The day after Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik testified about antisemitism on campus before a House congressional committee, New York City Police Department officers descended on university grounds and arrested more than 108 peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters.
It was a huge escalation in the university’s ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters. Students had formed a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the university’s South Lawn on Wednesday, as they reiterated calls for the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel and for a cease-fire in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have been killed in the six months since Israel began its siege and military campaign in response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, which killed 1,200.
On Thursday afternoon, NYPD officers arrested more than 108 protesters and gave them summonses for trespassing. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell characterized the protesters as peaceful, telling The Columbia Spectator that the students did not resist arrest and they “were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
Those who participated in the encampment have been suspended, Shafik said in a letter to the NYPD. Three students from nearby Barnard College who joined the protest — including Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who had grilled Shafik on Columbia’s treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters the day before — were also suspended.
All those arrested were released from police custody as of Thursday night.
On Wednesday, Shafik told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that the administration was walking a tightrope between respecting students’ free speech rights while protecting Jewish students from discrimination. Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student groups, which count many Jewish students as members, have rejected the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
Shafik said in a statement that she called the NYPD on protesters “[o]ut of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus.”
“This is a challenging moment and these are steps that I deeply regret having to take,” she said. But the irony of her sending in armed police officers to remove peaceful protesters while emphasizing campus safety was apparently lost on Shafik. The mass arrests also mirror the university’s brutal response to antiwar student protests in 1968, when the administration authorized police to arrest hundreds of demonstrators who were occupying its buildings. The editorial board of The Spectator, its student newspaper, said in a scathing editorial that “Shafik has proven to her students yet again the administration’s commitment to silencing and marginalizing its own student body.” The administration’s efforts to stamp out the encampment did not deter protesters. On Friday morning, dozens woke up on the campus’s West Lawn, where they had set up camp the night before to continue their protest.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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