Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

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      On Columbia’s Campus, a Protest Encampment Grows and Tensions Flare

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      With a light blue academic robe tucked under her arm, Professor Marianne Hirsch hurried to get through a security line at a Columbia University entryway on Monday morning. To pass the gates, everyone had to scan IDs, in compliance with an announcement from the university’s administration that only students and faculty would be allowed on campus.Dr. Hirsch was not on her way to a graduation ceremony, however, but to protest the university’s president, Nemat Shafik. Last Wednesday, Dr. Shafik testified at a tense congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, and the next day she called in the police to empty an encampment of demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza and the university’s ties to Israel. More than 100 students were arrested.“I am here because of her infringement on academic freedom in the congressional hearing and because of her decision to bring police on to campus to arrest students,” said Dr. Hirsch, a professor emerita in the English and Comparative Literature Department.Around and on Columbia’s campus on Monday — as protests unfolded under perfect blue skies, just hours before the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover — there was one sentiment shared by nearly everyone, no matter their viewpoint on the war: anger at Dr. Shafik.Students have been sleeping in tents on campus for several nights, and confrontations between protesters and counterprotesters have occasionally broken out both inside and outside Columbia’s gates. On Monday, the action on Broadway began at about 9:30 a.m., when several dozen people, several wrapped in Israeli flags, listened to a speech from Professor Shai Davidai, who has been a vocal critic of Columbia’s response to antisemitism on campus.A trio of women who live nearby saw Dr. Davidai’s posts saying he would be at Columbia and felt an urge to attend, despite needing to prepare Passover meals for dozens of guests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Using Police to Clear Protesters, Universities Struggle to Calm Campuses

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      Students were arrested at N.Y.U. and Yale on Monday. But at Columbia, that approach led to a new encampment and demonstrations outside its gates.Police arrest protesters outside of New York University on Monday night. Adam Gray for The New York TimesAt New York University, the police swept in to arrest protesting students on Monday night, ending a standoff with the school’s administration.At Yale, the police placed protesters’ wrists into zip ties on Monday morning and escorted them onto campus shuttles to receive summonses for trespassing.Columbia kept its classroom doors closed on Monday, moving lectures online and urging students to stay home.Harvard Yard was shut to the public. Nearby, at campuses like Tufts and Emerson, administrators weighed how to handle encampments that looked much like the one that the police dismantled at Columbia last week — which protesters quickly resurrected. And on the West Coast, a new encampment bubbled at the University of California, Berkeley.Less than a week after the arrests of more than 100 protesters at Columbia, administrators at some of the country’s most influential universities were struggling, and largely failing, to calm campuses torn by the conflict in Gaza and Israel.Despite arrests at Columbia last week, protests continued on campus on Monday.C.S. Muncy for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dozens of Yale Students Arrested During Campus Protests

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      At least 47 people were arrested at Yale University on Monday during pro-Palestinian protests, as student-led demonstrations that roiled Columbia University and other campuses last week spread to the center of the school’s community in New Haven, Conn.Demonstrators set up an encampment at the campus’s Beinecke Plaza on Friday night. The group said in a statement on social media that it was calling on the university to disclose its investments in military weapons manufacturers and to divest from those companies.The first of the Yale students arrested today has been released and just gave a speech to the crowd, met with some of the loudest cheering I’ve heard in the last three days.47 students were arrested, according to organizers.“For our friends, we shall not be moved,” they sing. pic.twitter.com/25yAjMLgVo— Thomas Birmingham (@thomasbirm) April 22, 2024

      In a statement on Monday morning, Yale said it had repeatedly asked protesters to leave and warned that they could be arrested or face university discipline. The university also said it had offered the protesters audiences with leading trustees but had decided by late Sunday that negotiations were at an impasse.According to the university, the police issued 47 summonses on Monday and said arrested students could be disciplined by Yale itself, which could impose suspensions.“The university made the decision to arrest those individuals who would not leave the plaza with the safety and security of the entire Yale community in mind and to allow access to university facilities by all members of our community,” a university spokesperson said in a statement.The police action at Yale came four days after more than 100 students were arrested at Columbia University in New York at an encampment set up by pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the campus.This is a developing story. More

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      What We Know About the Protests at Columbia University

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      Demonstrations outside the school gates have added to the upheaval, with protesters who appear unconnected to the university targeting Jewish students.Columbia University is grappling with the fallout from its president’s promise to Congress that she would crack down on unsanctioned protests, and her decision to ask the police to clear an encampment on campus.Demonstrations just outside Columbia’s gates, which are currently closed to the public, took an especially dark tone over the weekend, when protesters who did not appear to be connected to the university were accused of celebrating Hamas and targeting Jewish students.“The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days,” Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president, said in a statement early Monday. “These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas. We need a reset.”All classes on Monday would be held virtually, Dr. Shafik said, and university officials urged students to stay away from the campus in Upper Manhattan if they did not live on it.How Columbia got hereSince the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, American college campuses have been hubs of protest and debate. The scene at Columbia has been particularly contentious, with protests drawing hundreds of demonstrators, and some faculty members drawing attention for statements that critics considered to be antisemitic.Columbia administrators, like their counterparts on campuses across the country, have struggled to fine-tune a response that balances discipline, free speech and institutional and national politics. For example, Columbia suspended two pro-Palestinian student groups after a walkout, and it has rewritten its protest policies, suspended some students and moved to cut or reduce ties to some faculty members.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Protests Continue at Columbia, Some Jewish Students Feel Targeted

