Pro-Palestinian Columbia students occupy academic building
NEW YORK — Pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University early Tuesday charged the same campus building that students advocating for racial justice occupied in the 1960s, a significant escalation at the elite institution that launched dozens of campus demonstrations across the world.
“We will not leave until Columbia meets every one of our demands," one of the students yelled from a balcony window. The demands include university divestment from Israel, disclosure of Columbia investments and protections for protesters.
About a dozen students and two janitors were in the building, according to a student inside who was granted anonymity to avoid retaliation from the university. The janitors left the building shortly after the students entered.
The breach began around 12:30 a.m on Tuesday, the day after the university suspended students who refused to leave the so-called Gaza Solidarity Encampment for nearly two weeks. The encampment is a few hundred feet from Hamilton Hall.
Hundreds of students formed a human chain Tuesday in front the building, where civil rights and anti-war protesters demonstrated in 1968. About a dozen university public safety personnel surveyed the scene, and the New York Police Department — which must have permission from senior administrators to enter campus — were not on site.
“Shut it down!” hundreds chanted outside the building, which holds many of the school’s humanities classes, along with the office of the dean of Columbia College and the undergraduate admissions office. Classes were held in Hamilton Hall on Monday.
Later Tuesday, the protesters unfurled a banner from a balcony window at Hamilton Hall that read "Hind's Hall," in honor of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old who was killed in Gaza City following an Israeli bombardment.
“Today we take this building in honor of Hinds and every Palestinian martyr," one of the students yelled from the balcony. A sign with the word "intifada," Arabic for uprising, hung from a higher section of the building facade.
“The safety of every single member of this community is paramount,” Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said in a statement to POLITICO.
An NYPD spokesperson said officers were outside the campus, but declined to comment on how many and whether or not they'd been authorized by the university to enter the grounds.
“This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968, 1985, and 1996, which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today,” Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group behind the encampment, wrote in an Instagram post.
The students barricaded the building’s doors with chairs. At least one window was broken.
"They swarmed the building," said one university staffer, who was inside Hamilton Hall at the time.
“I got into a scuffle with a couple of them. They finally let us out,” said staffer said, gesturing to a small, surface-level cut on the hand. The Columbia employee was granted anonymity over concerns for their personal safety.
At 6:23 a.m. Tuesday, officials informed Columbia affiliates that access to campus would be limited to essential staff and students living in residential buildings within the school’s gates, barring many students and nearly all faculty from dining halls, labs and libraries on the first day of “reading week,” the dedicated finals study period.
Twenty-four hour quiet hours had gone into effect the night before.
