Columbia University placed at least 65 students on interim suspension Friday, and barred another 33 from campus after the anti-Israel protesters forced their way into the Butler Library reading room Wednesday and refused to leave, according to JNS.
Columbia University acting President Claire Shipman called in the NYPD to clear the reading room after the students involved would not identify themselves or disperse.
Shipman said Columbia’s administration “spent substantial time working to defuse the situation in multiple ways, through Public Safety and Delegate visits to the students,” as well as conversations with professors, before calling the police.
“I am enormously grateful for the many people we have in our community, our Public Safety officers, our faculty, our staff, and my team, who work so hard to make Columbia what we know it can be and should be for our community,” Shipman said in a statement Wednesday. “I also made sure to be present when the police arrived; I wanted to see for myself how the operation would unfold, and I’m grateful that it was orderly, professional, and extremely limited, with a focus on the students who refused to leave the reading room.”
Two of Columbia’s Public Safety officers were injured in the unrest, a turn of events that Shipman called “outrageous.”
“Sadly, during the course of this disruption, two of our Columbia Public Safety Officers sustained injuries during a crowd surge when individuals attempted to force their way into the building and into Room 301,” she said in a statement to Fox News. “These actions are outrageous.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration was scrutinizing the visa statuses of the protesters involved in the library takeover, suggesting there would be a federal response in addition to Columbia’s disciplinary action.
“We are reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals who took over Columbia University’s library,” Rubio wrote in a post on X. “Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation.”
The Washington Examiner reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest helped organize the takeover of the library, which it temporarily renamed “Basel Al-Araj Popular University.” The name was an apparent homage to an alleged terrorist who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces in 2017.
The protesters reportedly distributed pamphlets that celebrated Al-Araj as a champion of the Palestinian resistance movement.
“At the original Popular University project in the West Bank, Basel al-Araj taught about the Palestinian resistance and insisted that knowledge must serve liberation, not empire,” the pamphlet shared with the Examiner read. “Today, we teach each other the stories our universities refuse to tell. We feed each other, protect each other, learn with and from each other. The Popular University is not only a demand for divestment.”
In addition to divestment from Israel, the pamphlet called for the university to bar police and federal immigration authorities from Columbia’s campus.