Pro-Palestinian demonstrations escalated Tuesday at Columbia University, which has been the epicenter of the growing campus protest movement across the nation.

Early Tuesday morning, protesters broke windows and occupied Hamilton Hall at the Manhattan campus after defying a Monday deadline to clear the protest encampment. The school had suspended protesters Monday, and is now threatening to expel those occupying the building. (The same building was occupied in 1968 by students protesting against the Vietnam War.) The incident reflects mounting tensions at campus protests across the country, which have led to hundreds of arrests and skirmishes between demonstrators and law enforcement in recent days.

The White House condemned the takeover of campus buildings on Tuesday. “President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful — it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said.

Protesters have made it clear that they are against Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, which is in its seventh month. But what, specifically, are these demonstrators demanding from their universities that can make an impact on a war in the Middle East? Here’s a closer look:

📣 What are students’ demands?

“Disclose, divest. We will not slow, we will not rest” is the chant that protesters were heard yelling on Columbia’s campus Monday after defying the school’s deadline to clear their encampment.

A central demand from student protesters has been calling for their universities to divest, i.e., cut business ties with Israel or any companies that are aiding its military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

❌📈 What is divestment?

Divestment is when an organization — in this case, a university — sells off what it has invested in a certain fund or property. Specifically, the protesters want their universities to stop investing money in entities that they believe support Israel.

It might seem odd to think of universities investing money like a bank, but it’s in fact a similar process. Universities have endowments — money granted through alumni donations and other means — and they put that money into ventures like private equity funds, real estate and hedge funds. In turn, those types of assets can have investments anywhere in the world.

Although most universities have only a small amount actually invested in Israeli companies, there are many related connections. For example, the Guardian reports that Columbia has direct investments in companies like Amazon and Google, which have a $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government; Microsoft, whose services are used by the Israeli Defense Ministry; and Lockheed Martin, which supplies weapons for Israel.

Demonstrators at Columbia and elsewhere are calling for their universities to break these kinds of financial ties.

💬 Is there any movement with divestment negotiations?

Columbia University: University president Minouche Shafik says the school will not divest from Israel, but did offer some proposals to demonstrators.

“The University offered to develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters,” Shafik said in a statement Monday. “The University also offered to publish a process for students to access a list of Columbia’s direct investment holdings, and to increase the frequency of updates to that list of holdings.”

University of Pennsylvania: Divestment negotiations between protest organizers and university leaders broke down over the weekend. The school put “Notice of Trespass” signs around the protesters’ encampment on campus Monday morning. But protesters have defied the school’s orders to take down the encampment.

Brown University: The school said it will hear a group of students and faculty members’ “arguments for divestment” in May if the campus’s encampment “is peacefully brought to an end within the next few days and is not replaced with any other encampments or unauthorized protest activity.”

🗣️ What other demands are protesters making?

In addition to divestment, pro-Palestinian protesters are calling for their universities to take a number of other actions in response to the ongoing war. Here are some examples:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology: A student group calling itself Scientists Against Genocide is demanding that the school stop accepting alleged research funding from the Israeli military. MIT has declined to address claims that their school has financial ties to Israel, according to the Boston Globe.

• University of Michigan: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus say they refuse to move their encampment until the school stops sending money to investment managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors. School officials have said they have no direct investments with Israeli companies. The school rejected protesters’ demands and cited a decades-old policy “that shields the university’s investments from political pressures.”

• Columbia, Emerson, Harvard and Yale: Along with demands to divest, protesters are calling for greater financial transparency in how their schools spend their endowments.

• University of California, Berkeley: protesters there are urging the school to enact policies to protect Palestinian students and sever academic ties with Israeli universities and programs, according to a social media post from UC Berkeley Divest.

↩️ Is there any precedent for divestment?

Divestment movements aren’t a new concept in the world of student activism. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, campus protesters successfully pressured universities to cut financial ties with companies that supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. More recently, fossil fuel divestment protests have also proved successful at U.S. universities.

Columbia made headlines in 1985 when it announced it would sell $35 million of stock in U.S. companies that were doing business in South Africa.

The success of the anti-apartheid movement inspired a decades-long campaign against Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, known as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS. The current demands for universities to divest from Israel are rooted in this movement.