Columbia’s president called the police. Students say they don’t know who to trust.

At the iron gates to Columbia University on Saturday, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside to vent their frustration. Inside on a campus lawn hemmed by neoclassical buildings, rows of tents signaled that a protest movement that began last October is far from over and could intensify after police swooped last week to make over 100 arrests. 

Behind one of the gates, where campus police guarded access, a female student in a keffiyeh led pro-Palestinian chants with the help of a megaphone. Other students flanked her and sang along. They wore khakis and graphic tees, and their protest signs and clothing were a swirl of red, black, green, blue, and white in the spring sunshine. The protesters have vowed to keep the encampment open until Columbia agrees to divest from Israel and companies that profit from “apartheid, genocide, and occupation.”

Shaket wasn’t among them. An Israeli undergraduate, she was gathered with friends who had just returned from Shabbat services with their kippot clipped in place. Shaket, who asked not to use her surname, wore a necklace with her name in metal Hebrew letters. She says it’s an unsettling time to be Jewish at a university where pro-Palestinian views are dominant. But she’s also dismayed more broadly at what’s happened to civil discourse and tolerance on campus and how Columbia has responded. 

“The university may have good intentions, but it’s not helping us with arrests,” she says, referring to the students taken into custody. “We need to cultivate the environment of a university where we discuss our differences of opinion. And I think we’ve lost that.” 

How Columbia navigates its free speech traditions at a time of heightened concern about antisemitism on campus and roiling political discord on the left over U.S. support for Israel is an open question. The decision to call the police last week has historical resonance: The last time it happened was in 1968 during mass protests over the Vietnam War. University administrators across the country are now watching Columbia closely, as similar protest encampments start to mushroom. Police were called to Yale University on Monday, where they made 47 arrests at a camp.  

Stefan Jeremiah/AP

Tents erected by pro-Palestinian protesters stand in an encampment at Columbia University in New York, April 22, 2024. More than 100 protesters were arrested April 18 after the university president called in the police.

For students and faculty who prize the spirit of free and open discussion in a trusted environment, the escalating tensions at Columbia over a Middle East conflict that shows no sign of ending are a sour note on which to end an academic year. And in an election year in which foreign policy, and Democratic divisions over Israel, may sway the voting behavior of millions of young voters, events at this and other universities could hold a sting in the tail. 

On Monday, Columbia’s campus remained closed to outsiders and classes were being held remotely, even as the protest encampment remained on the lawn. Administrators have asked students who live off campus not to go there. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the university to meet with administrators, students, and law enforcement. She spoke about the need to “fight antisemitism and protect public safety” and condemned recent harassment as “vile and abhorrent.” 

More than 100 students were arrested. Those who were later charged by police for trespassing were suspended by Columbia, which means they must vacate student housing and can’t enter libraries or dining halls. Some students have been told they may not graduate.

In Sacchariah’s dorm, two beds are unmade. Her friends who were at the protest camp were arrested and suspended last week, and Sacchariah worries about her own future at Columbia. A freshman of Lebanese descent, she sympathizes with pro-Palestinian protesters and not with students of opposing views. “At the end of the day, I don’t want a relationship with students who don’t support the cause,” she says. 

On Saturday, wearing a pink headscarf and glasses, she stood away from the protesters off campus. She was careful not to be filmed by journalists and asked for her full name not to be published. Some of her friends have begun talking about transferring to other schools, but to where, she wonders – and to what end. “Because the problem isn’t just [here]. ... It’s going to be the same problem like throughout other institutions after graduation,” she says. 

Uzma Afreen

Students form a barrier at the encampment on Columbia University's campus April 22, 2024.

The April 18 arrests at Columbia came a day after the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, testified in Congress about antisemitism on campus. She admitted that the university faced a challenge in preventing antisemitic speech and threats that made Jewish students feel unsafe. Republican lawmakers have for months lambasted elite schools over a surge in pro-Palestinian protests that have sparked sporadic incidents of violence against Jewish students. 

In December, the presidents of Penn and Harvard resigned after their own appearances before Congress in which GOP lawmakers pushed back on lawyerly statements about free speech when it came to what constitutes hate speech against Jews. Some Republicans have accused college administrators of fostering a generation of progressive students who see all conflicts as battles between oppressed and oppressing classes. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on X that what was happening at Columbia was “outrageous and un-American,” referring to a call from Elie Buechler, an Orthodox rabbi, for Jewish students to stay home. Other Jewish leaders at Columbia have been more measured, however, in their comments on the first day of Passover.

In a statement on Monday, Dr. Shafik, the university president, called for a reset and said outsiders were exploiting the tensions on campus. She also condemned “intimidating and harassing behavior” on campus and said that a working group of faculty and administrators would talk to protesters and try to resolve the situation. “Our bonds as a community have been severely tested in ways that will take a great deal of time and effort to reaffirm,” she wrote. 

Her decision to call in city police to arrest protesters continues to reverberate on campus. “Arresting students and preventing students from accessing food makes me really distrustful of the university’s ability to keep students safe,” says one student, a junior who asked that she not be named. “I think that the university needs to start with dismissing all their charges against the students if they want to rebuild trust.”

Given the timing of Columbia’s crackdown, one day after Dr. Shafik testified, students are right to be skeptical of her actions, says Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech nonprofit. But that doesn’t mean that students are immune from the consequences of their actions. 

“You don’t want to see cops in riot gear descend on peaceful student protests. But if they’re breaking the rules and engaging in civil disobedience ... sometimes that’s what has to happen,” she says. 

Still, universities are at fault in their failure to uphold neutrality in how free speech is maintained on campuses like Columbia, says Ms. Morey. Unlike in the Vietnam era, when opposition to the war galvanized a mass movement, the conflict over Gaza involves two groups with passionate and personal views on a complex political issue. In recent years, though, universities have taken progressive political positions on domestic issues, and neutrality has been jettisoned. 

“The college campus is the place to host all sides of a given debate. Universities really shot themselves in the foot by setting up this expectation that they would take a firm side on one side of Israel/Palestine,” she says. 

Since Oct. 7, when Hamas murdered around 1,300 people in Israel and took hundreds of hostages, leading to a punishing Israeli onslaught on Gaza, some leftists in the United States have cast the struggles of Palestinians as the equivalent of Black victims of police violence. In this framing, Israel is a colonial power guilty of “structural racism” in the Palestinian territories. At least 34,000 Palestinians have been killed as of April 21, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Another Columbia student, who wore a keffiyeh and a face mask, carried a tote of books to the quad where she was joining a teach-in. She also asked for anonymity because she feared a suspension or doxxing as a participant in protests. Two of her friends were arrested last week.

She blamed the university for prescribing “decolonial texts” in classes that, in her mind, are a moral imperative to support Palestinian rights. “They mandate we read these texts and arrest us when we put them into action,” she says. “The way I’ve been taught at Columbia is that you need to apply the theory. If you don’t apply theories in practice, you’re no better than someone who didn’t read them. What am I supposed to do?”

Shaket looks from her friends to the protesters in the distance. “We should be talking. We should be learning and building a community and disagreeing,” she says. “I think this is a wonderful school and there are wonderful people that go here.” And she should be able to respectfully disagree.