Police are breaking up encampments on college campuses across the U.S. as graduation ceremonies approach

From coast to coast on Friday, police drove protesters away from college campuses and demolished camps that had been there almost since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Officers in riot gear arrived at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outside Boston at dawn to arrest and remove protesters who had defied earlier orders to disperse, local media reported.

No muscle was needed at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where campus officials and a group called Students for Justice in Palestine reached an agreement “aimed at ending the illegal encampment at Library Mall,” a statement said the University.

But after a night of clashes between police and pro-Palestinian protesters, it was a different story on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson.

Four people were arrested after that camp became the scene of a pitched battle late Thursday, with police apparently firing rubber bullets and clashing with protesters who threw bottles at them, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

“The university and law enforcement have attempted to prevent the situation from escalating and have continued to issue repeated warnings, including the possibility of an arrest,” university President Robert Robbins said in a statement received Friday. “The protesters ignored the warning and continued to reinforce their camp, chanting: ‘If you come in, we will fight you’.”

Three of the four people arrested were charged with trespassing, Robbins said. The other was charged with trespassing and aggravated assault on a peace officer.

Two of the four are “not affiliated with the university,” Robbins said.

Meanwhile, police began clearing the encampments at MIT on Friday and announced that students who did not leave the center voluntarily would be subject to disciplinary action.

Harvard University, also located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has begun sending out suspension notices, a student protest group claimed on X.

When NBC News asked Harvard about the suspensions, a university spokesperson issued the following statement:

“The ongoing protest camp in Harvard Yard continues to violate University policy and is causing significant disruption to the educational environment at a crucial time in the semester as students complete their final exams and prepare to begin their studies. The University has repeatedly communicated that disciplinary procedures and administrative instructions for the involuntary leave of absence of protesters continue to progress.”

At Penn, Philadelphia police officers dressed in riot gear arrived at 6 a.m. and gave protesters two minutes to disperse from the encampment they had set up on campus about 16 days ago, the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

Thirty-three people were arrested, given civil violations and then released, said Dustin Slaughter, a spokesman for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

“After Penn’s weeks-long efforts to engage protesters were met with further escalation, University of Pennsylvania leadership today made the right decision to disband the encampment,” Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. John Shapiro, said in a statement.

But while the police cleared established camps, new ones emerged on other university campuses.

Early Thursday, University of Denver students set up tents in front of the university’s administration building on what is known as Carnegie Green.

They call themselves “DU for Palestine,” and like the 100 or so other protests on college campuses across the country, these students are demanding that the school secede from Israel.

“Students on campus feel unsafe and frustrated by the university’s silence on the Israeli military’s massacres of Palestinians, while maintaining direct ties to Israeli universities,” a “DU for Palestine” organizer said in a press release issued on Thursday from the NBC affiliate in Denver.

In response, DU administrators said Thursday that the university is “allowing today’s new encampment on the green space,” but noted that protesters who are not students, faculty or school staff will not be allowed to remain on campus overnight and be removed “without notice.”

The DU students followed the protesters to the nearby Auraria Campus, also in Denver, where students have been camping since April 25 in the engineering building on campus.

Back in New York City, Columbia’s scaled-back commencement ceremony was held on a school soccer field rather than on the historic main campus because university officials cited ongoing “security concerns” after weeks of protests on campus in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood.

At the first mini-ceremony, approximately 800 Columbia School of Professional Studies students received their diplomas. Two more commencement ceremonies followed later Friday, and more ceremonies are planned in the coming days, the university said.

The traditional university-wide commencement ceremony that brings together all Columbia schools and was scheduled to take place May 15 was canceled last week. Instead, the university announced it would host small celebrations like Friday’s.

While graduates and their families expressed disappointment at the time, the only indication of the last-minute venue change came when Troy Eggers, dean of the School of Professional Studies, told graduates he would have liked the ceremony to take place at the Morningside campus could take place, but “unfortunately” it couldn’t.