Harvard University again threatened suspensions for pro-Palestinian protesters if they don’t leave a campus encampment, escalating tensions in an impasse that’s left the school as one of the few elite colleges that hasn’t forcibly removed demonstrators.

The Ivy League university has so far resisted calling in the police to clear the encampment, a move that President Alan Garber has said would require a “very, very high bar.” That’s in contrast to other schools that have cracked down on protesters ahead of commencement ceremonies, a marquee event for graduating students, parents and powerful donors.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania cleared similar encampments early Friday, resulting in more than 40 arrests at the two schools, following a police sweep at Columbia University last week.

The protesters want the universities to – among other demands – cut their financial and academic ties to Israel, moves that are aimed at pressuring the country to stop its military operation in Gaza. Israel launched a counterattack that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in the enclave after a deadly Oct. 7 assault on the Jewish state by Hamas. The group, designated a terrorist organization by the US, killed more than 1,200 people and is still holding hostages.

While some schools such as Brown University and Northwestern have agreed with protesters to hold discussions on divestment in exchange for an end to encampments, other rich institutions like Harvard, Columbia and Penn have rebuffed such demands. Garber has said he “will not entertain” calls for divestment.

Rich donors from Robert Kraft to Marc Rowan and Barry Sternlicht have expressed furious opposition over the schools’ handling of the protests. Many university administrators have long viewed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel as antisemitic because it calls into question the legitimacy of the Jewish state and singles out the policies of one country.

Read more: Colleges Ripped for Agreeing to Hear Israel Divestment Demands

Protesters didn’t resist police action at Penn and MIT on Friday morning, the schools said. Penn said its officers and the Philadelphia Police Department arrested 33 protesters for defiant trespass. Nine students were among those arrested and later released, a Penn spokesperson said, adding that heavy gauge chains and smaller chains that could be used as weapons had been recovered upon a search.

MIT Police arrested 10 protesters. President Sally Kornbluth said she had “no choice but to remove such a high-risk flashpoint at the very center of our campus.”

Harvard is trying to prepare for upcoming campus events on the Yard, where the encampment currently stands, including the main commencement May 23, an event that typically draws more than 30,000 people.

The process of placing protesters on involuntary leave continues to move forward, a spokesperson for the school said Friday. Suspended students wouldn’t be allowed on campus or in Harvard housing, Garber said this week.

“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 spokesperson said.

The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance slammed “Harvard’s fecklessness” and urged its members to “encourage bold action” by the school’s leadership. The alumni group said the encampment should be disbanded immediately, “by force if necessary,” and the students behind it expelled.

The student group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine said early Friday that Garber rejected a proposal “that would move Harvard forward on transparency and ethical investment” in exchange for taking down their encampment.

The spokesperson for the school said Garber offered to arrange a meeting between students and a member of a shareholder responsibility committee, but only if the protest came to a voluntary end.

“President Garber has made clear the university’s commitment to reasoned discussion of complex issues, including the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “However, as he said, ‘Initiating these difficult and crucial conversations does not require, or justify, interfering with the educational environment and Harvard’s academic mission.'”

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Columbia canceled in-person classes, dozens of protesters were arrested at New York University and Yale, and the gates to Harvard Yard were closed to the public on April 22 as some of the most prestigious U.S. universities sought to defuse campus tensions over Israel’s war with Hamas.

More than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia’s green were arrested last week, and similar encampments have sprouted up at universities around the country as schools struggle with where to draw the line between allowing free expression while maintaining safe and inclusive campuses.

At New York University, an encampment set up by students swelled to hundreds of protesters throughout the day Monday. The school said it warned the crowd to leave, then called in the police after the scene became disorderly and the university said it learned of reports of “intimidating chants and several antisemitic incidents.” Shortly after 8:30 p.m., officers began making arrests.

“It’s a really outrageous crackdown by the university to allow the police to arrest students on our own campus,” said New York University law student Byul Yoon.

“Antisemitism is never ok. That’s absolutely not what we stand for and that’s why there are so many Jewish comrades that are here with us today,” Yoon said

The protests have pitted students against one another, with pro-Palestinian students demanding that their schools condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza and divest from companies that sell weapons to Israel. Some Jewish students, meanwhile, say much of the criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitism and made them feel unsafe, and they point out that Hamas is still holding hostages taken during the group’s Oct. 7 invasion.

Tensions remained high Monday at Columbia, where the campus gates were locked to anyone without a school ID and where protests broke out both on campus and outside.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina who was visiting Columbia with three other Jewish members of Congress, told reporters after meeting with students from the Jewish Law Students Association that there was “an enormous encampment of people” who had taken up about a third of the green.

“We saw signs indicating that Israel should be destroyed,” she said after leaving the Morningside Heights campus. Columbia announced Monday that courses at the Morningside campus will offer virtual options for students when possible, citing safety as their top priority.

A woman inside the campus gates led about two dozen protesters on the street outside in a chant of, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” — a charged phrase that can mean vastly different things to different groups. A small group of pro-Israel counter demonstrators protested nearby.

