AP (“Police clear pro-Palestinian protesters from Columbia University while clashes break out at UCLA“):
The pro-Palestinian demonstration that paralyzed Columbia University ended in dramatic fashion, with police carrying riot shields bursting into a building that protesters took over the previous night and making dozens of arrests. On the other side of the country, clashes broke out early Wednesday between dueling groups at the University of California, Los Angeles.
New York City officers entered Columbia’s campus late Tuesday after the university requested help, according to a statement released by a spokesperson. A tent encampment on the school’s grounds was cleared, along with Hamilton Hall where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window.
Protesters calling on the Ivy League university to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the war in Gaza seized the hall about 20 hours earlier.
“After the University learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” the school said. “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing. We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”
[…]
Meanwhile, violence broke out at UCLA overnight between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters. Police wearing face shields formed a line but did not immediately intervene.
People threw chairs and shoved and kicked one another. Some armed with sticks beat others. Before the police arrived, a group piled on one person who lay on the ground, kicking and beating them until others pulled them out of the scrum.
“Horrific acts of violence occurred at the encampment tonight and we immediately called law enforcement for mutual aid support,” Mary Osako, a senior UCLA official, told the campus newspaper the Daily Bruin.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spoke to the university’s chancellor and said police would respond to the school’s request, according to a post on social media platform X from her spokesperson Zach Seidl.
The clashes took place just outside a tent encampment, where pro-Palestinian protesters erected barricades and plywood for protection — and counter-protesters tried to pull them down.
[…]
Police have swept through other campuses across the U.S. over the last two weeks, leading to confrontations and more than 1,000 arrests. In rarer instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.
Just blocks away from Columbia, at The City College of New York, demonstrators were in a standoff with police outside the public college’s main gate. Video posted on social media by news reporters on the scene late Tuesday showed officers putting some people to the ground and shoving others as they cleared people from the street and sidewalks. Many detained protesters were driven away on city buses.
After police arrived, officers lowered a Palestinian flag atop the City College flagpole, balled it up and tossed it to the ground before raising an American flag.
Brown University, another member of the Ivy League, reached an agreement Tuesday with protesters on its Rhode Island campus. Demonstrators said they would close their encampment in exchange for administrators taking a vote to consider divestment from Israel in October. The compromise appeared to mark the first time a U.S. college has agreed to vote on divestment in the wake of the protests.
NPR (“New York police have cleared Hamilton Hall and the encampment at Columbia University“) adds:
New York police arrested dozens of people on two campuses Tuesday night after officers cleared out a Columbia University building occupied by protesters.
At Columbia, New York police used a massive armored vehicle to push a bridge into a window of Hamilton Hall, the building demonstrators began occupying the previous night. Officers then streamed over the bridge into a window — quickly retaking the building.
Elsewhere in New York City, police made dozens of arrests at The City College of New York, less than a mile from Columbia. A large number of students were hauled away.
[…]
Early Tuesday morning, protesters hid in Hamilton Hall until it closed and let other protesters in. There were two security guards present, who Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the school released from the building.
“We believe that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University,” she wrote in a letter requesting the New York Police Department’s assistance.
Protesters then chained the doors, used furniture as barricades and used rope to have people outside the building transfer supplies to them, tactics Rebecca Weiner, NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said were taught to other participants.
Some of the protesters have been on the New York Police Department’s radar for years, Weiner said at a press conference Tuesday.
“I’ve been saying for days, if not weeks now, that we should have been a peaceful protest,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said. “It has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators. We were extremely cautious about releasing our intel/information because our goal was to ensure the safety of our students, the faculty, and without any destruction of property.”
Adams said he would not let the occupation turn into a “violent spectacle that serves no purpose,” and urged parents to contact their children to get them to disperse.
NYT (“Columbia Said It Had ‘No Choice’ but to Call the Police“):
Exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation at Columbia University was violently cleared by the New York Police Department, hundreds of police officers moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday night to quell a different kind of antiwar protest.
Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested as police officers entered Columbia’s main campus, which was on lockdown, and cleared Hamilton Hall of a group who had broken in and occupied it the night before.
It was a dizzying and, to many students and faculty, disturbing 24 hours on campus.
Last time, students were protesting the Vietnam War and Columbia’s plans to expand its campus into Harlem. This time, students were protesting the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has killed about 34,000 people, according to health officials there, and trying to force the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
But the students’ tactics were the same: By escalating their protest to the point where the university was unable to function, students forced the hand of administrators, who brought in the police to arrest them. Both times, the students had occupied Hamilton Hall.
The NYT Campus Protests live blog includes this map:
It’s hard to assess the situation from the news accounts. In some cases, leaders are surely overreacting and escalating the situation. In others, they may well be waiting too long, letting the situation getting so far out of hand that there’s not much alternative to calling in the police.
Talk of “outside agitators” is almost always a distraction. While there are indeed people who glom on to existing protests and try to egg on violence, it’s just absurd to think that this is happening at two dozen or so campuses across the country.
The decision by administrators at Brown to give in to protestor demands is interesting. On the one hand, it de-escalates the immediate situation. But if the board votes to divest, it invites every group with a grievance to stage their own shutdown of the campus to get what they want. And, if votes to continue the status quo, I don’t know why the protestors would be mollified.
As to the bigger picture, I wonder to what degree these protests have legs. In the case of the Vietnam protests, after all, the students had a direct stake in the war, as they were in danger of being drafted to fight. I’m skeptical that American college students will spend their summer breaks occupying near-closed campuses to protest a war that they’re merely watching unfold on television.
More recently, even the Black Lives Matter protests eventually petered out in a few weeks. It’s just hard to sustain the energy for mass demonstrations even when the grievances are more immediately salient.
So, no, I don’t think we’re seeing a reprise of 1968 here. There will doubtless be protests outside of the Democratic National Convention in September but I suspect they’ll be comparatively muted. And I continue to think the impact of the war in Gaza on November’s elections will be negligible.
