At dawn on Wednesday 17 April, a small group of students pitched their tents at Columbia University, demonstrating against Israeli military action in Gaza and calling on their university to stop doing business with companies they see as supporting the war.

They did so as Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, made her way to Capitol Hill to face a Congressional grilling over antisemitism on campus and how she was tackling it.

In nearly four hours of questioning that Wednesday, she defended actions she was already taking. Students, she said, were “getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences”.

The next afternoon, the Columbia president made a decision that would ignite a wildfire of protest at colleges across the United States.

The students at the protest camp were trespassing, had refused to leave and had created a “harassing and intimidating environment” for many of their peers, she said.

She was sending in the NYPD.

Soon after, officers from the largest police department in the US, wearing riot gear and wielding plastic handcuffs, arrested more than 100 students – the first time mass arrests had been made on Columbia’s campus since Vietnam War protests more than five decades ago.

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