With the start of the new academic year at Columbia University in New York City, visitors needed to pass through security while dozens of demonstrators yelled slogans opposing the school and the Jewish state.
Photos and video published by the New York Post on Tuesday showed chaos at the university’s entrance as those seeking to enter faced long, slow-moving lines that stretched around the block. A few protesters were reported as being arrested.
They chanted, “Over 100,000 dead, Columbia, your hands are red” and “Don’t cross the picket line, we must honor Palestine.” They wore keffiyehs, banged drums and waved signs like “Columbia Kills.” On campus, someone had vandalized the school’s alma mater bronze statue with red spray paint.
It comes as interim president, Katrina Armstrong, who followed the resignation this summer of embattled former Columbia president Minouche Shafik, acknowledged: “I am acutely aware of the trials the university has faced over the past year.”
Two counter-protesters stood by wearing Israeli flags as capes while holding up the signs “Bring Them Home Now” and “Let Us Grieve.”
Graduate student Aryeh Krischer described the scene to the Post as “a lot of angry students who are blocking access to campus and trying to encourage students not to come to campus in solidarity with Gaza.”
Krischer called the experience “certainly inconvenient.”
Rebecca Korbin, a history professor who served on Columbia’s antisemitism task force, told the Post: “There haven’t been any monumental changes, so I don’t know why the experience in the fall would look much different than what it did in the spring.”