On Monday, all classes at Columbia University went virtual as demonstrations and debates around the Israeli offensive against Gaza heated up on campus recently.

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The university’s president Minouche Shafik urged relevant parties to “sit down and talk and argue and find ways to compromise on solutions.” 

On April 18, Shafik sent a letter to the New York Police Department (NYPD) requesting that the police help remove individuals who had occupied the South Lawn of the university’s Morningside Heights campus a day earlier.

The students with “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” opposed Israeli military action in Gaza and demanded the university divest from companies that “profit from Israeli apartheid.”

“The continued encampment raises safety concerns for the individuals involved and the entire community,” Shafik said, adding that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to Columbia University’s substantial functioning.

The NYPD arrested more than 100 protesters from the campus of the university in the afternoon on April 18. Shafik denounced antisemitic behavior by students and professors at the university and pledged consequences for those actions at the hearings by the House of Representatives on antisemitism on April 17.

The university also suspended students who participated in unauthorized protests and terminated a professor who supported the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.

In a statement on Saturday, the Barnard and Columbia chapters of the American Association of University Professors condemned the suspension of students engaged in peaceful protest and their arrest by the NYPD.

“During the coming days, a working group of deans, university administrators and faculty members will try to bring this crisis to a resolution,” said Shafik.

Security guards at Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus on Monday required ID issued by the university before granting access to the campus.

On Monday, the NYPD had a strong presence around the campus, while over 100 protesters rallied at a gate by Columbia University Bookstore on Broadway.

“We saw this as an unacceptable escalation of repression. And we had to stand with the students against that,” said Carl Dix, a representative of the US Revolutionary Communist Party, of the police who were called in on the students.

“Opposing genocidal attacks is right. It’s correct, and it’s not anti-semitism. In fact, the people in the ruling class who run all this stuff about the Jewish conspiracy. They’re the ones who are anti-Semitic, not these students here,” he stressed.

Students from Yale University, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina also staged encampments in solidarity with their peers at Columbia University.

Over 40 students from Yale University, who occupied Beinecke Plaza at the center of campus starting Friday night, were arrested on Monday, according to the local police department.

New York University ordered scores of student protesters to disperse on Monday afternoon after “a breach in the barriers set up at Gould Plaza.”

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