At New York University, police swept in to arrest protesting students Monday night, ending a standoff with the school’s administration.

At Yale University, police placed protesters’ wrists into zip ties on Monday morning and escorted them onto campus shuttles to receive summonses for trespassing.

Columbia University kept its classroom doors closed on Monday, moving lectures online and urging students to stay home.

Harvard Yard was shut to the public. Nearby, at campuses including Tufts and Emerson, administrators weighed how to handle encampments that looked much like the one that police dismantled at Columbia last week — which protesters quickly resurrected. On the West Coast, a new encampment bubbled at the University of California, Berkeley.

Less than a week after the arrests of more than 100 protesters at Columbia, administrators at some of the country’s most influential universities were struggling, and largely failing, to calm campuses torn by the conflict in the Gaza Strip and Israel.

During the turmoil on Monday, which coincided with the start of Passover, protesters called on their universities to become less financially tied to Israel and its arms suppliers. Many Jewish students agonised anew over some protests and chants that veered into antisemitism and feared again for their safety. Some faculty members denounced clampdowns on peaceful protests and warned that academia’s mission to promote open debate felt imperilled. Alumni and donors raged.

And from Congress, there were calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president from some of the same lawmakers Nemat Shafik tried to pacify last week with words and tactics that inflamed her own campus.

The menu of options for administrators handling protests seems to be quickly dwindling. It is all but certain that the demonstrations, in some form or another, will last on some campuses until the end of the academic year, and even then, graduation ceremonies may be bitterly contested gatherings.

For now, with the most significant protests confined to a handful of campuses, administrators’ approaches sometimes seem to shift from hour to hour.

“I know that there is much debate about whether or not we should use the police on campus, and I am happy to engage in those discussions,” Shafik said in a message to students and employees early on Monday, four days after officers dressed in riot gear helped clear part of Columbia’s campus.

“But I do know that better adherence to our rules and effective enforcement mechanisms would obviate the need for relying on anyone else to keep our community safe,” she added. “We should be able to do this ourselves.”

Protesters have demonstrated with varying intensity since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But this particular round of unrest began to gather greater force last Wednesday, after Columbia students erected an encampment, just as Shafik was preparing to testify before Congress.

At that hearing in Washington, before a Republican-led House committee, she vowed to punish unauthorised protests on the private university’s campus more aggressively, and the next day, she asked the New York Police Department to clear the encampment.

New York Times News Service