “Jews for Palestine.”
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine said in a statement Sunday that the “inflammatory individuals” making antisemitic comments do not represent them.
“We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand vigilant against non-students attempting to disrupt the solidarity being forged among students — Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, Black and pro-Palestinian classmates and colleagues who represent the full diversity of our country,” they wrote.
At a news conference Tuesday afternoon featuring Jewish Columbia students arrested and suspended at protests, speakers said they have been victims of antisemitism because of their pro-Palestine views.
Students outlined three demands in a news release before the conference. They are asking Columbia to divest all its finances from corporations profiting from “Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine; provide financial transparency on all its investments; and ensure amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for partaking in the movement.”
One protester, Soph Askanase, criticized the media for portraying the Jewish people as a “monolith, and erasing the stories of the thousands of us fighting for a free Palestine.”
Askanase said those who made the encampments are “committed to fighting all forms of oppression together, knowing that antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians, are all cut from the same cloth.”
Another protestor, Sarah Borus, said as she was taken away in zipties by police, she “walked in the path of Jewish ancestors” such as her great-grandfather, who lived through the 1905 Russian Revolution and experienced the “constant threat of pogroms and state violence.”
Borus, like other protestors, said she lost housing and was not allowed in any dining halls after her suspension.
Despite what happened to her, Borus said as an anti-Zionist Jew, “I cannot in good faith ignore the checkpoints, the bombs and the settler violence that Palestinians are subject to every single day.”
Marianne Hirsch, a professor at Columbia who has studied and written about the Holocaust and is the daughter of survivors herself, said she is “distressed” to see how antisemitism is being weaponized to “shut down academic freedom, free debate, critical thinking and the openness and the independence of higher education and universities in the United States right now.”
She noted the Palestinian protests are a political movement, criticizing the state of Israel.
“It is not directed against an entity which is Jewishness, of a faith which is Jewishness,” Hirsch emphasized while pointing out that there have been “anti-Muslim” and “anti-Palestinian” incidents that have gone underreported.
As a Palestinian student on campus, Mahmoud Khalil says he has not felt safe for months and that Columbia has not acknowledged the pain of the Palestinian community on campus. Askanase also mentioned feeling “extremely unsafe” on campus after being sprayed with a noxious chemical at a protest earlier this year, which led to their friends being hospitalized.
“We believe that the struggle to achieve Palestinian and Jewish liberation is intertwined and goes hand in hand,” Khalil told reporters. “After all, this is a movement of equality, social justice and liberation for Palestine and the rest of the world.”
During Monday’s demonstration, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, which says on X that it works in coalition with the university’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and over 110 other student groups, posted pictures of a Passover Seder it held at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
Student newspaper The Columbia Spectator reported demonstrators displayed a sign saying “Pesach Means Solidarity and Liberation,” distributed handmade Haggadah, and prayed in Hebrew.
“We represent our community. We don’t represent the external community who may be mobilizing outside of the gates for us,” one student protestor at Columbia told NewsNation. “We align with full and total divestment out of Palestine. We refuse to be complicit. We refuse for our tuition dollars to be used to fund the current occupation of Palestine, and that is what we’re aligning ourselves with.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said Tuesday that Biden administration officials are monitoring the situation closely.
While the president respects and supports “every American’s right to peacefully protest,” Bates added that “calls for violence, physical intimidation, hateful antisemitic rhetoric” are unacceptable.
NewsNation’s Kelley Connors, Emiliana Wood, Cassie Buchman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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