published on August 30, 2024 in Informative Details

Columbia University cancels main commencement after weeks of protests

Fallout from nationwide pro-Palestinian protests continued Monday as Columbia University canceled its main commencement ceremony, Harvard threatened suspensions of demonstrators in an encampment and police arrested dozens of students on two California campuses.

Administrators at MIT ordered an encampment to disperse, and the leader of the University of Pennsylvania said he fears violence at the protest site on his campus.

At Columbia, where protests and arrests last month sparked a nationwide movement, the Manhattan campus remained on lockdown with a heavy police presence at the request of Minouche Shafik, the university’s embattled president.

Despite the restrictions, more than 100 demonstrators still gathered by the campus’s only accessible entrance in the afternoon, next to Hamilton Hall, the site of a tumultuous police sweep last week. Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student, said student protests were freshly inspired by the Israeli military’s threatened incursion on Rafah, in southern Gaza.

In Providence, R.I., about 20 people occupied a Rhode Island School of Design administration building, the Brown Daily Herald reported. Demonstrators barricaded entrances with tables and chairs about 7 p.m., the Brown paper reported of the arts school a couple of blocks away.

A spokesperson for RISD said Monday evening that the school’s president and provost were on-site, meeting with the demonstrating students. “We have and continue to affirm our students’ right to freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and peaceful assembly,” Jaime Marland said in an email.

RISD Students for Justice in Palestine (RISDSJP) claimed the building occupation. A live stream on its Instagram page showed demonstrators banging drums, shouting slogans, calling for divestment of Israeli-linked funds and standing in the street. It also showed law enforcement officers blocking an interior doorway of the building.

Across the country Monday, universities continued to grapple with how they could gain control over protests they said were violating campus rules and disrupting campus life in the face of protesters’ determination to press their case against the war in Gaza.

At the University of California at Los Angeles, 44 people, including some students, were taken into custody by campus police, and then a peaceful but loud student march through campus followed. Sixty-four people, including 40 students, were arrested at the University of California at San Diego as an encampment there was dismantled.

On Monday evening, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block announced an investigation into a “group of instigators” who attacked pro-Palestinian protesters last week on campus, which he called a “despicable act.” It will be led by UCLA’s newly appointed Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Safety Officer Rick Braziel, working with an LAPD detective and the University of California police. The university has contacted the FBI, he said.

The university will also review UCPD’s response to the attack, the school’s security protocols as a whole and “all acts of violence over the last 12 days, including those against counter-protestors,” he said.

At Harvard, an administration frustrated by an ongoing encampment said students who remained on the site would be referred for “involuntary leave” from their schools, meaning they cannot take exams, live in Harvard housing or be on campus — the latest in a coast-to-coast discipline crackdown not seen in decades.

Protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont, however, announced they would remove their encampment in an agreement with the school that included a promise that the endowment would not invest in arms and arms manufacturing, the Middlebury Gaza Solidarity Encampment said.

As the student protests have continued, colleges have braced for how the demonstrations and added security on campuses would affect commencement ceremonies. The University of Southern California also canceled its main commencement ceremony, it announced in late April, citing safety measures put in place after protests began on its Los Angeles campus. The university said it would still hold other events, including school ceremonies.

At Columbia, Shafik said in an April 29 statement that the university “will indeed hold a commencement.”

But on Monday, the institution said it was calling off a university-wide ceremony scheduled for May 15 and moving most individual schools’ graduation events from its main Morningside campus, where most protests have taken place, to the university’s Baker Athletics Complex at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.

Columbia said it made the changes to commencement after consulting with student leaders and would focus its resources on keeping its smaller graduation events “safe, respectful and running smoothly.”

Share this articleShare

“We are determined to give our students the celebration they deserve, and that they want,” the university said in an announcement. But the announcement also acknowledged: “These past few weeks have been incredibly difficult for our community.”

Spokesman Ben Chang said the security concerns around a large commencement ceremony on campus “proved insurmountable” and the university was unable to locate an alternative venue that could accommodate such a large event. “Like our students, we are deeply disappointed with this outcome,” he said.

The announcement frustrated students including Teji Vijayakumar, 21, Columbia’s student body president who has also been participating in the protests. She is about to receive a bachelor’s degree in computer science and visual arts.

“It seems like they want to close off any spaces where there can be freedom of assembly. If you’re worried about protests [at commencement], then don’t be there,” she said.

Vijayakumar noted that university officials have often said that they were trying to limit protests to protect commencement and the senior class experience; the encampment on the school’s south lawn was cleared with this rationale. “Well, if you cleared these spaces for commencement, why did you cancel commencement?”

Early Monday afternoon, about a dozen student members of the local United Auto Workers union beat upturned plastic tubs as drums and marched in a small circle while referencing, in chants, Columbia’s storied history of student protests by singing “’68 and ’85! History is on our side!” The demonstration disbanded after about a half-hour.

Later, another group of some 100 protesters gathered in front of the campus gates under the watch of roughly 30 NYPD officers, none in riot gear but many with zip ties at their waists ready for arrests.

The demonstrators cheered for speakers who renewed calls for divestment from Israel and “intifada revolution.” Students carried a banner showing slices of watermelon, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity, with a message: “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

“We’re here against Columbia but most importantly we’re here for Palestine, as we’ve always been,” said Polat, a Columbia graduate student who was one of two student negotiators from the encampment.

The protest grew steadily but was a far cry from the tumult that unfolded on the street a week earlier, when officers in riot gear climbed through a second-story window to clear Hamilton Hall. Next to the protesters, other students continued to stream in and out of the campus gates, some wheeling cardboard moving boxes of belongings from their dorms. The protest left Columbia’s gates after around 20 minutes to join protesters at another college.

Columbia’s main campus remained closed to the public and Columbia students, except for students who live in residential buildings on campus and essential workers. New York police officers guarded its gates.

Colleges and universities have been under enormous pressure in recent weeks — both from protesters as well as political figures who have demanded that administrators get control over their campuses.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) responded to Monday’s news with a sharp attack on Columbia’s administration, saying commencement was being canceled because the school was unable to properly restore order on campus.

“President Shafik and Columbia University administrators have displayed a shocking unwillingness to control their campus,” he said in a post on X. “Now, thousands of students who’ve worked hard to achieve their degrees will not get the recognition they deserve.”

Johnson, who has previously called for Shafik to resign if she couldn’t control her campus, went further Monday, saying Columbia trustees should remove her as president.

Canceling commencement festivities represents a particular disappointment for this year’s graduating class. Four years ago, many of these students saw their high school graduations canceled due to the pandemic.

“I was talking to my roommate, and she said this was going to be uglier than her high school graduation that was a drive-through graduation in a parking lot,” Vijayakumar said. “It’s frustrating because there were just a lot of other ways this could have been resolved.”

Richard Morgan in New York, Yvonne Condes in Los Angeles, Frances Vinall in Seoul, Annie Gowen and Hannah Natanson contributed to this report.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLuiwMiopWhqYGeBcHyUaGdvZ5Okuba5waKYZq2ensOmvtKiq7Jlk5a7pLHLrGScp52isq%2BvxKacp6xf