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Students chained to a gate were removed by security officials. It came as the university planned to deploy 36 officers empowered to remove people from campus.
April 4, 2025, 11:39 a.m. ET
Columbia University students have long had a basic understanding about their relationship with the school’s Public Safety Department. Unlike at most American universities, which employ a full-fledged police force, Columbia’s public safety officers rarely, if ever, touch students.
No longer.
A new, more assertive stance was on display on Wednesday, as the university’s officers intervened to stop a daylong demonstration of students, most of whom were Jewish, who had chained themselves to the campus’s wrought-iron gates. Their demand: that the school’s board of trustees tell them who provided the federal government with information that led to the arrest last month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent Columbia student.
Moving to end the protest, public safety officers cut or untangled the students from their chains at about 11:15 p.m., and then physically picked them up before escorting them from campus. The officers carried at least one student off the lawn, according to video posted on social media and student interviews.
“I yelled out in pain that they were cutting off the circulation to my wrist, but they ignored me and proceeded to drag me from under my arms before I had the chance to stand on my own,” said Maryam Alwan, 22, a protesting student whose chain was cut Wednesday night. “And then they fell on top of me, and I was pushed to the ground.”
Even at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement last spring, Columbia public safety officials did not intervene to physically remove students, instead calling in the New York Police Department when force was required.
That has changed, reflecting an evolution in how Columbia administrators think about the use of force and a demand by the Trump administration that the university implement “full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators” if it wants the restoration of $400 million in federal research funding that the White House cut.
