Clashes between pro-Palestinian student protesters and police intensified at colleges across the nation Wednesday, as university officials aggressively cracked down on campus demonstrations against the Israel-Gaza war, leading to several arrests and tense standoffs with authorities.

New skirmishes broke out at the University of Texas at Austin, where state troopers clad in riot gear took at least 34 protesters into custody at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), according to state law enforcement officials, after hundreds of students walked out of class to demand the school divest from companies that do business with Israel.

At the University of Southern California, officers struggled with protesters as they sought to break up an on-campus tent encampment. Videos posted to social media showed scenes of increasing tension as campus police pushed their way through a growing crowd. Los Angeles police said 93 people had been arrested, with no reports of injuries, and that the protesters later dispersed.

The episodes in Austin and Los Angeles were the latest flash points in months of student-led demonstrations that have crescendoed in recent days, spreading rapidly across the country after students at Columbia University began occupying a grassy patch of their New York campus. The subsequent arrest of more than 100 Columbia students last week, far from quelling the protest, appeared to supercharge it, and similar tent encampments began springing up at schools across the country.

As of Wednesday, protests had broken out at dozens of institutions, including the East Coast’s elite Ivy League universities, large public schools in the Midwest and the South, and colleges up and down California, with students denouncing the bloodshed in Gaza and calling for an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Meanwhile, Columbia’s leadership was under mounting pressure from seemingly all sides: the political left and right, students and faculty members, and high-ranking politicians — including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who visited the school on Wednesday afternoon to call for the university president’s ouster.

The speaker said his trip, which included a meeting with Jewish students at Columbia, was meant to highlight the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and what he characterized as a failure of school leaders to effectively combat it.

“As speaker of the House, I’m committed today that the Congress will not be silent as Jewish students are expected to run for their lives and stay home from their classes hiding in fear,” Johnson said.

Perhaps expecting to find common cause with protesters who have also demanded that the president, Minouche Shafik, resign her post, Johnson was instead met with boos and heckles from assembled students. Some faculty members and students cast Johnson’s appearance as political meddling in school affairs.

“Get off our campus!” yelled one student. “Go back to Louisiana, Mike!” another added.

“Enjoy your free speech,” Johnson answered, sounding irritated.

Still, demonstrators also have become increasingly critical of the school’s handling of the campus conflict.

“We’ve lost all the trust in this administration,” said Mahmoud Khalil, one of the students who has been negotiating with the university on behalf of protesters, who have demanded that the school divest from corporations they say are profiting off the war in Gaza.

The protesters have for days been in talks with school officials over clearing their encampment on the West Lawn of Columbia’s Manhattan campus. Earlier Wednesday, school officials said they would continue discussions with students for another 48 hours.

In a statement, Columbia said student protesters had already agreed to dismantle and remove a “significant number” of tents; committed to ensuring that only Columbia students will participate in the demonstrations; and taken steps to ensure no discriminatory or harassing language is used at the encampment.

If negotiations break down, Shafik has warned that the administration “will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.”

In response, student negotiators said university officials had threatened to call the National Guard and the New York police if their demands were not met. The university has denied those allegations.

As a light drizzle fell on students camping out Wednesday, organizers insisted they would not back down until the school agrees to their terms, which include ending a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.

“Until our demands are met, we do not have any plans of leaving,” said Khymani James, a junior and the spokesperson for the student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest. “In threatening us, the university is negotiating in bad faith.”

Others condemned the university’s treatment of its own students, saying the rapid deployment of law enforcement last week to break up a peaceful protest showed a disregard for the principles of free speech and open exchange that a university is supposed to protect.

“There’s such harsh and abrasive energy from the university towards even the concept — or practice — of protest,” said Anand Chitnis, a junior and the student government’s vice president of campus life.

At the faculty level, a similar chorus of discontent has also been building this week. Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty group, has drafted a resolution that would censure Shafik, her administration and the school’s Board of Trustees.

The school leaders have “demeaned their offices and lost the trust of many faculty, staff, students, and alumnae/i,” reads the draft resolution, which criticizes Shafik for testimony she gave to Congress last week and the student arrests.

