Universities Make Arrests, or Deals, to Protect Commencement Events (2024)

Here’s the latest on campus protests.

Arrests continued on Friday as more schools sought to secure their ceremonies, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Arizona. And the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined a handful of schools that have managed to strike deals with their demonstrators to clear out ahead of graduation.

Here are other developments:

• A handful of people interrupted the ceremony for law school graduates at U.C. Berkeley on Friday with pro-Palestinian chants. Speakers, including Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean, and Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general of the United States, struggled at times to be heard.

• Asna Tabassum, the University of Southern California valedictorian whose graduation speech was canceled after she was criticized by pro-Israel groups, received her diploma on Friday morning. Students and families in the audience gave her a long round of applause, with a few standing ovations.

• Xavier University in New Orleans this week became the second school to rescind an invitation to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations. The University of Vermont announced last week that she also would not be speaking there, agreeing to a key demand from student demonstrators.

• Arizona State University has put the chief of its campus police department on paid administrative leave. The decision came after complaints were filed related to the chief’s actions in late April, when the campus police broke up a pro-Palestinian encampment and arrested dozens of people.

• Administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that they had reached a resolution with protesters, and that the encampment there would be cleared on Friday. The school said protesters agreed not to disrupt graduation in return for meeting with decision makers to discuss the university’s investments.

• More than 2,800 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses since April 18, according to New York Times tracking data.

A U.C.L.A. meeting to consider formally rebuking the chancellor ends without a vote.

“For many of us, we feel strongly that the actions and inaction of our chancellor warrant a vote of no confidence,” said Carlos Santos, an associate professor of social welfare who represents the Luskin School of Public Affairs in the Assembly, before the meeting. “We feel strongly that it’s critical that we go down in history as centering our students’ safety, first and foremost.”

But after more than three hours of discussion, much of it devoted to parliamentary procedure, the meeting ended without a vote. The group will take up the issue again at its next meeting, on May 16.

Mr. Block, 75, did not comment on the resolutions on Friday. He has served as chancellor of U.C.L.A. since 2007 and has already said that he will step down at the end of July. But the vote could still serve as an important indicator of how faculty members at the elite public university feel about free speech and the campus climate in a polarized era.

On Friday, dozens of speakers recounted rushing to help students who had been beaten, their eyes streaming from chemical agents. Medical school faculty members described hearing from medical students and residents who had been attacked as they tried to treat injured protesters.

Many emphasized that a vote of no confidence was simply that: an indication that Mr. Block had lost the backing of the faculty, and a sign to the incoming administration that faculty members would not hesitate to speak up on behalf of students. It was not, they said, a referendum on the views of the protesters themselves.

Relatively few speakers opposed the measures, though a couple voiced concerns about antisemitism among protesters at the encampment.

If the Senate passes one or both resolutions, U.C.L.A. will join a list of universities whose faculty and staff have united with protesters to rebuke their administrators’ handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Earlier this week, the Academic Senate at the University of Southern California voted to censure its president. The University Senate at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, took a vote of no confidence last month in its president, Tom Jackson Jr., after law enforcement officers in riot gear responded to activists who took over an administration building.

Frustration with Mr. Block has mounted since the night of April 30, when a large group of counterprotesters confronted a pro-Palestinian encampment that had sprawled across a campus quad days earlier.

Administrators initially took a more hands-off approach to the encampment than other universities, citing University of California policy that law enforcement was to be called “only if absolutely necessary to protect the physical safety of our campus community.”

But on April 30, the sixth day of the encampment, Mr. Block declared the site illegal and warned protesters to leave. He cited some violent incidents between protesters and counterprotesters, as well as examples of pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocking access to parts of the campus.

Counterprotesters arrived later that night and sprayed students with pepper spray, shot fireworks into the encampment and used metal pipes and other objects to attack protesters. Police and security officers who were present for parts of the melee didn’t intervene for hours, and no arrests have been made in the attacks.

The next night, administrators authorized police officers from three agencies to clear the encampment.

Criticism from members of the campus community, as well as state and local officials, was swift. Mr. Block called it “a dark chapter in our campus’s history.”

He subsequently established an office of campus safety, with a former police chief at its head, to oversee the university’s police department. He also brought in outside consultants to investigate what happened during the attacks.

