Columbia Displays More Aggressive Posture in Dealing With Demonstrators

New York Times

04-04-2025

Columbia University students have long had a basic understanding about their relationship with the school's Public Safety Department. Unlike at most American universities, which employ a full-fledged police force, Columbia's public safety officers rarely, if ever, touch students.
No longer.
A new, more assertive stance was on display on Wednesday, as the university's officers intervened to stop a daylong demonstration of students, most of whom were Jewish, who had chained themselves to the campus's wrought-iron gates. Their demand: that the school's board of trustees tell them who provided the federal government with information that led to the arrest last month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent Columbia student.
Moving to end the protest, public safety officers cut or untangled the students from their chains at about 11:15 p.m., and then physically picked them up before escorting them from campus. The officers carried at least one student off the lawn, according to video posted on social media and student interviews.
'I yelled out in pain that they were cutting off the circulation to my wrist, but they ignored me and proceeded to drag me from under my arms before I had the chance to stand on my own,' said Maryam Alwan, 22, a protesting student whose chain was cut Wednesday night. 'And then they fell on top of me, and I was pushed to the ground.'
Even at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement last spring, Columbia public safety officials did not intervene to physically remove students, instead calling in the New York Police Department when force was required.
That has changed, reflecting an evolution in how Columbia administrators think about the use of force and a demand by the Trump administration that the university implement 'full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators' if it wants the restoration of $400 million in federal research funding that the White House cut.
In a statement, Columbia said that protesters at the gate on Wednesday night were warned that the space had been declared closed by the university and that they would face disciplinary consequences if they did not disperse. Three demonstrators remained.
'They were asked for identification, which two provided, informed of rules violations and informed they would be escorted off campus by public safety if they did not disperse,' the statement said. 'Following these repeated warnings, the chains were removed by public safety and the individuals were escorted off campus.'
The university said it was investigating what rule violations had taken place.
Columbia, which has roughly 300 public safety officers, pledged in a March 21 letter responding to a Trump administration demand to do more to fight antisemitism that it would add 36 'special patrol officers.' The new officers will have additional training and, unlike the existing force, have arrest powers.
The new officers will be a mixture of contracted officers employed by Allied Universal, a private security company already on campus, and in-house officers who pass a 162-hour training course, Columbia officials said. Unlike police forces at many other universities, the new officers will not be armed and will bring anyone arrested to a Police Department precinct for processing. The officers will be identifiable by a special badge and patch on their uniforms, officials said.
'One of the overriding goals we have is to handle as many situations on campus as we possibly can on our own,' Cas Holloway, the university's chief operating officer, said. 'Our objective when it comes to things like protest activity and other student-related activity is for our own public safety officers, and ultimately these special patrol officers, to be able to handle it.'
Wednesday's protest took place just before the new officers were expected to be deployed. The first 20 officers, who work for Allied and have completed a peace officer certification course and been sworn in, were not yet active.
The public safety officers involved on Wednesday were instead operating under a 2019 policy stating that campus officers 'will only use physical force that is reasonably necessary to bring an incident under control.' In practice, however, that has meant that force is rarely used against students.
Ms. Alwan, a Palestinian American comparative studies major, was one of the student leaders of last spring's encampment movement and said she could not recall a response last year similar to what unfolded Wednesday.
'The most aggressive they were, that I can remember, was when they injured a few students by forcefully grabbing tents from them,' she said. 'But they have never picked students completely off of the ground and then pushed us onto the ground like that before.'
Earlier Wednesday, Israeli American undergraduate Aharon Dardik said that public safety officers had grabbed his shoulder and arm as they cut his chain off a campus gate during an earlier stage of the same protest, surprising him.
'They didn't inflict bodily harm, but for me at least, it was just a show of like, oh, this is one of the first instances of Columbia changing how it treats students,' he said. 'One of the things you know as a Columbia student is that public safety officers are not allowed to touch you.'
Columbia's introduction of officers with arrest powers comes as American universities have dramatically expanded their campus police teams during the past several decades. At four-year U.S. colleges with more than 2,500 students, campus law enforcement departments employed nearly 36,000 full-time personnel in 2021 — a 43 percent increase from 2004, federal data shows.
The use of campus police forces can be traced to the late 19th century, when Yale University hired two officers to patrol its grounds. But most schools didn't have campus police officers and relied on local law enforcement until after the 1960s.
Violent clashes between student activists and outside police officers during protests in the '60s prompted many administrators to seek legislative permission to create in-house forces, said John J. Sloan III, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied campus policing. Schools wanted to make sure that the billions of dollars invested in their campuses were protected.
At Columbia, however, the reverberations of protests in 1968, when New York City police officers flooded campus to rout protesters from buildings, had the opposite effect. Shocked by the violence and more than 100 reports of injuries, faculty members took greater control over the rules for student conduct and discipline. During the ensuing decades, the university came to bill itself as a place where political protest was respected and tolerated.
Last year, Columbia's pro-Palestinian movement challenged that understanding. With some Jewish students saying they felt threatened and harassed by the protests, which were disruptive and loud, the university found itself under heavy pressure to enforce and tighten its rules on demonstrations. Unable to enforce those rules with its own security force, Nemat Shafik, Columbia's president at the time, called in the Police Department twice, leading to hundreds of arrests and inflaming campus tensions.
Some faculty members now support introducing an unarmed campus force that can better enforce rules in the hopes that it will obviate the need to call in the police.
'A lot of things would go a lot more smoothly if in fact we could physically control our campus space in the event of disruptions,' said James Applegate, a professor of astronomy on the executive board of the university's senate, a policymaking body.
Other faculty members are concerned that Columbia is signaling a diminished tolerance for protests and political speech. Wednesday night's demonstration, for example, was stopped by public safety officers even though it was peaceful and students said they had received permission to protest in the area until midnight.
Columbia administrators said they started planning for a peace officer force last summer and through the fall, and that they had consulted with a campus advisory committee. But it was not publicly announced until the Trump administration demanded that the university adopt further measures to control what it described as the school's failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The timing left some on campus questioning whether Columbia was caving to White House pressure to rein in pro-Palestinian protests.
'Whether police or public safety, security personnel should only be putting their hands on members of our community if it's absolutely necessary,' said Joseph Howley, a Columbia classics professor who supports the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and visited the protest Wednesday night.
'The real question is: How are we determining the circumstances in which it is necessary to physically touch or move people who are engaged in political protest?' Mr. Howley said. 'Last night, I saw students sitting in an area that was not obstructing or interfering with anything. It didn't seem to me that they presented a danger to anyone.'