Diana Ramirez-Simon, Jonathan Yerushalmy, Edward Helmore and Erum Salam

Dozens of students have been arrested after hundreds of New York City police officers entered Columbia University on Tuesday night to clear out an academic building that had been taken over as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.

Live video images showed police in riot gear marching on the campus in upper Manhattan, the focal point of nationwide student protests opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Police used an armoured vehicle with a bridging mechanism to gain entry to the second floor of the building.

Officers said they used flash-bangs to disperse the crowd, but denied using teargas as part of the operation.

Before long, officers were seen leading protesters handcuffed with zip ties to a line of police buses waiting outside campus gates. NYPD spokesman Carlos Nieves said he had no immediate reports of any injuries following the arrests.

“We’re clearing it out,” police yelled as they marched up to the barricaded entrance to the building.

“Shame! Shame!” jeered many onlooking students still outside on campus.One protester at Columbia, who only gave their name as Sophie, told the Guardian that police had barricaded protesters inside buildings before making arrests. “It will not be forgotten,” she said. “This is no longer an Israel-Palestine issue. It’s a human rights and free speech and a Columbia student issue.”

The police operation, which was largely over within a couple of hours, follow nearly two weeks of tensions, with pro-Palestinian protesters at the university ignoring an ultimatum on Monday to abandon their encampment or risk suspension. On Tuesday, Columbia University officials threatened academic expulsion of the students who had seized Hamilton Hall, an eight-story neo-classical building blocked by protesters who linked arms to form a barricade and chanted pro-Palestinian slogans.

The university said in a statement on Tuesday it had asked police to enter the campus to “restore safety and order to our community”.

It said: “After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice. Columbia public safety personnel were forced out of the building, and a member of our facilities team was threatened. We will not risk the safety of our community or the potential for further escalation.”

The university reiterated the view that the group who “broke into and occupied the building” was being led by individuals who are “not affiliated with the university”.

It added: “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing.”

New York congressman Jamaal Bowman said he was “outraged” by the level of police presence at Columbia and other New York universities. He said on X: “The militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy.”

Bowman has called on the Columbia administration to stop the “dangerous escalation before it leads to further harm” and allow faculty back on to campus.

At a Tuesday evening news briefing, Mayor Eric Adams and city police officials said the Hamilton Hall takeover was instigated by “outside agitators” who lack any affiliation with Columbia and are known to law enforcement for provoking lawlessness.

Adams suggested some of the student protesters were not fully aware of “external actors” in their midst.

“We cannot and will not allow what should be a peaceful gathering to turn into a violent spectacle that serves no purpose. We cannot wait until this situation becomes even more serious. This must end now,” the mayor said.

Neither Adams nor the university provided specific evidence to back up that contention.

One of the student leaders of the protest, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian scholar attending Columbia’s school of international and public affairs on a student visa, disputed assertions that outsiders had initiated the occupation. “They’re students,” he told Reuters.

Hamilton Hall was one of several buildings occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protest on the campus. This week, student protesters, displayed a large banner that reads “Hind’s Hall”, renaming it in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza City who was killed by Israeli forces earlier this year.

Columbia journalism professor Seyma Beyram, said on X that she and her journalism school colleagues were trapped on one block surrounded by police barricades. “All I can document right now are students getting put on one of the buses.”

On Tuesday night, Columbia’s student radio station reported that Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, was threatened with arrest if he and others in the building came out. “Free, free, free Palestine,” chanted protesters outside the building. Others yelled: “Let the students go.”

At CUNY as the police moved off, one student said: “We de-escalated , and now the police are leaving. We’re proud of standing up for something. All we’re saying is were not happy university tuition fees are being used to fund wars, and we want to see what we can do about it, but without violence.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Reuters contributed to this report

Dr Binoy Kampmark

The rage against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza since 7 October has stirred students to protest at a number of US university campuses and, indeed, in other countries. Echoes of the anti-Vietnam War protests are being cited. All-too-often docile consumers of education are being prodded and found to be interested. University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to be, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest and free speech. Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.

