U.S.C. Holds Graduation Event With No Mention of Protests or War (2024)

Pinned

Here’s the latest on campus protests.

In Washington, the police said early Friday morning that at least one person had been arrested at a protest at George Washington University before demonstrators dispersed. Late on Thursday, police officers shut down a street blocks from the White House as scores of protesters shouted pro-Palestinian slogans and pitched tents in front of the home of the university’s president.

The raucous scene was the latest outbreak of unrest over the war in Gaza that has roiled campuses across the country, upending commencement plans and frustrating administrators. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania became the latest public official to call for a resolution, saying a demonstration at the University of Pennsylvania had grown “unstable and out of control.”

“More rules have been violated. More laws have been broken,” Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat who is a nonvoting member of Penn’s board of trustees, said of the expanding protest in Philadelphia. “That is absolutely unacceptable.”

More than 2,700 people have been arrested since April 18 at demonstrations on American college campuses, according to New York Times tracking data.

Here is the latest:

• The author Colson Whitehead posted on social media that he had withdrawn from speaking at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, after more than 130 demonstrators were arrested there this week. “Calling the cops on peaceful protesters is a shameful act,” Mr. Whitehead wrote.

• The president of Cornell University, Martha E. Pollack, said on Thursday that she was resigning, making Cornell the fourth of eight Ivy League universities now undergoing a leadership change. Though there has been controversy on campus over disciplinary action Cornell has taken against pro-Palestinian student protesters, she said the decision was “mine and mine alone.”

• The campus arrests this week included 33 at George Washington University. The arrests happened hours before the mayor of the city, Muriel Bowser, was to testify before Congress about the handling of the pro-Palestinian encampment at the university. The hearing was canceled.

U.S.C. celebrates in a brief moment of joy with no mention of campus tumult.

But he did not get into specifics, and for most of the audience of about 20,000 graduates and their relatives, the evening was notable for its departure from the angst of the past month.

The party was held in lieu of the typical pomp and pageantry-filled commencement at the campus. It took place three weeks after the university canceled a speech by its valedictorian, who is Muslim, which touched off intense campus protests. The school dropped its main stage commencement, saying it could not provide the level of additional security that would be needed.

Despite the pyrotechnics and thundering music, Thursday night’s audience was rather subdued, with much of the 78,000-seat stadium empty. Celebrities, professors and an Olympian wished graduates well, mostly on videos that played on the big screen, giving the ceremony an air of a pandemic-era Zoom call. Much of the action took place in the chilly night sky, where drones spelled out “U.S.C.” and fireworks exploded over Los Angeles as thousands of faces looked up.

The “Trojan Family Graduate Celebration,” as the event was billed, was announced 10 days after the university canceled the main ceremony, saying that it could not ensure the safety of more than 60,000 people.

“I’m just trying to be grateful,” said Princess Isis Lang, 22, who is graduating with a degree in musical theater. She said she was critical of the administration’s decision to cancel the speech but was trying to enjoy what normalcy she could and celebrate with her family.

When the university canceled the speech, the school said there had been emails and other electronic communications warning of a plan to disrupt the ceremony, including at least one targeting the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum.

The school’s president, Carol Folt, has faced scrutiny for that decision, which was delivered after pro-Israel groups condemned Ms. Tabassum’s selection and pointed to a social media post by the student sympathetic to Palestinians. Ms. Tabassum, many of her fellow students and some faculty members said she was being silenced.

In the days and weeks that followed, protesters tried to establish an encampment in Alumni Park on campus to criticize the war in Gaza and the cancellation of the speech. A scuffle between protesters and the campus police eventually led to the school calling in the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers arrested 93 people and cleared the central campus.

On Wednesday, U.S.C.’s academic senate voted to censure Ms. Folt, citing “widespread dissatisfaction and concern among the faculty” about her decisions over the past few weeks. Many parents and students have been upset by the school’s cancellation of its main commencement ceremony and the high security at this week’s celebration.

