Columbia cancels main commencement
Fallout from nationwide pro-Palestinian protests continued Monday as Columbia University canceled its main commencement ceremony, Harvard threatened suspensions of demonstrators in an encampment and police arrested dozens of students on two California campuses.
Administrators at MIT ordered an encampment to disperse, and the leader of the University of Pennsylvania said he fears violence at the protest site on his campus.
At Columbia, where protests and arrests last month sparked a nationwide movement, the Manhattan campus remained on lockdown with a heavy New York police presence at the request of Minouche Shafik, the university’s embattled president.
Despite the restrictions, more than 100 demonstrators still gathered by the campus’s only accessible entrance in the afternoon, next to Hamilton Hall, the site of a tumultuous police sweep last week. Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student, said student protests were freshly inspired by the Israeli military’s threatened incursion on Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Across the country Monday, universities continued to grapple with how they could gain control over protests they said were violating campus rules and disrupting campus life in the face of protesters’ determination to press their case against the war in Gaza.
At the University of California at Los Angeles, 44 people, including some students, were taken into custody by campus police, and then a peaceful but loud student march through campus followed. Sixty-four people, including 40 students, were arrested at the University of California at San Diego as an encampment there was dismantled.
Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science at UCLA, said he saw an Instagram post about 7 a.m. local time Monday warning student protesters were being arrested and held in a campus parking lot. He headed to the scene, where police caution tape and two stationary police vehicles kept him and others away from those detained, who appeared to be sitting on the concrete floor of the parking structure, Blair said.
At Harvard, an administration frustrated by an ongoing encampment said students who remained on the site would be referred for “involuntary leave” from their schools, meaning they cannot take exams, live in Harvard housing or be on campus — the latest in a coastto-coast discipline crackdown not seen in decades.
Protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont, however, announced they would remove their encampment in an agreement with the school that included a promise that the endowment would not invest in arms and arms manufacturing, the Middlebury Gaza Solidarity Encampment said.
As the student protests have continued, colleges have braced for how the demonstrations and added security on campuses would affect commencement ceremonies. The University of Southern California also canceled its main commencement ceremony, it announced in late April, citing safety measures put in place after protests began on its Los Angeles campus. The university said it would still hold other events, including school ceremonies.