'ANARCHY' ENGULFS ACADEMIA, NYU HAS NYPD ARREST MORE THAN 100 STUDENTS, AND FACULTY, CALL FOR NAT’L GUARD
-NEW YORK UNIVERSITY HAS NYPD ARREST MORE THAN 100 STUDENTS AND FACULTY
-COLUMBIA HAD 108 STUDENTS ARRESTED LAST WEEK, STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS NOW IN OPEN REVOLT AGAINST PRESIDENT
-NYPD SAYS NO REPORTS OF ASSAULTS ON JEWISH STUDENTS BUT 'HATEFUL' WORDS SPOKEN AND ISRAELI FLAGS TAKEN, ALLEGEDLY
-SENATORS CALL FOR NAT’L GUARD
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This is a developing report. Check back for additional news.
Yale University sicced police on its pro-Palestinian protest camp in a dawn raid on Monday, while new protest camps sprung up at the New School for Social Research, Tufts, Emerson, New York University, the University of Michigan and the University of Alberta, in Canada.
These joins protests at Yale, at Brown, at MIT, Boston University and Harvard University, at Princeton, Northwestern University, Miami University in Ohio, Temple University and at the University of North Carolina.
At Yale, police descended on protesters shortly before 7:00am. At least 47 students were arrested while high-ranking school administrators watched, the Yale Daily News reported.
During the mass-arrests, about 150 more protesters stood nearby and chanted “YPD or KKK? I don’t know, they’re all the same” and “Officer, officer, can’t you see? You’re on the wrong side of history."
The students were charged with trespassing, according to a statement by protest organizers. Their statement added they "pledged to continuing campaigning in solidarity with Gaza until the university discloses and divests from the ongoing genocide."
After the arrests, more protesters flooded the campus and blocked traffic.
Meanwhile in New York, the original student occupation at Columbia University entered its sixth day.
During a Congressional hearing into alleged anti-semitism at Columbia last Wednesday, university Pres. Nemat Shafik equated legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and said Columbia was disciplining professors for exercising academic freedom. Students reacted by seizing a part of the campus's quad, erecting tents strung with protest signs and Palestinian flags.
The next day, Pres. Shafik told the NYPD the student protesters were trespassing and asked it to arrest them. 108 Columbia students were arrested on Thursday.
After the mass arrest, Columbia students seized a different part of the quad and re-established a pro-Palestinian protest camp.
Supporters have gathered everyday outside the school's gates. Sometimes they marched around the gated campus, which is now guarded by hundreds of NYPD officers.
Video captured outside the school and published on social media shows a pro-Palestinian protester yelling at Jewish students "Go back to Poland" and "Fuck Jews!" on Saturday. On Sunday, Pres. Joe Biden issued a news release condemning what he characterized as an "alarming surge of Antisemitism—in our schools, communities, and online."
While he didn't name Columbia, Pres. Biden's statement called it "reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."
Protesters at Columbia pointed out that the incident did not happen on Columbia's campus—which is closed to the public. It happened on a public street adjacent to the campus.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn), whose daughter was arrested for protesting at Columbia on Thursday, issued a news release saying "throughout history, protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University."
The NYPD mostly agreed.
"We have not received any reports of any physical harm against any student," Kaz Doughtry, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Operations, said at a news conference outside the university on Monday.
The NYPD said it had "received reports" that students carrying Israeli flags "had their flags taken away from them, snatched out of their hands," but no one had been assaulted. It also "received reports" of "hateful things that was said towards them and they wanted to know if that was a crime or not."
Columbia protest organizers issued their own statement on Monday.
"We are frustrated by inflammatory individuals who do not represent us," their statement said. "We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand vigilant against non-students attempting to disrupt the solidarity being forged among students."
Columbia's tenured professors joined the students on Friday. Columbia's non-tenured educators joined them on Monday.
"Our message is simple," they said in a communique published by the Columbia student newspaper, the Spectator. "We stand with you in solidarity, we are appalled by what has been happening on our campus, and we want to help you reclaim your University.
Classes at Columbia and its sister school Barnard were held virtually on Monday. Pres. Shafik called on everyone to "deescalate the rancor."
Scores of faculty held a walkout protest Monday afternoon. They filled the steps of the university's iconic Low Library. Some wore the academic regalia they typically reserve for graduation ceremonies. The sun shone brightly in a cloudless, endless blue spring sky.
As the professors gathered, the crowd shouted in unison over and over: “We will not stop we will not rest! Disclose! Divest!”
Christopher Brown, professor in the history department, addressed the crowd.
"This is not typical for me," he explained. "I'm here because I am so concerned about what has happened at this university, with where we are now, and with where we are going."
The day the NYPD arrested 108 Columbia students peacefully protesting on their school's public square, at the order of their school's president, "will be remembered as a shameful day in Columbia's history."
"The president's decision to send riot police to pickup peaceful protesters, on our campus," Prof. Brown charged, "was unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive and dangerous."
Members of Congress—the same representatives Pres. Shafik sought to placate with submission to their demands last Wednesday—disagreed.
Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Chairwoman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, called some of the protesters "jihadists."
"I am gravely concerned by the ongoing chaos at Columbia University caused by the radical, unlawful Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which has now entered its fifth day," she wrote on Sunday. Pres. Shafik's "failure to restore order and safety promptly to campus constitutes a major breach" of federal law," Foxx wrote.
The Committee, Foxx warned, "will not hesitate in holding you accountable."
By the end of business Monday, all 10 Republican representatives from New York called on Pres. Shafik to resign because “anarchy has engulfed the campus.”
Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark) even said the National Guard should be deployed. Hawley’s letter to Pres. Biden called on him to “immediately mobilize the National Guard” to end what he claimed was “a dayslong, illegal pro-Hamas demonstration.”
Typically, the decision whether to deploy the National Guard is made by the governor. But Section 4 of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution also affirmatively requires the President deploy the military to protect states from “domestic Violence“ upon “application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened).”
While Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the U.S. Army and the National Guard solely by Executive Order No. 10730 to protect Black students in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, he did so only after local officials defied a federal court order to desegregate the high school.
There is no federal court order to enforce with respect to Columbia.
While the National Guard was not deployed on Monday, the NYPD was—again.
This time it was New York University that summoned police to arrest and remove student protesters from the camp they set up this morning on the plaza in front of the Stern Business School.
More than 100 appear to have been arrest there, including faculty.
“Dystopian images and sounds from our comrades at NYU, where their Gaza Solidarity encampment has just been stormed by the NYPD,” the National Students for Justice in Palestine said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.
“The student movement for Palestinian liberation stands proud with the brave NYU faculty members who took a historic stand against genocide,” the group added. “May others follow your lead.”
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