“It’s been a mess,” said Juanpablo Sanchez, 21, an acting and cinematography major. Mr. Sanchez was surrounded by eight family members who had flown in from Texas, Arizona and Mexico, and wore matching T-shirts with his name for the occasion. Mr. Sanchez said that his high school graduation four years earlier had been curtailed by the pandemic.

“Maybe this is a little bit of a taste of the real world because a lot of time things don’t go the way we plan,” he said.

Victoria Kim contributed reporting.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Not a word about politics, protests, or valedictorians. But lots of pyrotechnics and “Fight on!”

Inside the Coliseum the seats are as full of parents and grandparents as they are with students, and things are pretty subdued.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The heavy police presence near the protest is a stark reminder of the tension surrounding the removal of the student encampment from George Washington on Wednesday, when the police used pepper spray and arrested more than 30 people.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Union Theological Seminary will divest from holdings that profit from the war in Gaza.

The seminary, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, is a historically Christian but increasingly interreligious institution with a reputation for being devoted to social justice. It is adjacent to the main campus of Columbia University, where police were called to clear away protesters and the main graduation ceremony was canceled for security reasons. The seminary was one of a few Columbia affiliates to condemn Nemat Shafik, the university’s president, for bringing the police to campus, and for suspending more than 100 student protesters.

“We want this war to stop, and we want the killing to stop, the massive crushing violence to end,” Dr. Jones said in an interview Thursday. “We’re trying very clearly not to weigh in on, not to make statements that are explicitly anti-Zionist.”

The seminary trustees voted on the new policy on Thursday and said that they were “revising the section of our investment policy statement section pertaining to responsible investing to include an overt reference to the Israel-Palestine hostilities.”

The trustees said they have “have taken steps to identify all investments, both domestic and global, that support and profit from the present killing of innocent civilians in Palestine.” Dr. Jones said that holdings in companies doing business in Israel but not profiting from the war — like, she suggested, a restaurant chain — would not be affected.

She said that the seminary had been working on the decision and researching its portfolio since November. Students would be part of the process, the trustees said. They did not offer a timetable, but parsing companies can be complex and divestment generally takes time.

The demand for schools to disclose their holdings with Israel has been a rallying cry at the pro-Palestinian encampments that have emerged on campuses across the country. Demonstrators have chanted, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

Officials at California State University, Sacramento, updated campus policies this week to review investments and divest from any that appear to profit from “genocide, ethnic cleansing and activities that violate fundamental human rights.” The agreement was hailed as a victory by demonstrators who have been camped for a week on campus and who announced on social media after the decision that they would end their encampment and clean up the site.

Under the decision, Sacramento State, which is one of 23 campuses in the larger California State University system, instructed the finance committees of its campus foundation, student union and other campus-specific sources of auxiliary funding to ensure that they were avoiding investments in companies, and index and mutual funds, that were not considered “socially responsible.” The policy change noted that so far, Sacramento State had no direct investments that the new policy would outlaw.

Union has espoused social responsibility as a policy for years. The seminary was early to divest from apartheid South Africa and fossil fuels, and it also has banned investment in for-profit prisons and armament companies.

“With respect to both Palestine and Israel, we affirm their right to secure existence and self-determination,” the trustees said. “We hope that our action today to divest will bring needed pressure to bear against agents of war to stop the killing and find a peaceful future for all.”

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

Michael Goldsmith, a representative for Mr. Whitehead, said the author had no further comment.

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.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

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

In a letter to the M.I.T. community Friday morning, the university’s president, Sally Kornbluth, called the encampment’s removal by police “a last resort” and said the ongoing disruption had made its continuing presence “increasingly untenable.”

“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.

A pro-Palestinian encampment at Penn grows as commencement nears.

Steve Silverman, a spokesman for Penn, declined to comment on the activists’ assertion that the university was not negotiating in good faith.