Until then, “We thought the university was handling it great,” said Matt Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicano studies who has been acting as a spokesman for a faculty group that has been supporting the protesters. So the sudden change in approach and in particular, what Mr. Barreto characterized as an overly violent police response, was jarring.

Some Jewish organizations, however, were upset by videos of protesters blocking students from accessing walkways or buildings if they did not renounce Zionism. Jewish Federation Los Angeles said the climate had become hostile to Jewish students and that there had been a “horrifying escalation of antisemitism.”

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After arrests at Arizona State, the campus police chief is put on leave.

There were also reports that the police had removed some women’s hijabs during the arrests. Those reports were being reviewed by the general counsel’s office, the university said in a statement last week.

Azza Abuseif, executive director for Arizona’s branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement on April 29 that she was calling for a full investigation.

David Chami, a lawyer representing four of the women, as well as many of the students who were arrested and suspended, also pointed to video reportedly showing Chief Thompson, in plainclothes, cutting through a tent in the encampment as it was being cleared out.

University officials did not respond to questions about whether those reports were related to Chief Thompson being placed on leave. The assistant chief of the school’s police department, John Thompson, is now serving as acting chief. The two men are not related, according to the school.

Anna Betts contributed reporting.

A college parent is arrested after a confrontation at a protest at Syracuse.

The arrest followed an off-campus incident the day before involving a pro-Palestinian protester who the school says was not a Syracuse University student. The protester said “Heil Hitler” as he made a Nazi salute at a Jewish student and then punched the student in the face, according to a police report and an email from university officials.

The assault on the Jewish student and Mr. Torossian’s arrest reflect the increasingly murky situations around the country that university administrators, students and parents are trying to navigate as lingering protests draw students and non-students alike, at locations both on and nearby campus.

Mr. Torossian, who helped organize fund-raising events for Mr. Adams’s election campaign, said he and other Jewish parents have been exasperated that the university chancellor has declined to meet with a group of concerned Jewish parents since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.

“The university has not taken any action,” Mr. Torossian said in a phone interview, “so a group of us went to raise a voice of nonviolent civil disobedience.”

The off-campus incident last Saturday began when a group of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at Walnut Park in Syracuse, located near the university campus, according to accounts by two witnesses, the parents of the Jewish student, a Syracuse Police Department report and statements issued by the university.

The protesters, who included Syracuse University students and others who were not affiliated with the school, walked from Walnut Park to the encampment on campus and then returned to the park.

The park is adjacent to several fraternity houses, including a Jewish fraternity, where members had gathered on their porch and were playing the Israeli and American national anthems at top volume.

As the rally disbanded, a protester walked to the edge of the park, directly across the street from the fraternity and extended his arm in the gesture of the Nazi salute. A few Jewish students walked toward the protester to confront him, according to the police report. The protester then punched one of the Jewish students in the face. Amid the fracas, the assailant left.

Mr. Torossian said the school should be addressing the matter as an incident of antisemitism.

Jeff Stoecker, Syracuse University’s chief communications officer, said the university has no jurisdiction to get involved in incidents that occur off-campus.

(Two witnesses said that a campus safety officer had, in fact, approached the fraternity during the protest and told the students to turn down their music. The university said this was done as a courtesy, to let the students know they could be in violation of the city’s noise ordinance.)

The next day, Mr. Torossian and two other parents arrived on campus and demanded a meeting with Kent Syverud, the chancellor and president of the university. For months, Mr. Torossian said, he and other members of Syracuse Jewish Parents Council have sought meetings with Mr. Syverud.

Mr. Stoecker said the university does not recognize the group as having an “official affiliation” to Syracuse and said that school leaders have had “daily communication” with parents and families since Oct. 7, including phone calls, emails and Zoom sessions. The school’s Hillel chapter, a campus organization for Jewish students, hosted a Zoom session with about 400 parents, he said.

He also expressed frustration with Mr. Torossian. “Since his arrest, we have seen a vast amount of disinformation, including from Mr. Torossian, that is being distributed in an attempt to inflame the situation, drive personal agendas, and portray an inaccurate assessment of the demonstration on the Quad,” Mr. Stoecker said in a statement.

Mr. Torossian’s arrest at the student encampment last Sunday was first reported by The Daily Orange, the Syracuse student newspaper.

