A California college president is vowing to get tough with anti-Israel student protesters terrorizing her campus.
Roughly 150 students at Pomona College in Claremont demonstrated at an administrative building on campus housing school president Gabrielle Starr’s office Friday, then stormed the building and refused to leave, according to the San Bernardino Sun.
Video circulating on X showed students calling on the school to “stop funding genocide” and berating police officers as “KKK.”
They briefly occupied Starr’s office, according to eyewitness accounts.
At least 18 students were reportedly arrested.
Several of the students used “a sickening, anti-black racial slur in addressing an administrator,” Starr claimed in an open letter to the college community.
“These actions are actively destructive of the values that underpin our community,” she wrote of the Alexander Hall occupation. “Any participants in today’s events … who turn out to be Pomona students, are subject to immediate suspension. Students from the other Claremont Colleges will be banned from Pomona’s campus and subject to discipline on their own campuses.”
The moves from Pomona suggest colleges are starting to rethink broad campus free speech policies that have allowed universities to became daily staging grounds for pro-Palestinian student demonstrators since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas which left at least 1,200 dead.
Pomona College is not the only school to change its approach to protests.
Last week the University of Michigan announced a “disruptive activity policy,” creating tough new penalties for students who interrupt official university events including classes, field trips, athletic events, performances, speeches, award ceremonies and graduation, the school announced.
The move comes after Michigan president Santa J. Ono was himself shouted down by students when he attempted to deliver remarks at a convocation for honors students last month.
“No one is entitled to disrupt the lawful activities or speech of others. Because the university is a public institution, not only are we prohibited from interfering with lawful speech, we are required to intervene when we become aware that others are interfering with or disrupting lawful speech on our campus,” Ono said in a note explaining the new policy.