(JTA)— Police arrested more than 70 pro-Palestinian protesters who crowded and occupied the main library of Columbia University, thrusting the New York City campus back into the center of campus tensions over Gaza.
Two Columbia public safety officers were injured in the incident, the school said.
The mass arrest, which was authorized by Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, comes about a year after Columbia was the epicenter of student anti-Israel protests. At the beginning of May 2024, police had stormed the campus to clear out and arrest protesters who had forcibly entered a campus building, alongside an encampment protest on the quad.
Since then, protest activity at Columbia has been less frequent, as the school has contended with a Trump administration crackdown on it and other schools with high-profile pro-Palestinian protests. The demonstration at the library on Wednesday, May 7, by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the school’s main pro-Palestinian coalition, appeared to be an attempt to revive that movement.
Shipman authorized the NYPD to break up the protest on Wednesday evening, hours after protesters entered a reading room in the school’s Butler Library en masse and began a demonstration there. The protest took place at a time when students are studying in advance of final exams.
The protesters beat drums and unfurled a banner reading “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” named for a Palestinian writer killed in a gunfight by Israeli troops in the West Bank in 2017, years before the current Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Many of them wore masks, which Columbia banned in March in a bid to recover $400 million in funding frozen by the Trump administration.
Columbia officers blocked the exits and would not let protesters leave the building without showing ID. This was the first time since last May that school leaders had called in police to clear out a protest, The New York Times reported.
“The individuals who disrupted activities in Butler Reading Room 301 still refuse to identify themselves and leave the building,” Shipman’s statement said. “Columbia has taken the necessary step of requesting the presence of NYPD to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community.”
She added, “Requesting the presence of the NYPD is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community… Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
The protest and police raid occurred as campus pro-Palestinian protests are reentering the spotlight. At the University of Washington, a pro-Palestinian protest caused $1 million of damage to an engineering building, the school said. And on Wednesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik and other members of Congress threatened university presidents with the loss of federal funding, or pressure to resign, in the latest hearings on campus antisemitism.
Nationally, the Trump administration has suspended billions of dollars of federal funding at a series of schools, has arrested international students and has revoked student visas in what it says is an effort to fight campus antisemitism.
CUAD , which has embraced extreme rhetoric during this school year, decried the NYPD’s presence on campus.
“Columbia called in fascist NYPD on its own students protesting genocide—because nothing says ‘global leadership’ like brutalizing courageous youth in service of empire. Basil al-Araj lives. Honor our martyrs. The Student Intifada continues,” the group said, in a reference to two Palestinian uprisings against Israel, the latter of which included a series of lethal bombings.
Columbia Hillel’s director, Brian Cohen, praised the arrests, and called for the students involved to face consequences.
“Earlier today, masked protesters took over Butler Library while Columbia students were studying for finals,” he tweeted. Once again, protesters violated many University rules and infringed on the rights of Jewish students to study for exams without being screamed at and harassed. We are grateful to the public safety officers who, at great risk to themselves, tried to stop the protesters from storming the library.”