School security officials asked Mr. Torossian to leave, but he refused. He said he pointed to another man at the encampment whom he identified as a man not affiliated with the university who had been jailed years ago for manslaughter.

“Why am I being told to leave when a convicted felon is allowed to be on the premises?” Mr. Torossian said he asked campus security officers.

It is not clear why Mr. Torossian believed that the man had a criminal background.

Mr. Torossian was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing. A few days later, a school spokesman said, “we informed the student protesters that non-affiliates of the university would no longer be permitted on our campus as part of their protest.”

By Thursday, politicians were weighing in. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, tweeted: “Now we’ve got convicted killers on the loose in these encampments. Jail the lawbreakers. Expel the students. Deport the illegals. Send in the Guard.”

On Friday, the man Mr. Torossian had pointed to was again seen at the encampment and was arrested on charges of trespassing, Mr. Stoecker said.

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Two universities cancel speeches by the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

The University of Vermont announced last week that Ms. Thomas-Greenfield would not be speaking there, agreeing to a key demand by student demonstrators who set up an encampment on the campus in Burlington. The school’s president, Suresh Garimella, notified the student body last week that Ms. Thomas-Greenfield would not speak at graduation, and wrote, “I see you and hear you.”

A spokesman for Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement that the ambassador looked forward “to continuing to engage with young people on campuses” and elsewhere, and noted that she had recently spoken to high school students in Pennsylvania.

Opponents of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of more than 30,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities, have focused some of their ire on Ms. Thomas-Greenfield because she has led the U.S. efforts in the Security Council to block several resolutions calling for a cease-fire. She argued against the resolutions on the grounds that Hamas, whose Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people, had not agreed to release the hostages it took that day.

Even so, in March the United States abstained from voting on one cease-fire resolution, a signal of the Biden administration’s growing displeasure with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of Israel’s war efforts. That abstention allowed the resolution to pass the Security Council, breaking a five-month impasse.

Police arrest protesters at M.I.T., where suspensions have ramped up tension.

“We did not believe we could responsibly allow the encampment to persist,” Dr. Kornbluth wrote. “We did not take this step suddenly. We offered warnings. We telegraphed clearly what was coming. At each point, the students made their own choices. And finally, choosing among several bad options, we chose the path we followed this morning — where each student again had a choice.”

The move to end the encampment came after several protesters were arrested on Thursday afternoon while blocking access to a parking garage.

The university had set a Monday deadline for protesters to vacate the encampment or face suspension, and tensions had increased in recent days after some students who the university said defied the deadline received notices of suspension.

Administrators would not say how many students had been suspended.

“This means you will be prohibited from participating in any academic activities — including classes, exams or research — for the remainder of the semester,” said a letter received by one student and viewed by a reporter. “You will also be prohibited from participating in commencement activities or any cocurricular or extracurricular activities.”

The university had detailed the consequences of suspension in a letter to student protesters before the Monday deadline, making clear that those who had previously been disciplined “related to events since Oct. 7” would also be barred from university housing and dining halls.

As an additional condition of suspension, some students also lost their eligibility to be employed by the university, a penalty that cut off the income of graduate student employees who were suspended.

“I don’t know what comes next,” said Prahlad Iyengar, a first-year graduate student who said he had lost his income and housing as a result of his suspension. “I have friends and a community, and I can find a place, but there are people affected who are housing- and food-insecure, some with children.”

Dr. Kornbluth was one of three university leaders who were harshly criticized last year over their testimony in a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism. The other two, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned in the fallout.

Although Ms. Kornbluth did not face the same level of criticism, hundreds of M.I.T. alumni signed a letter calling for the university to take stronger actions to combat campus antisemitism. Last week, a group of concerned parents wrote to administrators detailing the “poisonous” environment they said their children had faced since the encampment began on April 21.

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Officers clear a pro-Palestinian encampment at Penn.

Sahir Muhammad, a 23-year-old Temple University graduate who had joined the protesters before dawn on Friday, said that he was lifted off his feet and carried out of the encampment when officers saw that he was shooting video.

“The police literally gripped me up and took me off the premises,” he said.

Mr. Muhammad was taken to the corner of 34th and Walnut streets, where he joined a group of protesters who were chanting and trying to block police vans from leaving. His video shows a group of roughly 40 protesters on College Green standing a few yards from a line of police in riot gear.

