Columbia Threatens to Expel Student Protesters Occupying Campus Building

NEW YORK―Columbia University threatened to expel students who took over an academic building as it sought to end a standoff between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and the Ivy League school.

“We made it very clear yesterday that the work of the University cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violated the rules,” said Ben Chang, a spokesman for Columbia. “This is about responding to the actions of the protesters, not their cause.”

Student protesters occupied the building after a prolonged conflict with the New York City university over an on-campus encampment. Columbia said students who didn’t commit to the school’s request to leave the encampment by 2 p.m. Monday are being suspended and will have access only to their individual residence. Seniors will be ineligible to graduate.

The university restricted campus access to students who are residents there and essential employees.

Tuesday afternoon, a group of people, many masked, were gathered near an entrance of Hamilton Hall, where the dean of Columbia College has an office. Metal tables and chairs blocked the doors inside and out.

“The administration created a siege,” said a woman who addressed the small crowd outside the building. “They have closed us in on campus, they have locked us down … The administration is scared of students and frankly they should be.”

In an emailed statement, Columbia University Apartheid Divest warned university administrators against calling in the New York City Police Department.

“Do not incite another Kent or Jackson State by bringing soldiers and police officers with weapons to our campus,” the group said, referencing deadly shootings amid campus unrest at the universities in 1970. “Students’ blood will be on your hands.”

In a late Monday night post on X, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry said police can’t go onto Columbia’s grounds without the university’s permission.

“If they request us to go to campus to address illegal behavior, or if there is an imminent threat of physical injury, we will do so,” Daughtry wrote.

Protesters earlier said that unless Columbia met their demands, including for the university to divest itself of investments in companies doing business with Israel, they had no intention of disbanding.

The encampment at the Ivy League university in New York City, now in its third week, has spurred similar protests over the Israel-Hamas war at colleges across the country. School officials have struggled to balance free-speech rights with campus security. Many Jewish students have said they feel unsafe amid rising antisemitism. Protesters have said their demonstrations are peaceful.

Protests this week have escalated in some places. At Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California, law enforcement removed students from two buildings they had occupied and arrested about 35 people, according to the university.

Protesters were arrested at schools including the University of Connecticut, University of Florida, the University of Georgia and Virginia Commonwealth University. Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland said 20 protesters were detained and released. Protesters at Princeton University in New Jersey briefly occupied a building on Monday night and 13 people were arrested, the school said. Portland State University in Oregon said its campus was closed on Tuesday in response to protests around the library.

Some schools have de-escalated protests. Yale University said all protesters left their encampment Tuesday morning after the school threatened to suspend and arrest them. Northwestern University in Illinois said it came to an agreement with students to disband the encampment but leave one tent up until June 1. The school pledged to support Palestinian faculty and students and revive its advisory committee on investment responsibility.

The protesters haven’t let up at Columbia. Freshman Nicholas Fink was among the bystanders watching early Tuesday morning as the barricades were set up.

“Definitely a little bit of nervousness,” he said. “No one really knows what the response to this is going to be right now.”

Tuesday afternoon, people were sending pizzas into Hamilton Hall using a black milk crate and a rope to raise it up to students on a ledge.

CUAD, the student group, said protesters had renamed the building Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Gazan who was killed in Gaza City in January. They unfurled a banner from the building that said “intifada,” an Arabic word meaning “an uprising” that Jewish leaders say is an incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews. The suicide bombings and fighting of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s killed about 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, said President Biden condemned the use of the term “intifada” and antisemitic smears.

“President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful,” Bates said. “Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful—it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.”

House Republicans criticized the university for what they said was a failure to protect Jewish students.

“We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus and we will hold these universities accountable,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said Tuesday.

The escalation came several hours after Columbia University began suspending students who stayed in the pro-Palestinian encampment past the 2 p.m. Monday deadline school officials had set for them to disperse voluntarily.

Video footage showed protesters, many wearing kaffiyehs—Arabic headdresses associated with the pro-Palestinian cause—carrying tables to barricade the hall’s entrance and linking arms to block a doorway. Some of the glass panes of the door were smashed or broken.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik said Monday that the school wouldn’t divest its investments in Israel and reiterated that protesters needed to leave or face consequences.

Shafik has faced criticism from both sides over her handling of the protests. Some faculty and student groups have called for her to step down for limiting students’ and professors’ rights to free speech. Some Jewish students have accused her of not doing enough to bring the protests to an end.

Columbia has in recent days said Shafik was “focused on de-escalating the rancor on Columbia’s campus.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday said there is no active effort to involve the National Guard at this time. “That decision-making has to start with the governor,” he said.

Confrontations between supporters of Israel and those of Palestinians have been hard for universities to manage. The presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania both stepped down under pressure over their handling of antisemitism on campus. Colleges have faced a backlash from alumni and donors about how they have handled the fallout from the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

Hamilton Hall has a history of being occupied by student protesters, including during demonstrations related to the Vietnam War in 1968 and the South African apartheid in 1985.

A small group of protesters gathered late Tuesday morning outside of Columbia on the sidewalk near 116th Street and Broadway.

“Columbia you will see, Palestine will be free,” they yelled to the beat of a drum.

Write to Erin Ailworth at [email protected], Alyssa Lukpat at [email protected] and Will Horner at [email protected]

Gordon Lubold, Sabrina Siddiqui. Suryatapa Bhattacharya and Jim Carlton contributed to this article