US universities send police to end protests

Pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested at university campuses across the United States as many school administrators ended their tolerance of demonstrations and called in police.

Universities and police have said people unaffiliated with the schools have joined or intensified the demonstrations protesting the Israel-Hamas war.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik told the campus community in a letter released Wednesday that the "drastic escalation" of monthslong protests "pushed the University to the brink".

Leaders at Columbia and the City College of New York requested police assistance to deal with the protesters on Tuesday night. Shafik said Columbia's Board of Trustees supported her move.

At the White House on Wednesday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sought to answer questions from reporters when asked why the country hadn't heard directly from President Joe Biden about the protests.

"No president, no president has spoken more forcefully about combating antisemitism than this president," she said.

On Tuesday, former president Donald Trump blamed Biden for the protests. "Biden is supposed to be the voice of our country and it's certainly not much of a voice," he told Fox News.

Columbia was in a partial lockdown on Wednesday after hundreds of police, many in riot gear, moved on to the Upper Manhattan campus Tuesday night.

They forced demonstrators out of a campus building they had seized and took down the few tents left in an encampment. There were no reports of clashes between demonstrators and police.

Police said they arrested 119 protesters at Columbia and 173 people at the City College of New York.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said outside agitators were co-opting the protest movement at Columbia.

The University of Texas at Austin said 45 of the 79 people arrested on campus on Monday weren't associated with the school. 

"These numbers validate our concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the University," UT Austin said.

Early Wednesday, violence erupted at the pro-Palestinian encampment on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus.

A group of counter-demonstrators, dressed in black and white masks, attempted to dismantle barricades enclosing an encampment.

Los Angeles police officers arrived to assist campus police at about 2 am, according to tweets from the agency. The police haven't released details about arrests. CNN reported 15 people were injured and one was hospitalized.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement Wednesday that the delayed law-enforcement response was "unacceptable and it demands answers".

UCLA canceled all classes for Wednesday.

Schools have de-escalated protests by using threats of arrest and/or suspension.

Yale University said all protesters left their encampment Tuesday morning after the school threatened suspensions and arrests.

Students protesting outside Fordham University's Manhattan campus on Wednesday said they anticipated a police crackdown after other demonstrators erected tents inside an academic building.

Fordham students who are part of an encampment at the school say they have been suspended. University administrators haven't commented, but students showed reporters their suspension letters through windows of a school lobby.

Arrests occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday at many schools, including the University of Arizona in Tucson, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and Tulane University in New Orleans. Tulane said the overwhelming majority of the protesters were outsiders.

In what appeared to mark the first time a US college has agreed to vote on divestment in the wake of the protests, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said it would close a protesters' encampment in exchange for administrators taking a vote to consider divestment from Israel-linked companies in October.

Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said it came to an agreement with students to disband their encampment but leave one tent up until June 1. The school pledged to support Palestinian faculty and students and revive its advisory committee on investment responsibility.

In New York, Angus Johnston, a historian of US student activism, explained that the generational divide on Israel is especially pronounced among Democrats.

"On a national level, we have seen this for a while as a disconnect between the values of young voters and most Democratic politicians," Johnston told Al Jazeera.

For example, he said college activism against apartheid in South Africa began in the 1950s and grew over the years.

They're the latest in a Columbia tradition that dates back more than five decades — one that also helped provide inspiration for the anti-apartheid protest of the 1980s and the Iraq war protests.

Rena Li in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

aiheping@chinadailyusa.com