Columbia University cites progress with Gaza war protesters after encampment arrests [Video]

Police peacefully arrested student protesters at the University of Southern California on Wednesday, hours after police at a Texas university aggressively detained dozens in the latest clashes between law enforcement and those protesting the Israel-Hamas war on campuses nationwide.

While tensions rose between police and protesters at USC earlier in the day, in the evening a few dozen demonstrators standing in a circle with locked arms were detained one by one without incident.

Police officers encircled the dwindling group, which sat in defiance of an earlier warning to disperse or be arrested. Beyond the police line, hundreds of onlookers watched as helicopters buzzed overhead. The school closed the campus.

While universities struggling to defuse unrest have quickly turned to law enforcement, the arrests in California were in sharp contrast to the chaos that ensued just hours earlier at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hundreds of local and state police — including some on horseback …