Protestors wave Palestinian flags on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 29, 2024. Student demonstrators at Columbia University, the epicenter of pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted at US colleges, said Monday they would not budge until the school met their demands, defying an ultimatum to disperse or face suspension.  

NEW YORK — Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a student protest group, denounced what it called the university administration’s “attempts to stifle the student movement.” The group said protesters will not be moved except by force, as negotiations with leadership remain “off the table.”

In a news conference Monday, student Sueda Polat said that university delegates issued disciplinary notices to protesters, alerting students they have two choices.

Students could sign a form and be put, “on academic probation on the condition that they abide by all university rules until June 30, 2025. Or until their graduation, whichever comes first,” Polat said. “Or, the students would be interim suspended.”

Polat added that suspension would mean that these student protesters lose their housing and healthcare access, as well as losing their right to graduation if they are in their final year.

Palot also said members of the university’s leadership confirmed that a state of emergency from the university was threatened. 

In a statement to CNN, Columbia Public Affairs said: “The rumor of a ‘state of emergency’ at Columbia University is a fabrication and totally false. There is no state of emergency.” 

Ahead of the 2:00 p.m. deadline to clear the encampment, about two dozen Columbia faculty linked arms outside the school’s lawn entrance, making a human barricade.

Earlier in the day, Columbia leadership asked protesters to voluntarily leave their encampment by the deadline or risk suspension. Protesting students overwhelmingly voted to defy the order and stay.

“Nobody thinks they should be suspended. Look at the thousands that have turned up here,” Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of anthropology at the university, told CNN’s Omar Jimenez after the deadline passed. Mamdani was one of the professors who had formed the human barricade and he expressed worry that the administration might call in police to forcibly break up the encampment.

“We teach our students not to accept things at face value. We teach them to ask questions, no matter the consequences,” Mamdani said. “The idea of penalizing students for protests? The administration has turned the site of a protest into a crime scene.”

“If I were the administration, I would have promoted discussion, not muzzled discussion,” he added.

While the demands among protesters slightly vary at each university, nearly all the demonstrations have called for divestment.

“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” protesters at Columbia and universities across the country have chanted.

Here’s what to know:

Put most simply, divestment is the opposite of investment.

Many universities have an endowment, which is donated funds generally invested to help the university earn money.

Most protesters are demanding that their institutions sell investments in companies with ties to Israel.

The scope of those demands varies by school, though.

For example, at Columbia, demonstrators want the school to divest its $13.6 billion endowment from any company linked to Israel. That includes companies like Microsoft and Airbnb that do business in Israel.

Other schools, like Cornell and Yale, are asking their schools to stop investing in weapons manufacturers.

So far, no major universities have agreed to protesters’ demands to divest.

Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN that full divestment may be more difficult than it seems.

“The economy is so global now that even if a university decided that they were going to instruct their dominant management groups to divest from Israel, it would be almost impossible to disentangle,” he said.