A key aspect of the protests centres on university divestment from US companies linked to and supplying the Israeli war machine.

The pattern is also repeating itself in other countries, including Canada and Australia. The response from university officialdom has been to formulate a more vigorous anti-Semitism policy – whatever that means – buttressed, as was the case in Columbia University, by the muscular use of police to remove protesting students for trespassing and disruption. On 18 April, in what she described as a necessary if “extraordinary step”, Columbia President Minouche Shafik summoned officers from the New York Police Department, in riot gear, to remove 108 demonstrators occupying Columbia’s South Lawn. Charges have been made; suspensions have been levelled.

Students from other institutions are also falling in, with similar results. An encampment was made at New York University, with the now predictable police response. At Yale, 45 protestors were arrested and charged with misdemeanour trespassing. Much was made of the fact that tents had been set up on Beinecke Plaza. A tent encampment was also set up at MIT’s Cambridge campus.

The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also been pressuring university heads to put the boot in, illustrating well the fact that freedom of speech is a mighty fine thing until it aggrieves, offends and upsets various factions who wish to reserve it for themselves. Paradoxically, one can burn one’s own US flag as a form of protest, exercise free speech rights as a Nazi, yet not occupy the president’s office of a US university if not unequivocal in condemning protest slogans that might be seen as “anti-Semitic” by those who have weaponised the term in the service of a foreign state.

It would have been a far more honest proposition to simply make the legislators show their credentials as card carrying members of the military-industrial complex.

The focus by students on the Israeli-US military corporate nexus and its role in the destruction of Gaza has been sharp and vocal. Given the instinctive support of the US political and military establishment for Israel, this is far from surprising. However, it should not be singular or peculiar to one state’s war machine, or one relationship. The military-industrial complex is protean, spectacular in spread, with those in its service promiscuous to patrons. Fidelity is subordinate to the profit motive.

The salient warning that universities were at risk of being snared by government interests and, it followed, government objectives, was well noted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his heralded 1961 farewell address, one which publicly outed the “military-industrial complex” as a sinister threat. Just as such a complex exercised “unwarranted influence” more broadly, said Eisenhower, “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The nation’s academics risked “domination… by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”

This has yielded what can only be seen as a ghastly result: the military-industrial-academic complex, heavy with what has been described as “social autism” and protected by almost impenetrable walls of secrecy.

The nature of this complex stretches into the extremities of the education process, including the grooming and encouragement of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. Focusing on Lockheed Martin’s recruitment process on US college campuses in his 2022 study for In These Times, Indigo Olivier found a vast, aggressive effort involving “TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews.” Much is on offer: scholarships, well-paid internships and a generous student repayment loan programme. A dozen or so universities, at the very least, “participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defence industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM.”

Before the Israel-Gaza War, some movements were already showing signs of alertness to the need to disentangle US learning institutions from the warring establishment they so readily fund. Dissenters, for instance, is a national movement of student organisers focused on “reclaiming our resources from the war industry, reinvesting in life-giving services, and repairing collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.”

Such aspirations seem Pollyanna-ish in scope and vague in operation, but they can hardly be faulted for their intent.

The Dissenters took to the activist road, being part of a week-long effort in October 2021 comprising students at 16 campuses promoting three central objects: that universities divest all holdings and sever ties with “the top five US war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics”; banish the police from campuses; and remove all recruiters from all campuses.

Demanding divestment from specific industries is a task complicated by the opacity of the university sector’s funding and investment arrangements. Money, far from talking, operates soundlessly, making its way into nominated accounts through the designated channels of research funding.

Every university should, as part of its humane intellectual mission, divest from the military-industrial complex in totality. It will help to see the books and investment returns, the unveiling, as it were, of the endowments of some of the richest universities on the planet. Follow the money; the picture is bound to be ugly.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.