For nearly two weeks, the protesters have been occupying the west side of a green space in front of College Hall, the oldest building on campus. On Wednesday night, after a march that brought a large group of students and Philadelphia activists to College Hall, protesters expanded the encampment to the east side of the green space, moving the metal barriers that had been erected to mark the boundaries of the protest space.

Penn’s administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to the encampment. But on Thursday afternoon, the university announced actions against six students in connection with the “unauthorized encampment.”

In a statement posted on Penn’s website, the university said it had imposed “mandatory temporary leaves of absence” on the students pending “disciplinary investigations.”

When asked on Thursday about the protests, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said that 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, who is a nonvoting member of Penn’s board of trustees, demurred when asked whether he would take independent action, saying that the matter was best left to campus administrators and local police.

On Thursday, the scene around the encampment was subdued. Some protesters rested on a plinth beneath a statue of Benjamin Franklin. Others walked around the encampment with the chief of Penn’s fire and emergency services, who was surveying the grounds for potential hazards. Outside the barriers were small groups of police officers, college administrators and pro-Israel counterprotesters.

This week, Penn announced special security measures for commencement, including no bags and “airport-style security screening.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

In a surprise, Cornell’s president resigns.

Dr. Pollack, a computer scientist, said she would remain in office until July 1.

In a separate announcement, Kraig H. Kayser, the chairman of Cornell’s board of trustees, said the board had asked the university provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff, to serve as interim president for two years. Dr. Kotlikoff was previously dean of Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, among other posts.

Dr. Pollack’s resignation means that four of the eight Ivy League universities — Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell — will now be in various stages of leadership transition, three of them with interim presidents already in charge or presidential searches underway. The presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned in the last six months, in part because of fallout over their testimony at a December congressional hearing investigating campus antisemitism.

Mr. Kayser said that Cornell’s trustees would wait to begin a search for a new permanent president until about six to nine months before the end of Dr. Kotlikoff’s two-year term, an unusually long delay.

Dr. Pollack, 65, leaves at a time of controversy over disciplinary action Cornell has taken against pro-Palestinian student protesters. While Cornell has not summoned outside police forces to its campus in Ithaca, N.Y., it has taken what some professors called draconian measures against six protesters. Critics have found the disciplinary actions particularly disturbing coming in a school year when Dr. Pollack launched a campus free-expression initiative.

Though the students’ protest remained peaceful, the university invoked a provision calling for “immediate temporary suspension,” a measure intended for situations where the safety and health of the community were threatened, according to Risa L. Lieberwitz, a Cornell professor and the campus president of the American Association of University Professors.

“It is not intended to be used where the university is unhappy about the fact that you have an encampment and chanting,” she said.

Professor Lieberwitz called on Dr. Pollack to revoke the students’ suspensions — penalties that could erase their academic credits for the semester — as a parting presidential act that would ease tensions on campus.

Mr. Kayser called Dr. Pollack a “transformational leader” who increased financial aid and created new academic programs at Cornell.

U.S.C.’s president is censured by the university’s academic senate.

The vote represented only a fraction of the university's 4,700 faculty members, and the senate stopped short of taking a vote of no-confidence in the administrators, which would have been a harsher rebuke. Despite criticism, Dr. Folt has maintained considerable support from the university’s trustees, and some faculty members have quietly sympathized with her.

Still, the vote was “significant” with “far-reaching implications,” said William G. Tierney, a professor emeritus of higher education at U.S.C., who has written about the response to campus protests across the nation.

“The petition from the faculty was thoughtful and the discussion was serious,” said Dr. Tierney, a past president of the senate who has criticized Dr. Folt’s handling of the protest and who confirmed the vote. “No faculty wants to rebuke their president and provost. But this was warranted.”

Christina Dunbar-Hester, the acting president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who watched the meeting, said that faculty members have been particularly frustrated by a lack of communication from administrators and the speed with which the Los Angeles Police Department was called on protesters who were not violent.