The arrests came a day after Gov. Josh Shapiro said it was “past time” for Penn’s administration to clear the encampment. “Over the last 24 hours at the University of Pennsylvania, the situation has gotten even more unstable and out of control,” he said, speaking at an unrelated news conference near Pittsburgh.

The governor, a Democrat, is a nonvoting member of Penn’s board of trustees.

In a letter sent Friday morning to Penn’s staff, the interim president, J. Larry Jameson said that “extraordinary circ*mstances” had forced the administration’s hand. He added that a university ID card would be needed to enter the campus green. “Passion for a cause cannot supersede the safety and operations of our university,” he wrote.

Mr. Jameson became Penn’s interim president late last year after his predecessor, Elizabeth Magill, resigned in the wake of harsh criticism of her testimony at a congressional hearing. In the hearing, Ms. Magill and the presidents of Harvard and M.I.T. were accused by Republicans of failing to crack down on campus antisemitism.

In a statement after the arrests on Friday morning, the executive committee of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned what it called “repressive action” by the school’s administration and “a cowardly, shameful attempt to silence and punish speech.”

The committee demanded that Penn drop all of its pending disciplinary cases against the student protesters and the “mandatory temporary leaves of absence” it imposed on six of them on Thursday.

Justin Seward, a 20-year-old Penn undergraduate, said that he believed the university’s actions were contrary to the school’s mission and driven by pressure from donors and Congress. “I think they were disruptive,” he said of the demonstrators, “but I think that’s the whole point of protesting.”

— Mattathias Schwartz Reporting from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Police clear protesters from the University of Arizona hours before commencement.

“This evening, police vehicles have been spiked, and rocks and water bottles have been thrown at officers and university staff,” school officials said. “Those who have violated the law are subject to arrest and prosecution. University officials have taken action to ensure the safety of Centennial Hall convocation attendees.”

The campus incidents page on the university’s website said that “chemical munitions” were deployed as police were dispersing the crowd and the encampment was cleared shortly before 4 a.m. Eastern time. The clearing of the encampment came less than 24 hours before the school’s scheduled graduation ceremony at 7:30 p.m. local time on Friday.

A spokesman for the school said on Friday that there were no reported injuries and that two people who were affiliated with the school were arrested. One of the groups that organized the protest posted on Instagram early Friday asking people to show up outside Pima County Jail “until all our friends are free.” In another post, the group stated that two faculty members had been arrested.

This was the second time in less than a month that law enforcement had disbanded an encampment on the school’s campus. Several weeks ago, protesters set up an encampment that was cleared on April 30. Four protesters were arrested that night, including an undergraduate student, a graduate student and two people unaffiliated with the university, the school said.

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Faculty at The New School set up an encampment.

One green-and-white tent had “faculty against genocide” written in red on it. A number of posters were affixed to the building’s windows, including one that read “All Eyes on Rafah,” an area of Gaza where many have taken refuge and where Israel has made incursions and is threatening a ground invasion.

“We call on faculty across all universities to escalate and take risk in solidarity with the student movement, their demands, and the people of Palestine,” the protesting faculty wrote in a social media post. A spokesman for the group declined to comment further on Thursday.

Faculty unrest at the New School, which has about 10,000 students, has been a feature of the historically progressive university in recent years. Around 90 percent of the school’s faculty are part-time adjunct professors, with some earning about $6,000 per course. A strike by part-time faculty demanding better wages shut down classes for three weeks in 2022.

The New School’s faculty encampment sprang up as more than 2,700 people across the country have been arrested or detained in recent weeks for their involvement in similar encampments on college campuses.

New School students had set up the university’s first indoor encampment last month to show their solidarity with Palestinians and publicize calls for the university to divest from companies connected to Israel, among other demands. In support, New School faculty passed a vote on May 2 in favor of the school divesting.

The next day, New School officials called in the police to quash the student-led protest there, leading to the arrests of 45 students.

University leaders have made some concessions, however. On Thursday, the university’s interim president, Donna Shalala, said in a statement that the school had decided against pursuing criminal charges against the students. She also announced that it would reconstitute a committee on “investor responsibility to provide input to the Board of Trustees.” That committee would include faculty and student members.

