School officials said more than 200 people were arrested.
Pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US campuses for weeks were further muted on Friday following a series of clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern directive from the White House to restore order.
Manhattan police cleared an encampment at New York University after sunrise, with video posted to social media by an officer showing protesters leaving their tents and dispersing when ordered to do so.
The scene appeared relatively calm compared to crackdowns on other campuses across the country – and some around the world – where protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza have multiplied in recent weeks.
University administrators, who have tried to balance the right to protest with complaints of violence and hate speech, have increasingly called on police to clear protesters before end-of-year exams and graduation ceremonies.
At the University of Chicago, the school president said talks with protesters about a settlement had failed and indicated that, as a result, the university might intervene in an encampment there.
The news came the same day that dozens of counterprotesters waving American flags showed up and confronted the school’s pro-Palestinian group, but police separated the two sides, local media reported.
More than 2,000 arrests have been made in the last two weeks in the United States, some during violent clashes with police, giving rise to accusations of excessive force.
President Joe Biden, who has faced pressure from all political sides over the Gaza conflict, made his first expansive comments on the protests on Thursday, saying “order must prevail.”
“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or suppress dissent,” Biden said in a brief speech at the White House.
“But we are also not a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”
His comments came hours after police attacked protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles, which saw a violent clash when counter-protesters attacked a fortified camp there.
A large police contingent forcibly cleared the sprawling camp on Thursday morning, while flash bangs were fired to disperse the crowd gathered outside.
School officials said more than 200 people were arrested.
On the US West Coast on Friday, protesters at a camp at the University of California, Riverside were disbanded at midnight after an agreement with administrators. The agreement came after similar commitments at New Jersey’s Rutgers University on Thursday and Rhode Island’s Brown University earlier in the week.
Worldwide
Republicans have accused Biden of being soft on what they see as anti-Semitic sentiment among protesters, while he faces opposition in his own party for his strong support for Israel’s military offensive.
“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” Biden said.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona repeated the condemnation in a letter to university leaders on Friday, pledging to investigate reports of anti-Semitism “aggressively,” CNN reported.
Meanwhile, similar student protests have emerged in countries around the world, including Australia, France, Mexico and Canada.
In Paris, police intervened to free students who were organizing a demonstration at Sciences Po University.
A camp has grown up at Canada’s prestigious McGill University, where administrators on Wednesday demanded it be removed “without delay.”
However, police had not yet taken action against the site as of Friday.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas militants carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP report using official Israeli data.
Israel estimates that 128 hostages remain in Gaza. The Israeli military says 35 of them are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-administered territory.
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