Akeem Luke washes away protest graffiti from the walls of Columbia University.
At Columbia University, Akeem Luke washed away graffiti from a wall bordering campus. The text once read “Free Gaza.” Now the lines are faded. In Luke’s two years of working on staff at the university, he said, he’s never seen students organize and protest like this before.
There is a quiet on campus that belies the chaos its seen in the last week. On April 18, following the establishment of a sit-in protest on Columbia’s South Lawn, Columbia President Dr. Minouche Shafik asked the NYPD to enter the encampment and begin making arrests. Shafik had just testified at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as part of the committee’s investigation into antisemitism on campus. Over 100 students were arrested, and the university said it has suspended encamped students.
The institution has now moved all its classes to a hybrid format until the end of the semester.
On Tuesday, Soph Askanase and Sarah Borus from Barnard College, two Jewish students who were arrested for participating in the protest, said the most targeted antisemitism they have experienced on campus came from their own Jewish peers. Meanwhile, they said, anti-Muslim sentiment has been underreported and unacknowledged by the university.
“We’re here in support of our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza. People are dying every day,” said Borus. “I and other Jewish students here are so disturbed. The media is more eager to talk about the experience of Jewish students than those in Gaza that are dying. We want you to focus on that, and Columbia’s culpability of that.”
In the past week, students at Yale University, New York University (NYU), MIT, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and more have gathered together for sit-in protests in solidarity with Columbia students and with Palestine. They have erected tents on their campuses, and some have barricaded themselves inside campus buildings. Many students from these universities have also been arrested.