“The administrators keep leaning on ‘safety’ without consulting or sharing their thinking with the Senate or wider faculty,” she said. “We do not necessarily doubt that there were safety concerns, but some question whether this series of decisions harmed and endangered members of the campus community while also sending a message to anyone threatening the campus that those threats work.”

The recent disruptions have once again put the university, in South Los Angeles, under an unflattering spotlight.

Dr. Folt’s hiring in 2019 was hailed as a kind of fresh start following a series of highly publicized missteps, which included playing a central part in the “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal. The past several years have largely been a period of calm for U.S.C.

Several top university officials said last week that many members of the faculty and board had understood the difficulty Dr. Folt faced in handling the protests. And many in the broader community noted that U.S.C.’s experience was relatively mild compared to the violence that rocked the University of California, Los Angeles, campus as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters clashed recently.

But many parents and students were distressed at the cancellation of the school’s main commencement ceremony, and angry at the high security accompanying what remained this week of the celebration.

On Wednesday evening, Dr. Folt said in a statement that she would work with faculty members going forward, and that she and Dr. Guzman welcomed engagement with a task force being created to investigate the decisions made by administrators.

“I understand there are many different viewpoints among members of the Trojan Community regarding our recent decisions,” she said. “I’m committed to working with the academic senate, and the wider faculty who weren’t present at today’s session.”

Then, alluding to graduation ceremonies that have been cut back, with tight security and the loss of celebrity speakers, Dr. Folt said, “For now, our focus is on celebrating the 19,000 graduates of USC’s Class of 2024.”

Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Police officials say that U.C.L.A. protesters had metal pipes, bolt cutters and an occupation manual.

Police officers initially arrested 44 people and charged most of them with conspiracy to commit a crime, according to the statement. Two local journalists were among those detained, but they were released without charges after being taken to a Los Angeles Police Department jail. The police said they did not have press credentials. A third person was also released without charges.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, a freelance journalist who has been covering the U.C.L.A. protests, was one of the two journalists arrested. He said he stumbled across the students in the parking lot after they were detained and began filming. His arrest “came out of nowhere,” he said.

“The idea that someone who quite clearly was just there to film, being guilty of a conspiracy, is absolutely cuckoo bananas,” he added.

Of those arrested, 35 were U.C.L.A. students, the police said. Four of the people arrested on Monday had also been arrested on May 2 when the police shut down a pro-Palestinian encampment at the campus. The 41 who face charges were released after being booked and cited, the police said.

The pro-Palestinian protesters who led the encampment at U.C.L.A. were unavailable for comment on Wednesday. In a statement after the arrests on Monday, the U.C.L.A. Palestine Solidarity Encampment said, “These unlawful arrests constitute harassment and abuse of power by law enforcement, and serve solely as an intimidation tactic.”

“The Do-It Yourself Occupation Guide” contains techniques for circumventing alarm systems, breaking into buildings and securing doors. The original manual, which was written more than a decade ago, was updated this year “in light of a nationwide resurgence of student occupations in 2024, beginning with Columbia University in New York, in response to an ongoing genocide in Palestine,” according to an editor’s note.

The U.C.L.A. Police Department said that as the 44 individuals were detained, a demonstration was occurring inside Moore Hall, a campus building that students were being encouraged on social media to occupy. The police said that it “became apparent” that the arrested protesters were planning to use their supplies to take over Moore Hall.

Another guide taken as evidence during the mass arrest was “Fight to Win: Protest Tactics and Staying Safe.” It describes police formations and contains advice on how to remain safe during a protest. It also has sections on protest tools like umbrellas and fire extinguishers, both of which were used by protesters last week at U.C.L.A. when the police raided their encampment.

While many of the pro-Palestinian encampments at colleges have been established in central quads or campus lawns, some demonstrators have gone further by taking over buildings and vandalizing property. The police last week quickly shut down a takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York, and law enforcement officers also ended a weeklong occupation of the administration building at the California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt.