Notably, the resolution — which could be voted on in the university senate this week — does not call on Shafik to step down. It also decried “any political interference” in the university’s governance.

“Let us be clear: we are calling for the censure of President Shafik, not for her resignation,” the document reads. “We are calling for a recommitment to our core values on the part of our President, her administration, and the Board of Trustees.”

The board on Wednesday released a statement saying it “strongly” supports Shafik “as she steers the university through this extraordinarily challenging time.”

“We are urgently working with her to help resolve the situation on campus and rebuild the bonds of our community; we encourage everyone who cares about Columbia to join us in that effort,” the statement said.

Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang declined to comment on the possible censure and said Shafik is “focused on deescalating the rancor on Columbia’s campus. She is working across campus with members of the faculty, administration, and Board of Trustees, and with state, city, and community leaders, and appreciates their support.”

Omitted from that coalition: the student protesters at the heart of the crisis.

Elsewhere, protests continued to rage from late Tuesday into Wednesday, as university and state police tried to clear encampments and stepped up arrests of students.

At Ohio State University, two protesters were taken into custody on Tuesday, according to student activists, who called for more demonstrations Thursday. At the University of Minnesota, a student encampment was cleared late Tuesday night after nine protesters were arrested.

At Brown University in Providence, R.I., 75 students set up an encampment early Wednesday morning and campus police soon collected student IDs, according to the Brown Divest Coalition. And at Harvard University, roughly 30 people set up tents as hundreds of others gathered and demanded their school “disclose and divest” from any financial ties to the war in Gaza.

And at USC in Los Angeles, more than 100 protesters set up tents and claimed the campus as a “liberated zone” while chanting “Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!” Campus police wrestled with protesters over tents and chairs. The Los Angeles Police Department arrived on the scene around noon, and its helicopters circled overhead, a spokesperson said. By late afternoon, the private school had closed its gates to “keep the rest of the campus calm.”

But it was the demonstrations at the University of Texas that were met with perhaps the largest display of police force. Ahead of the Austin demonstration, administrators warned organizers to cancel the protest, saying that “refusal to comply may result in arrest.”

In videos of the confrontation that followed, state troopers can be seen marching through campus, some on horseback. Protesters chanted “Free, free, free Palestine!” and “Off our campus!” as police dismantled tents and detained students on a grassy lawn. Later on, a Fox 7 cameraman was reportedly also detained, according to one of the channel’s anchors.

In one particularly tense moment, more than a dozen officers, who had mostly cleared the field and set up a barricade by pushing demonstrators with their bikes, forced a student wearing a white shirt to the ground. Protesters chanted “Let them go!” and “Peaceful protest is a right!” as officers took the student away with his hands behind his back, according to a live stream from Fox 7.

Abbott, Texas’s governor, said that the demonstrations were “hate-filled, antisemitic protests” and that students participating in them should be expelled.

“These protesters belong in jail,” Abbott said in a social media post.

But the forceful police response was also drawing criticism, from the university community and state lawmakers.

“We’re getting answers about why students are being arrested @UTAustin,” Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D), who represents Austin, wrote on X. “Unless there was an actual threat of violence, this is out of hand.”

Back at Columbia, the mood on campus was comparably tame, as students — whether they were participating in the protests or not — found themselves navigating a difficult environment in the waning weeks of the spring semester.

Remaining classes, and final exams, will be conducted in-person and online, the school announced this week. Mike Gerry, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering, said he has been inundated with calls from friends and family, checking on his safety. But the biggest disruption, he said, has been the increased security the school added around its perimeter.

“They’re acting like it’s a national disaster,” Gerry said of news reports. “It’s fine. It’s serious but not in a way that I’m in danger.”

Other students, however, such as Chitnis, the student government official, have said the administration’s response to the protests has forced them to reconsider their future at Columbia. The 21-year-old human rights major was an early-admission student — it was a dream school.

“I’ve loved it,” he said. “It’s changed my life for the better. Now I’ve caught myself thinking about transferring. But where would I go — where could I go — that treats students with more respect? I just saw students at Yale get hauled to jail in a Yale shuttle.”