Here’s what to know about the student protests over Gaza on campuses in Philly and across the U.S.

As pro-Palestinian demonstrations continued to roil campuses nationwide, school administrators reacted with a wide range of responses — negotiating with students, ordering the dismantling of tents dotting college greens, summoning police who made arrests. Here’s what you need to know about the campus movement protesting the war in Gaza.

Debate has been flaring over the war in Gaza, free speech on college campuses, charges of antisemitism, and American support for Israel.

About 400 arrests have been made at universities and colleges across the United States since April 18, according to the New York Times. The exact number of schools involved in protests isn’t known, with some estimates saying there are 200.

Early Thursday, nearly 110 Emory University students protesting the war in Gaza were taken into custody, with some unconfirmed reports saying police used gas and pinned a person to the ground.

At several schools, Jewish students have said they have been intimidated by some pro-Palestinian protesters spouting antisemitic taunts.

“Some protesters have directly confronted Jewish students on and near campus, at times using antisemitic rhetoric ...,” reads a statement from the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League. It continued: “[It] only serves to further marginalize Jewish students as they already face a disturbing level of antisemitism on many of the impacted campuses.”

The current wave of activism is believed to have started at Columbia University in New York, where around 100 demonstrators were arrested last week. The school, a catalyst of anti-Vietnam War protests in 1968, is once again on the front lines of dissent. New York and Yale Universities have also been hot spots in the last week, the scenes of confrontations with police who made arrests.

Negotiations between Columbia protesters and the school administration that were scheduled to end Wednesday at midnight were extended by university president Minouche Shafik into Thursday after she said some progress was being made, according to news reports. As of Thursday evening, negotiations between Columbia administrators and protestors were ongoing, according in NBC news.

The University of Pennsylvania became a hub of pro-Palestinian activism Thursday afternoon when some faculty and students staged a walkout and joined with hundreds of other protesters to call on the university to disclose its financial holdings, and to divest from corporations profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza.

Penn also must condemn Israel’s bombing and damaging of universities in Gaza and promise to defend its Palestinian students and their allies and provide amnesty to students facing disciplinary measures for their advocacy, said Dagmawi Woubshet, an associate professor of English and a member of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

Students also protested at Princeton, Temple, and Drexel and led a march and demonstration at City Hall.

An attempt to erect tents and start an encampment at Princeton was quickly shut down Thursday by the university, and two graduate students were arrested and charged with trespassing. At Swarthmore College, a group of students led by its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Swarthmore Palestine Coalition set up several tents on Parrish Beach by Clothier Hall. The encampment was still in place Thursday night.

“We will work with the student organizers of this latest act of protest to try to bring the situation to a peaceful conclusion, but this may take some time to resolve,” wrote Tomoko Sakomura and Rob Goldberg, the college’s acting copresidents, in a statement Tuesday.

Late Thursday afternoon, students at Penn began to erect tents on the College Green, making the campus the latest local university with an encampment.

Students have been protesting at Penn since the conflict escalated in the fall after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent military response in Gaza.

On March 1, pro-Palestinian Penn students disrupted a university board of trustees meeting to protest the school’s relationship with Israel. They cited a program for studying abroad and what they said were donations to the Israel Defense Forces, the Israeli military. A Penn spokesperson denied that the university makes donations to the IDF.

In some cases, universities receive endowments and monetary gifts from companies that do business with Israel, seen by protesters as antagonists victimizing Palestinians. Activists want their universities to cut off ties with such companies, according to the Guardian.

Protesters are also demanding that their schools stop investing in companies that do business with Israel, including, according to Columbia students, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

At Yale and Cornell Universities, students want their administrators to cease investing in weapons manufacturers.

And at several schools, students are using the Gaza protests as a reason to demand that universities no longer invest in fossil fuels.

At Penn on Wednesday, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the Penn Muslim Student Association circulated a petition asking students whether the university should divest its endowment fund from companies and organizations that “profit from, engage in, or contribute to the government of Israel’s human rights violations.”

Historically, some divestment campaigns have had major impact. From the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, more than 50 universities and colleges partially or fully divested from companies doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa. Companies, in turn, pressured the South African government to end apartheid.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) traveled to Columbia to blast the school administration, calling for Shafik to resign “if she could not immediately bring order to this chaos.” While students heckled him, Johnson continued: “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.”

Over the weekend, Congress approved a $26 billion aid package for Israel, including $9 billion in humanitarian relief for Gaza and elsewhere.

Also on Wednesday, Gov. Josh Shapiro criticized schools that did not protect students sufficiently, leading to antisemitic incidents.

“What we’re seeing at Columbia and what we’re seeing in some campuses across America, where universities can’t guarantee the safety and security of their students, it’s absolutely unacceptable,” the Pennsylvania governor told Politico.

On April 17, when the Columbia encampment was created, Shafik faced bruising criticism at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Republicans said she had not done enough to fight antisemitism.

“Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who wanted to protest,” Shafik said, “and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of discrimination and harassment has been the central challenge on our campus, and numerous others across the country.”

Former Penn president Liz Magill was forced to resign after testifying before the same committee in December following a bipartisan backlash against her comments and after a semester of near-weekly protests on campus.