U.C.L.A. administrators originally took a relatively tolerant approach to the encampment at their school, even as protesters were arrested within hours at some universities, including the University of Southern California. But after several days, the school chancellor, Gene Block, declared the encampment illegal on April 30 and told demonstrators to leave.

Later that night, counterprotesters attacked the demonstration site, and some beat pro-Palestinian protesters with sticks, used chemical sprays and launched fireworks as weapons. The police and security guards did not break up the melee for hours, and have not made any arrests. On the early morning of May 2, the police broke up the encampment and arrested more than 200 protesters.

Maintenance workers offer an inside look at the student takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.

“I’m like, what the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?” he recalled.

He said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way, telling him “this is bigger than you.” One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him “a fistful of cash.”

He said he replied: “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.”

It was the beginning of what would be a frightening time for Mr. Torres, who goes by Mario, and two other maintenance workers in Hamilton Hall, who were inside when pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia took over the building.

Just as upsetting as their encounters with the protesters, the three workers recounted in interviews this week, was their feeling that the university had not done enough to prevent the attack or to help them once the building was under siege.

“I cannot believe they let this happen,” Mr. Torres said.

Only one security guard was posted at the building when the demonstrators entered, despite heightened tensions from the growing encampment nearby, witnesses said.

Mr. Torres and his colleagues called for help from the police and the school’s public safety officers, but no one arrived in time to assist them. The university eventually asked the police to clear the building and other protesters around campus, but they did not come until nearly 20 hours later.

That meant the workers, who were briefly trapped inside, had to make their own way out.

“They failed to protect us,” said Mr. Torres, 45, whose scuffle with a male protester was captured by a freelance photojournalist inside the building. The image, showing Mr. Torres pushing a man against a wall, ricocheted around social media.

When the police eventually raided the building, nearly 50 people were arrested, according to prosecutors. Many of them were students at Columbia or its affiliated colleges, but a New York Times review of police records found that nine appeared to be unaffiliated with the university.

The union that represents the workers, Local 241 of the Transport Workers Union, has requested more information from Columbia about what the police had told the school before the occupation.

John Samuelsen, the international president of the union, wrote Monday to Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia, saying she had “epically failed to protect the safety of these university employees, who were forced to fight their way out of the building.”

Mr. Samuelsen added that though Columbia had briefings with the police about the possibility that the protests could escalate, “they conveyed none of that information to the union.”

In a statement, Samantha Slater, a university spokeswoman, said that the “employees who were in Hamilton Hall are valued members of the Columbia community, and we appreciate their dedication and service.”

“When protesters chose to escalate the situation by occupying Hamilton Hall, they committed egregious violations of both University policy and the law, which is why we made the decision to bring in the N.Y.P.D.,” she said. “We are committed to ongoing work to help our entire University community heal.”

On April 30, at about 12:30 a.m., a crowd of students had surrounded Hamilton Hall, cheering, as dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered. The building, on Columbia’s central Morningside Heights campus, has symbolic significance as a place of student protest and had been occupied five times by student protesters since 1968.

For months, pro-Palestinian students had protested to urge the university to divest from Israel, among other demands, over the country’s offensive in Gaza, eventually setting up a tent encampment. But the takeover of Hamilton Hall was a marked escalation.

Dr. Shafik, who also goes by Minouche, wrote in a letter to the police that before protesters entered the hall, “an individual hid in the building until after it closed and let the other individuals in.”

Mr. Torres was not surprised: He said he had caught a woman hiding under tables or behind doors “three or four times” over the last several weeks. And five days before the occupation, Lester Wilson, another longtime facilities worker in the building, had opened the door to a third floor closet just before midnight and found a surprise.

He said a woman was crouching in the slop sink, hiding and holding the door shut. Mr. Wilson said he brought her to university safety officers, and was not sure what happened next.

Both Mr. Torres and Mr. Wilson said they believed the occupiers had been highly organized, with knowledge of the location of the security cameras and exits, and backpacks full of supplies like rope, chains and zip ties.