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      After reports of harassment by demonstrators, some Jewish students said they felt unsafe. Others rejected that view, while condemning antisemitism.Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students.Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be unaffiliated with the university just outside Columbia’s gated campus in Upper Manhattan, which was closed to the public because of the protests.Some of those protests took a dark turn on Saturday evening, leading to the harassment of some Jewish students who were targeted with antisemitic vitriol. The verbal attacks left some of the 5,000 Jewish students at Columbia fearful for their safety on the campus and its vicinity, and even drew condemnation from the White House and Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable and dangerous,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said in a statement.But Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus said they felt solidarity, not a sense of danger, even as they denounced the acts of antisemitism.Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia University, says he doesn’t feel unsafe on campus.Bing Guan for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      India to Repeat Voting at Polling Sites Hit by Violence

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      The attacks occurred in Manipur, a northeastern state that has been troubled by ethnic unrest. Witnesses reported that voting booths were captured and bogus ballots cast.India’s election authorities have directed officials to redo voting at several polling places in the troubled northeastern state of Manipur, after armed men attacked polling stations and captured voting booths despite the presence of dozens of paramilitary soldiers.The state of Manipur has endured ethnic conflict for months after a dispute erupted over who gets to claim a tribal status that grants extra privileges, for example preferential treatment in seeking government jobs.The conflict, which began last May, has essentially split the region, home to about three million people, pitting two ethnic groups against each other: the mostly Hindu Meiteis, who form a narrow majority, and members of Christian hill tribes known as Kukis. More than 200 people have been killed, members of both groups. Thousands were internally displaced and still fear returning to places they once called home, seeking refuge in squalid camps.The Election Commission of India said on Saturday that voting would be done again on Monday in 11 polling stations where voting had been held on Friday.The order came after the region’s top election commissioner wrote to his agency describing mob violence, gunfire, damage to electronic voting machines and bogus voters entering the booths.Video footage from the Inner Manipur constituency, one of the two seats in the state for the lower house of Parliament, showed mobs raiding a polling station and breaking electronic voting machines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Columbia Students Who Were Arrested Face Uncertain Consequences

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      Students who camped in tents to protest the war in Gaza, including the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar, may be barred from finishing the semester.Many of the more than 100 Columbia University and Barnard College students who were arrested after refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus on Thursday woke up to a chilly new reality this week: Columbia said that their IDs would soon stop working, and some of them would not be able to finish the semester.The students who were arrested were released with summonses. The university said all of the 100 or so students involved in the protest had been informed that they were suspended.For some of those students, that means they must vacate their student housing, with just weeks before the semester ends.Yet whatever the consequences, several of the students said in interviews that they were determined to keep protesting Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.They said that after being loaded onto buses with their hands tied, they had sung all the way to police headquarters. Many expressed a renewed belief in their cause, and were glad that the eyes of the nation were on Columbia and Barnard, its sister college.The protests, the arrests and the subsequent disciplinary action came a day after the congressional testimony this week of Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, at a hearing about antisemitism on campus. Columbia has said there have been a number of antisemitic episodes, including one attack, and many Jewish students have seen the protests as antisemitic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Max Azzarello’s Path to Setting Himself on Fire Outside Trump Trial Began in Florida

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      Friends of Max Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside Donald J. Trump’s trial, said he was a caring person whose paranoia had led him down a dark path.The journey that ended with a man setting himself on fire on Friday outside the Manhattan courthouse where Donald J. Trump was being tried seemed to have begun in Florida, with a series of increasingly bizarre outbursts.Standing in the afternoon chill, the man, Max Azzarello, 37, of St. Augustine, Fla., threw pamphlets into the air before dousing himself with an accelerant and setting his body ablaze. The police hurried to extinguish the flames, but officials said his injuries were grave, and he was being treated at a hospital burn unit.The fire just a block or two from the courthouse appeared calculated to draw widespread attention, horrifying bystanders and temporarily overshadowing the momentous trial of a former president.But a closer look at the path the man had traveled to this moment of self-destruction revealed a recent spiral into volatility, one marked by a worldview that had become increasingly confusing and disjointed — and appeared to be unattached to any political party. His social media postings and arrest records suggest the immolation stemmed instead from a place of conspiracy theories and paranoia.Until last summer, Mr. Azzarello seemed to have lived a relatively quiet life. After high school, where he was a member of a bowling team, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009, with degrees in anthropology and public policy.As a student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he received a master’s degree in city and regional planning in 2012, he was known for leaving supportive Post-it notes for classmates in the hallways and for his karaoke performances of Frank Sinatra and Disney tunes, said a former classmate, Katie Brennan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More