Members of the New School’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors had earlier passed a vote of no confidence in Dr. Shalala, who has expressed her support for Israel in the past and, in a 2018 interview, said she was opposed to divestment.

The faculty named their encampment after Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian professor and writer who was killed in December 2023 during an Israeli airstrike on northern Gaza. On Thursday afternoon, around a dozen protesters marched in a circle outside the building, the New School University Center. The protesters now refer to it as Bisan Hall, in honor of Bisan Owda, a Palestinian journalist who has been reporting from Gaza.

The demonstrators chanted, “The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be.” It was unclear whether any of those protesters were faculty members.

Later in the evening, several people were arrested outside the school, according to protesters, during an episode in which they said they were sprayed with a chemical and the police wrongfully detained a person thought to have been involved. Police officials said that 13 people were arrested but that they did not have any information about a chemical being sprayed.

Jadyce Wash, 22, a senior fashion student from Paterson, N.J., was leaving the building on Thursday after giving a presentation on bags she had designed. She said she thought it was “amazing” the faculty was standing their ground.

Ms. Wash, who has not been involved in the protests, said the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian protests were unsatisfying.

“It’s a little intimidating, honestly coming into the building every day and having police on every corner, but I think they should continue,” Ms. Wash said of the faculty protesters.

Dr. Shalala, in her message to the university, said the university had not requested that the police patrol the area, noting that the police “will not enter any university building without our consent.”

Some faculty members have given students the option to attend protests or not attend class during finals week. But a group of students leaving the building were frustrated by the disruption. One first-year student said it felt unfair, both to students and to parents paying money for classes that were then canceled.

The school has also moved some graduation ceremonies off campus.

Trishia Rinaldo, 22, a graduating senior from Honduras who has not been involved in the protests, said it was encouraging to see the faculty encampment. But, she added, graduation was “a touchy subject” because the coronavirus pandemic disrupted her high school graduation in 2020.

“I don’t want to have my graduation canceled,” Ms. Rinaldo said.

New York’s commencement season opens with barricades and empty campuses.

The police barricades that still remain outside many college buildings are a visceral reminder of the intense divisions on campus, a marked contrast with the usual festive mood around the city each May, when thousands of students walk the city streets in their robes and regalia.

At Columbia, where a police crackdown on a large Gaza solidarity encampment on April 18 sparked an international student movement to pitch tents in protest, parents of graduating students peered through locked gates on Thursday at the green lawns and empty steps where their children’s commencement should have been.

Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president, announced on Monday that the school was canceling its main commencement ceremony, largely for security reasons. Instead, each of its 19 colleges will hold a separate ceremony, many at the school’s large athletics complex some 100 blocks north.

The first of those celebrations began at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, with the School of Professional Studies ceremony at the athletics complex.

Hundreds of family members and friends filled the seats at Columbia’s soccer stadium. Many held flowers and balloons for their graduates.

Around the outdoor event tent were giant screens that displayed photos of Columbia students in their caps and gowns. However, slides also shown on the screen were not edited to reflect the ceremony’s new location and instructed guests to use Hamilton and Pulitzer Halls for access to indoor restrooms.

Police officers were present outside of the stadium but not on the field. Instead, a handful of private security officers roamed around the tent.

After almost two hours, the graduation ceremony for the Columbia School of Professional Studies concluded. Graduates, family and friends danced as Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” played. There were no protests, although a couple of students wore kaffiyehs alongside their graduation stoles. One student waved a Ukrainian flag as she walked across the stage.

Amoura Whitney, 24, was among those who graduated on Friday. She said she was frustrated by the last-minute cancellation of the main graduation ceremony. “It definitely sucks because my immediate family was going to go to that one,” said Ms. Whitney, who graduated with a masters in technology management.

The ceremony for the School of Social Work will be held there at 4:30 in the afternoon.

N.Y.U. will hold its large commencement ceremony at Yankee Stadium next Wednesday. The New School will hold its commencement at Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens next Friday. Graduations at other colleges continue through May 23.

At the end of a typical school year, Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus becomes a sweeping venue with bleacher seating and some 15,000 graduates and their guests arrayed around the steps of Low Library. The university president takes center stage, officially conferring degrees on the graduates from the school’s different colleges.

