A year ago, when masked pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, the sole public safety officer who was present left the scene after notifying her supervisor. On Wednesday, demonstrators who swarmed into the main library on campus were met with a far different response.
The roughly four-hour occupation of Butler Library showed how much has changed about the way Columbia, and schools across the nation, are dealing with disruptive pro-Palestinian protests. This time, unlike during the occupation a year earlier, Columbia’s public safety officers intervened aggressively, pushing some demonstrators to the ground, as they worked to keep the occupation under control and end it, video posted on social media showed.
The officers blocked dozens of protesters from leaving one room at the library and locked the front doors of the imposing building with handcuffs to keep others from shoving their way in. Using powers newly granted to them, they arrested several demonstrators before the New York police arrived to finish the arrests.
But it wasn’t only Columbia officials who had adopted a tougher posture. The group at the heart of demonstrations during the past year, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has grown smaller but more hard-line in its rhetoric.
The university’s newly assertive response satisfied many of those who were harshly critical of Columbia’s management of last year’s protests, including the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, which has cut more than $400 million in research funding from Columbia, citing what it called the university’s failure to protect Jewish students. Columbia is negotiating with the task force in hopes of having the federal dollars restored.
The task force said it was “encouraged” by the way Claire Shipman, who has been Columbia’s acting president for less than two months, handled the occupation and called in the police, a rare occurrence on the campus before city police officers were summoned to end pro-Palestinian encampments and the Hamilton Hall occupation.