The sole public safety officer in the lobby left when confronted by the occupiers and called for backup, several witness said. The protesters then quickly began barricading the main doors with furniture and chains. The occupiers appear to have timed their break-in with the midnight shift change, and the woman on duty was coming off her shift, the union said.

Mr. Torres, who had worked there for five years, confronted some of the protesters, trying to protect what he saw as “his building.”

But as he saw the number of protesters grow to “maybe 15 or 20,” he said, he realized he could not fight them. He asked to be let out, but someone said the doors downstairs were already barricaded and that he couldn’t leave.

He thought of his two young sons at home. He had no idea if other buildings were being taken over, too. Fear made him “crazy,” he said. He grabbed an older protester and ripped off his sweatshirt and mask, demanding to be let out.

The man said he could bring 20 people up to back him. “I was terrified,” Mr. Torres said. “I did what I had to do.” Mr. Torres then grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher and pulled the pin before someone persuaded him to calm down.

Mr. Wilson, 47, saw Mr. Torres facing off with protesters in the stairwell. He radioed his supervisors for help. Then he made his way down to the main doors. They were fastened shut with zip ties.

“So I begged them,” Mr. Wilson said. “I said, I work here, let me out, let me out.” Eventually, someone cut the zip ties and pushed him outside, he said, then secured the doors again. He found the public safety officer and told her that his co-workers were stuck inside.

“God knows what could have happened,” he said.

At about 1:10 a.m., roughly 30 minutes after Mr. Torres first encountered the protesters, a student protester in the lobby finally cut the cluster of zip ties on the front door handle and let him out along with the third worker, who spoke with The Times but asked not to be identified because he was concerned about privacy.

Mr. Torres filed a university accident report that day showing a raw wound on his knuckles and stating he had bruises on his neck. It also stated that he had been “assaulted and battered, and wrongfully imprisoned.”

“I had no protection whatsoever from campus police or N.Y.P.D. and felt abandoned by those whose duty it is to protect me,” he wrote in a document shared with The New York Times.

Alex Molina, the president of the local union chapter, which represents both the facilities workers and the security guards, said that the guard on duty was not allowed to detain anyone and was unarmed.

Both Mr. Torres and Mr. Wilson said they strongly objected to the tactics of the occupiers, which they said had taken a toll on them. Neither man ever wants to work in Hamilton Hall again.

“What do you accomplish from that?” Mr. Wilson said. “You’re giving people traumatic episodes over this stuff. I understand your protest, but why you got to take over a building? Why you got to take workers against their will?”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The Washington police broke up a protest encampment, sparing the mayor a House grilling.

Asked about the timing of the operation, only a few hours before the scheduled hearing, Chief Smith said that the decision to clear the camp was made on Monday “based on public safety.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser said at the news conference that she had spoken with Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, who had scheduled the hearing about the city’s response to the encampment, and said she believed the hearing would be canceled, which it was.

The mayor defended the city’s actions, saying that the police had “maintained a presence” at the university throughout the protests and that the city had “demonstrated and upheld our values and constitutional responsibilities.”

Chief Smith said the trouble that led to the clearance began last Thursday when a campus police officer “was pushed by protesters, and an item was grabbed out of the police officer’s hand.” On Monday, she continued, police learned of a “simple assault” that had been reported to campus police, as well as indications that counterprotesters were “covertly in the encampment,” that protesters were studying ways to get inside campus buildings, and that items were being gathered at the camp “that could potentially be used for offensive and defensive weapons.”

As police cleared the encampment, she said, more protesters arrived from outside the area and “engaged the officers,” leading the police to use pepper spray, Chief Smith said. Thirty-three people were arrested, 29 of them for unlawful entry to the campus, she said, adding that several people were also arrested on charges of assault on a police officer. No one was seriously injured, she said.

Police officials said they were still on campus while the university cleared away tents and other items left behind by protesters.