This year, it was not clear which of the 19 celebrations Dr. Shafik would attend. Students say they have rarely spotted her on campus since the police arrived on April 30 to clear out pro-Palestinian protesters from Hamilton Hall, a building they had occupied.

A Columbia spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, said she has been “on campus regularly” and noted that she had released a video to “make sure they heard from her, whether on campus or not, as students take final exams.”

The sidewalks in front of her official residence have been blocked off by barricades for about a week, after students gathered in front of her building at midnight and yelled at length for a noisy finals-week tradition known as the “primal scream.”

Many students on campus are deeply upset at how the semester has gone, and many say the administration has made repeated missteps in its handling of the student protests.

“The community’s completely destroyed,” said Zohar Ford, 19, a freshman who was helping a friend move out of a freshman dorm on Tuesday on the largely locked-down campus.

“It’s 65 degrees out,” he said. “Warm, sunny, brilliant. This is supposed to be our finals week. Do you see anyone on the lawns playing around having fun? There’s nothing.” Over the past week, he said, campus “has been a ghost town that has felt like a police state.”

Dr. Shafik has not made an official announcement to the Columbia community since last week, when she explained that she had called in the police to remove protesters from Hamilton Hall because the escalation had brought “safety risks to an intolerable level.” She also called for civility to return to campus.

She has not publicly acknowledged the allegations, made by protesters and some faculty members, that there was police brutality during the crackdown. Nor has she commented on how one officer, during the operation, accidentally fired his gun, hitting a wall. Instead, in her announcement, Dr. Shafik thanked “the N.Y.P.D. for their incredible professionalism and support.”

On Thursday, she wrote an opinion essay for The Financial Times that look a long view on how universities can weather outside influences that seek to harden differences on campus. She also called on schools to “better define the boundaries between free speech and discrimination.”

“Rather than tearing ourselves apart, universities must rebuild the bonds within ourselves and between society and the academy based on our shared values and on what we do best: education, research, service and public engagement,” she said.

Dr. Shafik also wrote a letter to faculty members on Thursday, where she said “I know that many of you are angry, and that you feel let down by me and by other University leaders for many different reasons.”

The university spokeswoman, Ms. Slater, said in a statement that Dr. Shafik has spent the week consulting with members of the Columbia community, including the faculty, in private meetings “to allow for candid conversations.”

She faces more difficulties ahead.

More than 200 faculty members at Columbia and Barnard have “actively pledged to strike,” said Rebecca Jordan-Young, a Barnard professor, during a news conference on Friday.

A strike at this time of year would mean faculty members would still engage in student-facing work, but would stop doing work for the university, such as creating and finalizing department budgets for the fall or doing work on committees.

“There is an assumption that the work of the university, even for faculty, closes at graduation and that is just not the case,” said Shana Redmond, a Columbia professor, adding, “We are stopping this constant request for labor until such time as these demands are met.”

The demands included removing the police from campus and granting amnesty for students facing disciplinary action for pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy, Ms. Redmond said.

And about 1,000 professors and lecturers at Columbia, in the faculty of arts and sciences, are currently considering a vote of no confidence in Dr. Shafik, with the final votes to be cast on May 16.

Lola Fadulu and Liset Cruz contributed reporting.

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Colson Whitehead cancels his commencement speech at UMass Amherst after arrests of protesters.

The school said that the ceremony would proceed without a commencement speaker.

“We respect Mr. Whitehead’s position and regret that he will not be addressing the Class of 2024,” Ed Blaguszewski, a spokesman for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement.

The police arrested about 130 people at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Tuesday night after pro-Palestinian protesters refused to remove their encampments.

Mr. Whitehead, whose novels include “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” is an extraordinarily decorated author. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 2020 and 2017, and was a finalist in 2002. He also won the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is also something of shape-shifter, moving easily between disparate genres. His book “Sag Harbor” was a coming-of-age novel, “Zone One” was a postapocalyptic zombie story, and “The Underground Railroad” followed a young enslaved woman who escapes from a Georgia plantation.

C Pam Zhang, the author of “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” and Safiya Umoja Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression” and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, have also withdrawn from commencement speeches this year, according to the website LitHub. Both were scheduled to speak at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

How Columbia University lost support from the Russell Berrie Foundation.

Months passed, and the foundation, which has donated about $86 million to Columbia over the years, did not like what it saw. Frustrated and flummoxed by the sustained tumult at Columbia, the foundation suspended its giving to the university late last month.