University President Minouche Shafik said in a message to the school community Monday that she was “deeply saddened” by what was happening on campus.

“To deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps, I am announcing that all classes will be held virtually on Monday,” Shafik wrote, noting that students who don’t live on campus should stay away.

Protests have roiled many college campuses since Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. During the ensuing war, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, and at least two-thirds of the dead are children and women.

On Sunday, Elie Buechler, a rabbi for the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative at Columbia, sent a WhatsApp message to nearly 300 Jewish students recommending they go home until it’s safer for them on campus.

The latest developments came ahead of the Monday evening start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Nicholas Baum, a 19-year-old Jewish freshman who lives in a Jewish theological seminary building two blocks from Columbia’s campus, said protesters over the weekend were “calling for Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel.” He said some of the protesters shouting antisemitic slurs were not students.

“Jews are scared at Columbia. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “There’s been so much vilification of Zionism, and it has spilled over into the vilification of Judaism.”

The protest encampment sprung up at Columbia on Wednesday, the same day that Shafik faced bruising criticism at a congressional hearing from Republicans who said she hadn’t done enough to fight antisemitism. Two other Ivy League presidents resigned months ago following widely criticized testimony they gave to the same committee.

In her statement Monday, Shafik said the Middle East conflict is terrible and that she understands that many are experiencing deep moral distress.

“But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,” Shafik wrote.

Over the coming days, a working group of deans, school administrators and faculty will try to find a resolution to the university crisis, noted Shafik, who didn’t say when in-person classes would resume.

U.S. House Republicans from New York urged Shafik to resign, saying in a letter Monday that she had failed to provide a safe learning environment in recent days as “anarchy has engulfed the campus.”

In Massachusetts, a sign said Harvard Yard was closed to the public Monday. It said structures, including tents and tables, were only allowed into the yard with prior permission. “Students violating these policies are subject to disciplinary action,” the sign said. Security guards were checking people for school IDs.

The same day, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee said the university’s administration suspended their group. In the suspension notice provided by the student organization, the university wrote that the group’s April 19 demonstration had violated school policy, and that the organization failed to attend required trainings after they were previously put on probation.

The Palestine Solidary Committee said in a statement that they were suspended over technicalities and that the university hadn’t provided written clarification on the university’s policies when asked.

“Harvard has shown us time and again that Palestine remains the exception to free speech,” the group wrote in a statement.

Harvard did not respond to an email request for comment.

At Yale, police officers arrested about 45 protesters and charged them with misdemeanor trespassing, said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a New Haven police spokesperson. All were being released on promises to appear in court later, he said.

Protesters set up tents on Beinecke Plaza on Friday and demonstrated over the weekend, calling on Yale to end any investments in defense companies that do business with Israel.

In a statement to the campus community on Sunday, Yale President Peter Salovey said university officials had spoken to the student protesters multiple times about the school’s policies and guidelines, including those regarding speech and allowing access to campus spaces.

School officials said they gave protesters until the end of the weekend to leave Beinecke Plaza. The said they again warned protesters Monday morning and told them that they could face arrest and discipline, including suspension, before police moved in.

A large group of demonstrators regathered after Monday’s arrests at Yale and blocked a street near campus, Bruckhart said. There were no reports of any violence or injuries.

Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT graduate student studying electrical engineering, was among about two dozen students who set up a tent encampment on the school’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus Sunday evening. They are calling for a cease-fire and are protesting what they describe as MIT’s “complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said.

“MIT has not even called for a cease-fire, and that’s a demand we have for sure,” Iyengar said.

New York:

Prestigious Harvard University said Wednesday it had removed human skin from the binding of a book held for over 90 years at one of its libraries.

A copy of the 19th-century book “Des Destinées de l’Ame” — or Destinies of the Soul, a meditation on life after death — was found in 2014 to be bound in the skin of a woman.

Harvard said it had removed the binding and noted “past failures in its stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding.”

The university said it was consulting with French authorities “to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains.”

Harvard — widely considered the oldest college in the United States — had indulged interest in the morbid story of the book, calling the 2014 discovery “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike.”

Anthropodermic bibliopegy — the practice of binding books in human skin — was once a relatively common practice, Harvard said in a 2014 blog post.

The university said at the time that Dr. Ludovic Bouland, the first owner of the book written by French author Arsene Houssaye, had taken skin from the body of a mentally ill woman, who died of a heart attack, at a hospital where he worked.

Bouland was said to have told Houssaye in a note: “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”

In Wednesday’s media release, Harvard said its stewardship practices related to the book had “failed to meet the level of ethical standards to which it subscribes.”

It noted that, following scientific analysis confirming it was bound in human skin, the library made blog posts which “utilized a sensationalistic, morbid, and humorous tone that fueled similar international media coverage.”

In 2022, Harvard released a report that identified more than 20,000 human remains in its various collections, which ranged from skeletons to teeth, hair and bone fragments.

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