Police Clear Tents and Arrest N.Y.U. and New School Protesters

Police officers cleared two pro-Palestinian encampments and arrested student demonstrators at New York University and the New School early Friday morning after officials at the universities asked for their assistance, New York Police Department officials said.

Police officers arrested 56 people — 13 at N.Y.U. and 43 at the New School — according to preliminary information from the Police Department.

Student demonstrators had been sleeping in tents inside a New School building and on sidewalks outside of N.Y.U. buildings since last week. Officials at the two universities asked for the Police Department’s “assistance to disperse the illegal encampments.”

The arrests on Friday come after a turbulent week on college campuses across the country, where a wave of student activism, motivated in large part by concern for the scale of suffering in Gaza, has caused several schools to call in law enforcement agencies for help. More than 2,000 arrests have been made on campuses nationwide, according to a New York Times tally.

In New York City, police officers in riot gear entered Columbia University’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting over 100 people and clearing a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators from a campus building they had been occupying. They arrested nearly 200 people at an encampment and protest at City College, uptown, that same night.

Police officers arrived at N.Y.U.’s campus in Greenwich Village shortly after 6 a.m. on Friday and cleared students from the area 20 minutes later with “minimal confrontation,” the university said. The school chose the early morning time frame to “minimize the likelihood of injury or spread of disruption,” John Beckman, a university spokesman, said in a statement.