Police dismantle encampments on college campuses across U.S. as graduations approach

From coast to coast, police on Friday were clearing protesters from college campuses and tearing down the encampments that have been there almost since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Officers in riot gear arrived at dawn at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outside Boston to arrest and remove the demonstrators who had defied earlier orders to disperse, local media reported.

No muscle was needed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where campus officials and a group called the Students for Justice in Palestine reached an agreement "aimed at ending the illegal encampment on Library Mall," the university said in a statement.

But it was a different story at the University of Arizona’s campus in Tucson, following a night of clashes between police and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Four people were under arrest after that encampment became the site of a pitched battle late Thursday during which police fired what appeared to be rubber bullets and clashed with demonstrators who had pelted them with bottles, The Arizona Daily Star reported.

“The University and members of law enforcement sought to avoid escalation of the situation and continued to provide repeated warnings, including the possibility of arrest,” university president Robert Robbins said in a statement obtained Friday. “Protestors ignored the warning, continued to reinforce their encampment and chanted, ‘If you come in, we will fight you’.”

Three of the four people arrested were charged with criminal trespass, Robbins said. The other was charged with criminal trespass and aggravated assault against a peace officer.

Two of the four were “unaffiliated” with the university, Robbins said.

Meanwhile, police on Friday began taking down encampments at MIT and announced students who didn’t leave voluntarily would be disciplined.

Harvard University, which is also located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has started sending out suspension notices, a student protester group claimed on X.

When NBC News asked Harvard about the suspensions, a university spokesperson released the following statement:

“The ongoing protest encampment within Harvard Yard has continued in violation of university policies, creating a significant disruption to the educational environment at a key time in the semester as students are taking finals and preparing for Commencement. The University has repeatedly communicated that disciplinary procedures and administrative referrals for placing protesters on involuntary leave continue to move forward.”

At Penn, Philadelphia police officers dressed in riot gear arrived at 6 a.m. and gave protesters two minutes to disperse from the encampment they set up on campus some 16 days ago, the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported.

Thirty-tree people were detained, slapped with civil violation notices, and then released, said Dustin Slaughter, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

"After Penn’s weeks-long efforts to engage protestors were met with further escalation, today, the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership made the right decision to dismantle the encampment," Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. John Shapiro, said in a statement.

But even as police were clearing out established encampments, new ones were popping up on other college campuses.

Earlier Thursday, at the University of Denver, students erected tents outside the university’s administrative building on what’s called Carnegie Green.

They call themselves "DU for Palestine" and, like the 100 or so other protests on college campuses across the nation, these students are demanding that the school divest from Israel.

“Students on campus feel unsafe and frustrated with the University’s silence regarding the Israeli military’s massacres of Palestinians while maintaining direct connections with Israeli universities,” a “DU for Palestine” organizer said in a news released obtained Thursday by the NBC affiliate in Denver.

In response, DU administrators said Thursday that the university “is permitting today’s new encampment on the green” but noted that protesters who are not students, members of faculty, or school staffers will not be allowed to stay on the campus overnight and will be removed “without notice.”

The DU students were taking the lead from protesters at the nearby Auraria Campus, which is also in Denver, where students have been camped out since April 25. On Tuesday, a dozen or so were charged with trespassing after staging a sit-in at an engineering building on campus.

Back in New York City, Columbia’s pared-down commencement ceremony was held on a school soccer field rather than on the historic main campus because of what university officials called lingering “safety concerns” after weeks of protests on the campus in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood.

In the first mini-ceremony, some 800 students from Columbia’s School of Professional Studies received their graduate degrees. That was followed by two more commencement ceremonies later Friday and more ceremonies were scheduled the coming days, the university said.

The traditional university-wide commencement ceremony, which brings together all the Columbia schools and was supposed to take place on May 15, was cancelled last week. In its place, the university said it would hold small scale celebrations like the ones on Friday.

While graduating seniors and their families expressed disappointment at the time, the only reference to the last-minute venue change came when Troy Eggers, the dean of the School of Professional Studies, told graduates he’d wished the ceremony could be held on the Morningside Campus but, “alas,” it could not.