Columbia has spent months under siege, bombarded by public demands from protesters, faculty members, alumni, members of Congress and religious groups since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 that precipitated the war. But the foundation’s admonition, included in correspondence that it shared with The New York Times, illustrates the pressures that Columbia administrators have also had to confront in private with donors, with longstanding relationships and enormous sums at stake.

The Berrie Foundation’s pause threatens to cost Columbia tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. And it represents a sobering turnabout for a foundation so prolific at Columbia that it underwrote both the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center.

“It’s a painful decision for us to have come to this point where we have to tell them, ‘There’s a disconnect between your values and ours,’” Angelica Berrie, the president of the foundation’s board, said in an interview. The turmoil at Columbia, she said, had left foundation leaders “to weigh the passion my husband had for diabetes against the greater values of our foundation about pluralism, bridge-building and the fact that our Jewish values infuse our philanthropy.”

A Columbia spokeswoman, Samantha A. Slater, said in a statement that the university “values its longstanding relationship with the Russell Berrie Foundation, and is grateful for their generosity and support of innumerable and impactful diabetes initiatives throughout the years.”

She added: “As we have relayed to foundation leaders, we are committed to sustained, concrete action to make Columbia a community where antisemitism has no place and Jewish students feel safe, valued and are able to thrive.”

As protests have raged on campuses across the country, other leading donors have warned universities that future gifts are at risk. Last week, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht eviscerated Brown University for pledging to consider divestment from Israel, and suspended donations to the school. Marc Rowan, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, led a donor uprising at the University of Pennsylvania last year, and Robert K. Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, recently put future contributions to Columbia on hold.

But as the Berrie Foundation, whose giving has often been tied to Israel and Jewish causes in the United States, considered its options after the first protests began, it commanded neither the public clout of Mr. Kraft nor the swagger of Mr. Rowan or Mr. Sternlicht.

What it did have was a quieter influence that it had cultivated at Columbia for decades, since Russell Berrie, who built a fortune with a company whose wares included stuffed animals and troll dolls, received diabetes care there. In the years before the Bronx-born Mr. Berrie died in 2002, the foundation began to pour millions into the university.

Within five weeks of the Hamas attack on Israel last October, though, foundation trustees were alarmed by the pro-Palestinian protests and rhetoric at Columbia, which some Jewish students believed was becoming a hub of antisemitism.

The board discussed events at the university during its meeting on Nov. 9, but it kept its misgivings out of view. Scott Berrie, the board’s vice president and a son of Russell Berrie, compared the internal mood then to a collective “deep sigh.”

A day later, Columbia suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, a step that heartened foundation officials.

But the foundation still began a private campaign to pressure the university to do more, including during a Nov. 29 meeting with Dr. Shafik, who had taken over as Columbia’s president only in July.

Foundation executives were cautious, wary of being perceived as improperly meddlesome. They refrained, records show, from demanding that Columbia embrace a specific new policy or tactic. Rather, in a strategy familiar to many higher education leaders, they adopted a more subtle plan, describing their vision for Columbia in sweeping terms and nudging the university toward their interpretations of already-proclaimed principles, like protection from harassment.

“Considering our conversation, we’re curious whether your administration will enforce the policies you’ve established to prevent speech and conduct that could constitute harassment and appropriately discipline those responsible,” Scott Berrie wrote in an email to Dr. Shafik on Dec. 14.

“In this escalating climate of hate speech,” he added, “we look to Columbia for leadership that will inspire other universities to act with moral courage.”

But in January, Ms. Berrie, her board still unnerved, issued her warning to Columbia. Mr. Berrie, himself a Columbia alumnus, recalled that the idea was to “make it clear that this is an uncomfortable position for us to be in as funders, when the values of our foundation are being so severely tested by what’s happening on the campus.”

Dr. Shafik replied on Jan. 24, five days later, making no explicit mention of the funding threat but detailing her efforts to ensure “a safe and respectful environment” for students, which she characterized as “my highest priority.”

Columbia’s troubles, though, were only growing. By April 17, when Dr. Shafik arrived on Capitol Hill to testify before a House committee, Columbia students were in open defiance of the administration and gathering at a new protest encampment on the college green.

