HOW COLUMBIA STUDENTS SEIZED HAMILTON HALL
Outsiders infiltrated their ranks in key US uni protest.
The protesters occupying Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University seemed ready to stay awhile. They had a microwave, an electric teakettle and sleeping bags, images distributed by police show. On a blackboard in a classroom turned canteen, next to the words “Free Palestine” in bubble letters, they had written a chart for occupiers to list their dietary restrictions (two were vegan, one vegetarian).
In another classroom, they made a chart for security duties in two-hour shifts, and listed three Maoist revolutionary slogans as inspiration, according to the police videos.
“Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” one of the slogans said.
For two weeks, Columbia’s campus had been the focal point of a growing crisis on college campuses around the country. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up tent encampments, held rallies and otherwise attempted to disrupt academic activities in an attempt to force universities to meet several demands, including divesting from Israel.
But the takeover of Hamilton Hall was a new turning point. The university decided to call in police to clear the building — drawing both harsh criticism and praise, and raising new questions about who, exactly, was behind the growing unrest.
The people who took over the building were an offshoot of a larger group of protesters who had been camping out on campus in an unauthorised pro-Palestinian demonstration.
On Tuesday night, more than 100 of them — people inside the hall along with others outside on campus and those beyond Columbia’s gates — were arrested.
In the days since, Mayor Eric Adams, police officials and university administrators have justified the arrests in part by saying that the students were guided by “outside agitators,” as the mayor put it.
“There is a movement to radicalise young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it,” he said on Monday.
In an interview, Mr Adams said that 40% of people arrested after the protest at Columbia and another that night at City College “were not from the school and they were outsiders.”
But at Columbia, at least, the percentages appeared to be lower. On Thursday, Mr Adams and Edward A Caban, the police commissioner, said that of the 112 people arrested at Columbia, 29% were not affiliated with the school.
City College, north of Columbia in Manhattan, 170 individuals were arrested, and about 60% of them were not affiliated with the school, the pair said.
According to a Times analysis, most of those arrested on and around Columbia’s campus appeared to be graduate students, undergraduates or people otherwise affiliated with the school.
At least a few, however, appeared to have no connection to the university. One was a 40-yearold man who had been arrested at anti-government protests around the country. His role in the organisation of the protest is still unclear.
The day after New York City police officers stormed into the building through a second-floor window and rooted out the protesters from Hamilton Hall, new details emerged about both the takeover of the building and the operation to reclaim it.
The details revealed a 17-hour-long student occupation that was both destructive and damaging to property, amateurish, but in some respects, carefully organised.
A Police Department list showed that most of the more than 100 people arrested in the sweep of Hamilton Hall and other parts of campus on Tuesday were in their late 20s, white and female. The average age was 27; more than half were women.
At least 34 taken into custody on or around the campus were charged with burglary, which is defined by New York law as unlawfully entering a building with intent to commit a crime.
As of Thursday afternoon, at least 14 people who had occupied Hamilton Hall and later been arrested appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court. All were charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor.
The occupation began early on Tuesday morning, after a group of protesters decided to escalate their efforts to force Columbia to divest from companies supporting Israel.
As hundreds of protesters gathered around Columbia’s central campus, forming a picket, a smaller group carried tents to a lawn on the opposite end of campus from Hamilton Hall, apparently to create a diversion. At the same time, a second set of protesters approached the building.
A protester who had been hiding in the building after it closed let the others in, according to Columbia officials.Those protesters entered and told the security guard there to leave, said Alex Kent, a photojournalist who entered with them. They then began the process of bringing in supplies and barricading themselves in.
While city officials praised police for what they said was restraint in clearing the campus, protesters said some officers at the scene had been aggressive with demonstrators. Protesters posted videos that appeared to show police pushing and dragging demonstrators outside Hamilton Hall’s main entrance during the arrests.
The Columbia Spectator reported that outside Hamilton, officers threw protesters to the ground and slammed into them with metal barricades. Most journalists had been required by police to leave the area and could not document the scene.