Dr. Shafik called in the New York Police Department the next day to empty the encampment, and the university lurched to the center of the protest movement still unfolding across the country.

The decision to bring in the police infuriated many people on campus. The crackdown, though, did not fully assuage the Berrie Foundation’s fears. The board, disturbed by the vitriol on campus, decided unanimously on April 26 that the foundation’s giving would stop for now. The chaos that had enveloped Columbia for part of April, Ms. Berrie said, made the decision easier, if still deeply painful.

“For us, this didn’t start with the encampment — this has been an escalation of faculty with their ideological positions in the classrooms, Jewish students unable to participate fully in university life because of what they believe or who they are,” said Idana Goldberg, the foundation’s chief executive.

Most immediately, the pause affects $153,000 that the foundation had expected to put toward a diabetes research grant. A lasting suspension, though, could have far more costly consequences: The foundation, which is expected to wind down its operations in about a decade, has been weighing another gift of at least $10 million.

Daniel W. Jones, a former chancellor of the University of Mississippi who previously served as the dean of the medical school there, said it was “uncommon” for a donor to cut off support tied to medical research and care. Such causes, he said, are often seen as sacrosanct and insulated from the day-to-day turmoil of a major university.

“Rarely did I have someone who was interested in supporting research tie it to anything other than the research agenda,” Dr. Jones said.

Mr. Berrie acknowledged the struggle of picking among priorities. But, he said, “at some point, the rubber has to hit the road.” (Mr. Berrie said he did not believe the foundation’s decision would disrupt patient care, an assessment shared by Columbia officials.)

After the board made its move, he said, he did not feel resolve or relief — only regret.

“There’s a phrase I heard that’s like, ‘Where your attention goes, your energy flows,’” Mr. Berrie said. “And the fact that we are spending so much on energy on this rather than spending energy on bettering the world, is a regret.”

In a separate interview, Ms. Berrie resisted setting clear benchmarks for Columbia’s funding to be reinstated.

“We cannot dictate what happens in an institution of learning,” she said on Monday. “But we will watch and see whether their actions actually rectify the situation.”

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U.S.C.’s valedictorian graduates without a speech, but with cheers.

In mere weeks, Ms. Tabassum has gone from a relatively obscure undergraduate at the U.S.C. Viterbi School of Engineering to a national symbol of free speech and a voice for the Palestinian cause. She still has critics — a conservative nonprofit paid for a moving billboard near campus this week that attacked her — but has also won over students and academics who felt that she had been unfairly treated by the university.

Since the school canceled Ms. Tabassum’s speech, there have been protests over the decision and against the war in Gaza. The first of the demonstrations resulted in a swift crackdown ordered by the school president, Carol Folt, and 93 arrests by the Los Angeles Police Department.

A subsequent protest was allowed to linger on campus for days, a sign that Dr. Folt and U.S.C. leaders had softened their approach. But that was also shut down early Sunday, this time without arrests.

“The world is in angst and it is in pain,” Yannis Yortsos, the dean of the engineering school, told students on Friday. “International events take place thousands of miles away in different parts of the world, but we feel them here on our campuses. Through it, you demonstrated dignity, moral compass and true grace.”

Some universities have faced protest disruptions during their graduation ceremonies, including on Friday at the University of California, Berkeley, where some law school graduates chanted during speeches.But the engineering graduation at U.S.C. on Friday was drama free. There were no outbursts and no visible signs of protest, aside from a few students who wore keffiyehs, a checkered scarf that has become a symbol of the pro-Palestinian movement.

Still, traces of the turbulence of the last few weeks could still be seen across the campus on Friday. Entrances to the campus were tightly controlled and signs erected along campus walkways warned that the university reserved the right to eject anyone who disrupted graduation ceremonies.

Ms. Tabassum did not give a speech at the engineering school ceremony on Friday and declined to speak to a reporter after the event. Despite the intense focus on her, she seemed like any other graduate, smiling and taking photos with friends, and cheering with fellow classmates when a speaker singled out their degree program.

In the end, Ms. Tabassum may have had the last word. The Daily Trojan, the student newspaper, published what was billed as the speech that she had hoped to give. After initial greetings, Ms. Tabassum blacked out the rest of the contents aside from offering congratulations and thanks.

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

— Jonathan Wolfe Reporting from the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles.